People of the Information Renaissance: Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the known as the man who invented the World Wide Web. Without his contributions, we would not have hyperlinks or webpages. For this fact alone he should be recognized as one of the key figures of the Information Renaissance. Today he is a Knight of the British Empire and works as the director for the World Wide Web Consortium, the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web which is responsible for overseeing the future development of the web.
The story of the World Wide Web began in 1980 when Berners-Lee was working at CERN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN), the European Organization for Nuclear Research. At CERN, Berners-Lee further developed the idea of hypertext, a fundamental building block of the Web which allows documents to link to other documents. Berners-Lee did not invent hypertext, but in his own words:
Lots of hypertext systems had been made which just worked on one computer, and didn't link all the way across the world. I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and -- ta-da! -- the World Wide Web. Source.
In order to ensure the continued success of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide web Consortium, otherwise known as the W3C. The W3C worked to keep the World Wide Web royalty free (http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/) in order to make it an attractive and cooperative place to share information. This decision is the reason why the World Wide Web has such an open ended nature today.
For his efforts, Tim Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2004, and was honored by Time Magazine when they included him in the 100 Most Important People of the Century.
For his work in developing the concept of the World Wide Web, and his continuing efforts to keep the Web open and free to all users, Sir Tim Berners-Lee can easily be called one of the most important figures in the Information Renaissance.