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Tim Berners-Lee - Agenda Setters 2009

Name: Tim Berners-Lee

Title: Father of the world wide web

Position: 8 Last year: 1

Why? For striving to revolutionise the way we access information online

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While last year's Agenda Setters' winner might have slipped to number eight this year, if anything he is playing an even greater role in the world of technology in 2009.

The inventor of the world wide web (way back in 1989) was enlisted by government earlier this year to help "set free" the reams of public data locked away inside Whitehall.

Berners-Lee said the government should publish "raw data" on the web as soon as possible in order to allow people to link it with other information in online mash-ups.

Never short of ambition, Berners-Lee recommended that official information should be published in resource description format, a format that allows computers to better understand the nature of the information and its links with other people, places or things.

It is this pioneering spirit that caught the eye of the panellists who praised him for continuing "to steer the web into new areas". An example is his work on developing the semantic web, which will allow 'intelligent' computers to analyse everything on the web and automatically perform tasks done today by humans, such as finding, sharing and combining information.

Berners-Lee continues to head up the Web Science Research Initiative with colleagues from MIT in the US and the University of Southampton in the UK to promote the study of web science and help lay the foundations for the future development of the web.