The future information infrastructure: the many faces of the web

Speaker: Professor Thomas Roth-Berghofer, School of Computing and Technology
Compere: Professor Peter Komisarczuk, Head of the School of Computing and Technology
Date: Thursday 21 June 2012

This lecture will present and explain some of the current developments about the web.  It will identify some of the key challenges and explain how these are addressed by researchers of the School of Computing and Technology at the University of West London.

The world wide web has become the biggest source of information for many of us.

We use a variety of search engines to find such diverse information as cooking recipes, disease symptoms and medication, movie tips, and scientific articles; with various degrees of success.

To help us further, innovation has brought new 'answer engines' such as Wolfram Alpha whose aims are 'bringing broad, deep, expert level knowledge to everyone'.

The web is changing and turning into something more than being just a lot of web pages accessible to only humans. Two trends are highlighted in this lecture:

• linking data and semantically enriching information allows machines to reason about information, thus, providing new personalised services
• the web of things – a vision where everyday objects contain an embedded computer and are connected by fully integrating them to the web – extending the web even further.

Read Professor Thomas Roth-Berghofer biography.