By Erik Kirschbaum
Britain's Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web and then gave it away, will receive Germany's national Quadriga award on the country's 15th annual Unification Day on October 3, organizers said on Thursday.
Also receiving a Quadriga award for courage and vision will be six Northern Irish women who challenged the Irish Republican Army over the murder of a Catholic man, Robert McCartney, in Belfast in January.
McCartney's five sisters and fiance will receive the award for their tireless campaign against IRA violence, organizers said. Last month, the IRA pledged to end its armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.
Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1990 while at the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva to let his fellow scientists work together even when in other parts of the world.
But instead of patenting it and reaping a fortune, he chose to put it onto the Internet a year later, opening access to everyone. Quadriga organizers hailed Berners-Lee as the most important scientist of the
20th century after Albert Einstein."Berners-Lee elected not to patent the World Wide Web for commercial reasons or his own personal profit but gave it away for all of us," said Klaus Riebschlaeger, chairman of the organising committee. "Free and available to all humanity, it became the network for knowledge linking the world."
The Web made modern-day surfing possible and transformed the Internet from a domain for scientists and academics into the fastest growing mass medium of all time.
Before the Web was developed, electronic files stored on the Internet were exceedingly difficult to find and pages could only be located using an address -- often a vast string of numbers.
The Quadriga national awards for courage, vision and responsibility were inspired by ex U.S. President Bill Clinton on a visit to Berlin in 2002. They are presented each year in four categories: political, economic, social and cultural.
Other winners of the 25,000 euro prize this year include former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl for his achievements in reuniting Germany in
1990; and the Aga Khan, billionaire spiritual leader of the world's 15 million Ismaili Muslims, for his charitable institution the Aga Khan Development Network.Previous winners include Afghan President Hamid Karzai (2004) and British architect Norman Foster (2003).
Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited.
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