Father of the Web Tim Berners-Lee wants to reboot cyberspace

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist given a knighthood in his native UK for inventing the World Wide Web says he wants to give the world-changing technology a reboot.

Through a new startup called Inrupt, Berners-Lee is looking to remedy some of the problems that have hindered the so-called web at a time when it is dominated by enormous, sprawling closed platforms like Facebook.

Based on ideas developed by Solid, an open-source software project, Inrupt aims to create a webspace in which people can use one single login for any service, in which personal data is kept in personal online data stores, or pods, that are under the user's control.

“People are fed up with the lack of controls, the silos,” Berners-Lee, who is co-founder and chief technology officer of Inrupt, told Reuters. This new vision of the internet will allow people to collaborate and share in a way that has helped make social media so successful, whilst allowing users to remain in control of their data. 

Inrupt CEO John Bruce says the company has already signed by the UK's National Health Service (NHS), as well as the BBC and the government of Flanders in Belgium as pilot customers. He says more announcements will be made by April.

Investors in Inrupt include Hearst Ventures, Octopus Ventures and content delivery firm Akamai, though Bruce did not disclose how much has been raised.

He said that in the case of the NHS, the pilot scheme was looking at ways of addressing the long-standing issue of incompatible medical records. He said that through using Inrupt, the NHS could give patients “a holistic presentation of [their] medical history,” with doctors and other service providers able to update that record even as it remains in the control of the individual user.

One of Inrupt's key aims is to get software developers to write programmes for the platform. Like the original web, Inrupt is, at its core, mostly a set of protocols for how machines talk to each other, meaning that specific applications bring it to life.

“The use cases are so broad, it’s like a do-over for the web,” Berners-Lee said.

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