World Wide Web creator advises government on digital Britain

The man who has invented the internet is advising the government on how to manage its data.

The Prime Minister has announced a renewed commitment to the digital engagement programme as part of his attempt to recover from the political disasters of the past week. In a speech aimed at launching a renewed political agenda, Gordon Brown announced the appointment of Sir Tim Berners-Lee as expert adviser on public information delivery.

The announcement also clarified that Tessa Jowell MP, minister for the Cabinet Office, would pick up the portfolio left vacant by last week's resignation of Tom Watson, the former minister for digital engagement.

Berners-Lee, currently director of the World Wide Web Consortium, will head a panel of experts who will advise the minister for the Cabinet Office on how the government can best use the web "to make non-personal public data as widely available as possible".

This will include overseeing work to create a single online point of access for public sector information, along the lines of the US's www.data.gov. He will also help drive the use of the internet to improve government consultation processes.

Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide Web while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1990. Also on the panel is Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton.

The announcement, the first to be made on the programme since the appointment of Andrew Stott as head of digital engagement, will allay fears that the 'Power of Information' agenda will be shelved in the run-up to the general election.