The Web is entering a new phase of evolution.
Web 1.0 – The Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites.
Web 2.0 – This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era. Web 2.0 focuses on several major themes, including AJAX, social networking, lightweight collaboration, social bookmarking, and media sharing. While the innovations and practices of Web 2.0 will continue to develop, they are not the final step in the evolution of the Web.
Web 3.0 – This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.
The Next Generation Web: Search Context for Online Information
What Is the Difference between Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web) and Web 2.0? Web 3.0 is an extension of Web 2.0. Web 3.0 will be a third generation web to take the center stage approximately between 2010 and 2020. In the Web 2.0 universe, searching Google for a specific name will yield a plethora of unrelated hits. Web 3.0 solves this problem by providing context to searching for online information.
Intelligent Web: Web 2.0 is about social networking and mass collaboration with the blurring of lines between content creator and user whereas Web 3.0 is based on “intelligent” web applications using:
• Natural language processing: It can understand spoken language
• Self Learning programs/browser or Machine-based learning and reasoning.
• Intelligent applications: To understand user search habits
The goal is to tailor online searching and requests specifically to users’ profiles, preferences and needs. Although the intelligent web sounds similar to artificial intelligence, it’s not quite the same.
Openness: Web 3.0 is about openness. By “opening” API’s, protocols, data formats, open-source software platforms and open data, you open up possibilities for creating new tools. Although unlike openness can result in identity theft, Web 3.0 attempts to remedy this through:
• Open Identity (OpenID): An open standard that describes how users can be authenticated in a decentralized manner and this protocol does not rely on a central authority to authenticate a user's identity. OpenID authentication is now used and provided by several large websites. Providers include Google, IBM, MySpace, Orange, PayPal, VeriSign and Yahoo!
• Open Reputation: This will be used for smarter searching of web sites, blogs, events, products, companies and other individuals. This can be also based on user's feedback through appropriate feedback channels. In general reputations systems collect, distribute, and may aggregate feedback about a principal's past behaviour. The availability of online reputation feedback systems and the use of data extraction mechanisms will eventually lead to the wide availability of reputation information about users (human, devices etc.) on the Internet.
• The ability to roam with Portable Device and Personal Data, for example, the ability to port your user account and search history from one service to another.
Interoperability: By opening up access to information, Web 3.0 applications can run on any device, computer, or mobile phone. Applications can be very fast and customizable. Unlike Web 2.0, where programs such as Facebook and MySpace exist in separate silos, Web 3.0 allows users to roam freely from database to database, program to program.
A Global Database: Conceptually, Web 3.0 should be viewed as one large database. Dubbed "The Data Web", Web 3.0 uses structured data records published to the Web in reusable and remote-queriable formats. XML technologies such as RDF Schema, OWL, SPARQL will make this possible by allowing information to be read across different programs across the web.
Focus on Individual: Web 3.0 focuses on individual surfer’s information needs. Information is linked to user rather than user being linked to information. Moreover, user can roam around from one program to another program, one database to another database for more relevant information. They can also participate in global social networking and also stay linked to niche information.
3D Web & Beyond: Web 3.0 will use a three dimensional model and transform it into a series of 3D spaces. Services such as Second Life and the use of personalized avatars will be a common feature of the 3D web. Web 3.0 will extend beyond into the physical; imagine a Web connected to everything not only your cell phone but your car, microwave and clothes, thus truly making for an integrated experience.
Control of Information: Where Web 3.0 is about control of information, Web 2.0 is about information overload. The most obvious example is in the sheer explosion of programs and passwords on the Web which claim to encourage networking and socialization. Web 3.0 attempts to bring order and allow users to be more accurate in searching and finding precisely what they want.
Semantic Web versus Web 3.0: What is most confusing is the difference between the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 – both are conceptual entities. However, rather than competing spaces they should be viewed as complementary. By adding the semantic web to Web 2.0, we move conceptually closer to Web 3.0. The underlying technologies of the Semantic Web, which enrich content and the intelligence of the social web, pulls in user profiles and identities, and must be combined for Web 3.0 to work.
An excellent example of a “semantic web” based application is Twine. Twine is the flagship product of Radar Networks, a semantic-focussed start-up and has been acquired by Evri, a company using semantic technology to deliver real-time search results around news.
Twine provides a smarter way for people to leverage and contribute to the combined brainpower of their relationships. It is basically knowledge networking. It's the next evolution of collective intelligence on the Web. Unlike social networking and community tools, Twine is not just about who you know, it's about what you know. Twine is the ultimate tool for gathering and sharing knowledge on the Web. It automatically organizes information, learns about users’ specific interests and makes recommendations. The more users use Twine, the better the service gets to know its users and the more useful it becomes. Twine is an example of Web 3.0 at work, combining the social elements of Web 2.0 with user-specific Semantic Web tools.
The Semantic Web will be tagged using Resource Description Framework (RDF) and ontologized with Web Ontology Language (OWL) so that pages and content will be meaningful. The newly added meaning will make it possible for other computers to use the content intelligently: by giving you more-useful and context-aware search results. Twine extends this to all of your information--email, sites visited, feeds--and will automatically generate the tags to "semantify" the data.
Each user of the hosted Twine service will have his own "twine," which analyzes and stores all the collected metadata for all of his information. Twine will offer several ways to enter content into its uber index of all your information--via a Web button, by importing from documents, receiving it from collaborators, or sending email to your twine. Connecting your twine to other users' will result in a network effect benefit to knowledge management.
Conclusion: Web 3.0 will enable a device to understand human actions and perform intelligent tasks like gathering relevant, measurable and specific information useful for the users. All this is expected from Web 3.0 by the year 2015. Web 3.0 will be more connected, open, and intelligent, with semantic Web technologies, distributed databases, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, and autonomous agents. Its primary goal is to organize, share and discover information within likeminded Internet users.
No comments:
Post a Comment