No sooner did W3C hire itself a new CEO to run day-to-day operations than Tim Berners-Lee, who is still supposed to be director of W3C, turns up running a new research center that the British government is putting around $45 million (£30 million) into called the Institute for Web Science. It’s supposed to develop, maybe even commercialize, Berners-Lee’s quixotic next-generation notions of a Semantic Web and put the UK on the cutting edge of emerging Internet technologies, according to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who also wants every home in the UK to have super-fast broadband by 2020. The institute will be jointly based at the Universities of Oxford and Southampton, the latter a hot bed of Semantic Web research where Berners-Lee has had a part-time post since 2004.

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