ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- Sir Timothy J. Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, will keynote the Opening General Session for NACStech 2007, which will take place April 30 to May 2 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville, Tenn.
In 1989, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an Internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first Web client and server in 1990, and in August 1991, the first Web software was made available to the public. Berners-Lee’s specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is currently a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the school’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is also a professor of computer science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom where he is working on his new project, the Semantic Web.
“One would be hard pressed to find any innovation that has affected the world as quickly and to the extent that the World Wide Web has,” said NACStech 2007 Conference Chair Patrick Lewis, who is also partner and CEO of Oasis Stop ’N Go Convenience Stores. “Over the last 16 years, news, commerce, communications and many other staples of civilized culture have changed forever. Tim Berners-Lee’s invention has taken has taken the world in an exciting direction. His vision for the future will likely be just as dramatic.”
In 2001 Berners-Lee became a fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germany’s Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth. In February, Berners-Lee will receive the engineering profession’s highest honors in 2007 when he will be presented with the National Academy of Engineering’s Charles Stark Draper Prize.
Berners-Lee will present his NACStech Opening General Session address at 4:00 p.m. on April 30.
Approximately 1,500 attendees are expected at NACStech 2007, which will feature more than 100 exhibitors. Registration information will be available February 1 at the NACStech Web site.