Berners-Lee, who was recently knighted by the Queen of England, received a $1.2 million cash prize for his contributions to improving the quality of life through outstanding innovation. He was also honored for his choice to never commercialize or patent his contributions to the Internet technologies he developed.
The Millennium Technology Prize trophy, known as the "peak," as well as the monetary award, were given to Berners-Lee by the President of The Republic of Finland, Tarja Halonen.
The Millennium Technology Award is granted biannually by The Finnish Technology Award Foundation for outstanding innovations in one of the following fields: Energy and the Environment, Information and Communication, New Materials and Processes or Health Care and Life Sciences.
"There are so many new things to make, limited only by our imagination," Berners-Lee told the Helsinki audience. "We must remember that the web is a long way from revealing it’s full potential. The extension from human-readable to include also machine-readable information is just one direction of development."
Berners-Lee is credited with developing the core protocols for connecting web pages while serving at the particle physics institute, Cern, in Geneva. He is also one of the founders of the World Wide Web Consortium and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Berners-Lee has been quoted as saying that he never expected his tinkering with certain elements of the Internet would lead to such an accolade.
But Berners-Lee claims that if money has been a paramount motivator above the sheer passion of the project, "there would be lots of small webs," Berners-Lee said, but not what is know today as the all-pervasive connectivity of the Internet.
"I was just taking lots of things that already existed and added a little bit," said Berners-Lee. "Building the web, I didn't do it all myself," he said. "The really exciting thing about it is that it was done by lots and lots of people, connected with this tremendous spirit."
Berners-Lee said that his most recent project is called the Semantic Web, a standardization method for storing information on the Internet.
Berners-Lee is a graduate of Oxford University, England.
