sir tim berners lee
by sarah louise
tim
Berners-Lee was born in southwest London, England, on 8 June 1955, one of four children born to Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. His parents worked on the first commercially-built computer, the Ferranti Mark 1. He attended Sheen Mount Primary School, and then went on to attend south west London's independent Emanuel School from 1969 to 1973. A keen trains potter as a child, he learnt about electronics from tinkering with a model railway. He studied at Queen's College, Oxford, from 1973 to 1976, where he received a first-class degree in physics
After graduation he worked at the telecommunications company Plessey in Poole and in 1978 joined D. G. Nash in Dorset where he helped create type-setting software for printers
current work
In June 2009 then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Berners-Lee would work with the UK Government to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are the two key figures behind data.gov.uk, a UK Government project to open up almost all data acquired for official purposes for free re-use. Commenting on the opening up of Ordnance Survey data in April 2010 Berners-Lee said that: "The changes signal a wider cultural change in Government based on an assumption that information should be in the public domain unless there is a good reason not to—not the other way around." He went on to say "Greater openness, accountability and transparency in Government will give people greater choice and make it easier for individuals to get more directly involved in issues that matter to them