A Smarter Web The Web is huge but not very smart. Computer scientists are beginning to build a "Semantic Web" that understands the meanings that underlie the tangle of information.

Tim Berners-Lee must feel like he's in a time warp. In the early 1990s, he spent a frustrating year trying to get people to grasp the power and beauty of his idea for a scheme known as an Internet hypertext system, to which he gave the beguiling name the World Wide Web. But since the Web didn't yet exist, most people couldn't imagine the implications of what he was talking about. Berners-Lee persevered, and with the help of the few people who shared his vision, his invention became the fastest-growing media distribution system in history.