---
title: "Tim Berners-Lee"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Tim Berners-Lee"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-10-11T00:00:00.000Z"
connects_to: ["Semantic Web","World Wide Web","ontology maintenance cost","Nigel Shadbolt","Wendy Hall"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and, with James Hendler and Ora Lassila, published the 2001 *Scientific American* paper that launched the Semantic Web — a vision of machine-readable, codified knowledge layered over the web.

Matters to this vault as co-author, with Nigel Shadbolt and Wendy Hall, of the 2006 *IEEE Intelligent Systems* retrospective that names ontology-development-and-maintenance cost as "an often quoted concern" about the Semantic Web vision he helped launch — a 25-year-old diagnosis that 2026's agentic-AI "semantic layer" pitches are now implicitly trying to answer ([[claim-shadbolt-hall-berners-lee-2006-name-ontology-maintenance-cost-as-often-quoted-concern]]). Shadbolt and Hall, his co-authors on that paper, do not yet have separate standing in this vault beyond that joint byline.

## References
- [[claim-shadbolt-hall-berners-lee-2006-name-ontology-maintenance-cost-as-often-quoted-concern]]