In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall. ‘Vague, but exciting’, were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal, allowing Berners-Lee to continue.
J. Ding, L. Gravano, and N. Shivakumar. Proceedings of the 26th Int. Conf. on Very Large Databases, VLDB 2000, page 545--556. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., (2000)