“The next phase of the Web”
With the dramatic flood of rich material of all kinds onto the Web in the 1990s, the first part of the dream is largely realized, although still very few people in practice have access to intuitive hypertext creation tools. The second part has yet to happen, but there are signs and plans which make us confident. The great need for information about information, to help us categorize, sort, pay for, own information is driving the design of languages for the web designed for processing by machines, rather than people. The web of human-readable document is being merged with a web of machine-understandable data. The potential of the mixture of humans and machines working together and communicating through the web could be immense.
W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, May 1998