by Mark Frauenfelder

About the author: Mark Frauenfelder has written articles on technology for the New York Times Magazine, MIT Technology Review, Yahoo Internet Life, and the Industry Standard. He is also the founding editor in chief of Wired Online.

How do you endow the Internet’s chaotic pile of bits with a structure that makes information easier to find and use? It’s all a matter of semantics.

Tim Berners-Lee must feel like he’s in a time warp. In the early 1990s, he spent a frustrating year trying to get people to grasp the power and beauty of his idea for a scheme known as an Internet hypertext system, to which he gave the beguiling name the World Wide Web. But since the Web didn...