Tim Bray

Biomedical Visualization

By Joe Cellini

If you still haven’t found what you’re looking for — on the Web, in a stack of bad search returns or through a bank of network data fog — don’t hang it on Tim Bray. For more than 20 years, Bray has been there for you, singlemindedly working the problem of online information access. And chances are good that at some point in your history of urgent searching, Bray was the wizard behind the curtain, pulling the long levers that got you back to “Kansas,” or to some equally happy state of requited inquiry.

Precisely where online you might have encountered Bray’s handiwork is harder to pin down. Like some action hero for the information age, Bray has shown he is willing to go anywhere to run down fugitive facts, tackling projects as deep as the English Language (computerized Oxford English Dictionary, 1987), as wide as the Web (one of the first Internet search engines, 1994), and as tall as the meaning of data (XML, 1996). For his latest trick, Bray, through Antarctica Systems (1999), is attempting to break out network searching from the tight constraints of the query box.

Bray’s reassuring message — that all is not lost, given appropriate tags and maps — sounds like just the ticket for safe passage through a darkening datascape. Last year Upside Magazine stamped that ticket, electing Bray to its industry Elite 100. But one guesses that the self-described “backroom hacker” was more comfortable taking up his 2001 nomination by Tim Berners-Lee to the Web Consortium’s architectural oversight group, with a reserved seat on a lofty peak of that geek Olympus.

“In math I’d worked like a dog for my Cs, but in CS I worked much less for As — and learned that you got paid well for doing it.”

Lost and Found

Long before he became a wrangler of free-range information, Bray engaged in a formative experiment in career search and retrieval as an undergraduate student at the University of Guelph (“a cow college with a good CS department”).

“I went to university to become a high school math teacher,” Bray explains, “but there were no jobs. So I held off graduating, took a job and just on an experimental basis took a course in computer science. In math I’d worked like a dog for my Cs, but in CS I worked much less for As — and learned that you got paid well for doing it. I graduated in Computer Science in 1981.”

Structured Search

Math’s imperceptible loss was technology’s significant gain. In 1987, after several years in the industry, Bray accepted a job at the University of Waterloo managing a group of talented researchers and programmers in the creation of the first online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, the largest dictionary ever created in any language.

It was, says Bray, “about as much fun as you can have and get paid for.” And he is happy to explain what exactly the fun was about: “The raw text of the dictionary was 570 MB, which doesn’t sound like much these days, but our average Sun computer workstation had like 16MB of RAM. The data was so large that we couldn’t afford to be sloppy. So the dictionary not only had to do useful stuff, it had to do it with very high efficiency.”

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