Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, born 8 June 1955, is a British computer scientist and the inventor of the World Wide Web. Having studied physics at Queen’s College Oxford, graduating in 1976, he started as an engineer in the telecommunications and microprocessor software industry.

In 1980, while working as an independent contractor at CERN, Berners-Lee described the concept of a global system based on using hypertext to share information between researchers and built a prototype system called Enquire, which formed the conceptual basis for the World Wide Web. In 1989 he published his landmark paper, ‘Information Management: A Proposal’, built the first WWW server and web browser ‘WorldWideWeb.app’. In 1994, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). He holds the 3Com Founders’ chair in Engineering at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and also a chair in Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.

Sir Tim is an advocate for Internet freedom and open data. In 2009 he founded the World Wide Web Foundation, and in 2012 he co-founded the UK’s Open Data Institute (ODI). Among his many accolades, Berners-Lee was awarded a Knighthood and the Order of Merit, and was the first recipient of Finland’s Millennium Technology Prize. He was awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize and the Mikhail Gorbachev award for “The Man Who Changed the World.” He has been named among Time Magazine’s 100 most important people of the 20th century.