Tim Berners-Lee, professor of computer science, University of Southampton, UK

One thing Tim Berners-Lee would like, he says, is an in-depth knowledge of a subject area: he calls himself “jack-of-all-trades, master of none”. From the inventor of the World-Wide Web, that seems a startling claim. (see CV).

But Berners-Lee may be on course to get his wish, as he takes up an appointment at the University of Southampton, UK. There he will immerse himself in the Semantic Web, which aims to give information a clearly defined meaning, so that computers and people can work together more effectively. He will retain his current professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but by working more closely with Southampton, he hopes to give the semantic project increased momentum.

Berners-Lee followed an unusual path. The son of two mathematicians, he grew up with a love of electronics. On his way to a first-class degree in physics at Oxford, he spent much of his time building a computer from an old television set and some cheap parts.

“At the time, I was a budding engineer,” he says. “I didn't personally know any people doing computer-science research, who might have served as role models. Maybe I should have gone to the United States to do a masters and then come back and done a PhD in computer science.”

Turning away from academia, he took a series of jobs in Dorset — largely because he liked the seaside location. In 1989, as a database engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, he got on with another spare-time project, and the World-Wide Web was born.

“An awful lot of things had to be in alignment for the web to take off,” he says. “For the first few years, it didn't have the critical mass to make the world sit up and take notice. I and others at CERN did a great deal of work talking to people and encouraging them to give it a try.”

Now, with the Semantic Web, he faces a similar challenge — getting people to adopt a new technology when others are already in place. But he is exploring how the Semantic Web could be useful for life sciences, which he is learning more about on the fly. And in the process, another field may benefit from Berners-Lee's jack-of-all-trades inventiveness.