web 3.0

Web 3.0 is a term used to describe the future of the World Wide Web. Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform. Web 3.0 refers to the attempt by technologists to overhaul radically the basic platform of the internet so that it 'understands' the near infinite pieces of information that reside on it and draws connections between them. Web 2.0 has paved the way for applying real world contexts to the web and Web 3.0 will be an extension of this into everyday life.

Web 3.0 Road Map:

Web 1.0 was therefore the first decade of the Web: 1990 - 2000. Web 2.0 is the second decade, 2000 - 2010.Web 3.0, in my opinion is best defined as the third-decade of the Web (2010 - 2020), during which time several key technologies will become widely used. Chief among them will be RDF and the technologies of the emerging Semantic Web. While Web 3.0 is not synonymous with the Semantic Web (there will be several other important technology shifts in that period), it will be largely characterized by semantics in general.

Web 3.0 is an era in which we will upgrade the back-end of the Web, after a decade of focus on the front-end (Web 2.0 has mainly been about AJAX, tagging, and other front-end user-experience innovations.) Web 3.0 is already starting to emerge in startups such as Radar Networks, but will really become mainstream around 2010.

Web 3.0 Examples:

Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for "cat", reserving a library book, and searching for a low price on a DVD. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.

Another prime example of a Web 3.0 technology is powerset.com which is developing 'natural-language search', which refers to the ability of search engines to answer full questions such as 'Which US Presidents died of disease?'. In some cases, the sites that appear in the results do not reference the original search terms, reflecting the fact that the web knows, for instance, that Reagan was a US President, and that Alzheimer's is a disease. According to Barney Pell, chief executive of Powerset “ Their engine reads every page of the web sentence by sentence and returns results by drawing on a general knowledge of language and what specific concepts in the world mean, and their relationship with one another."

Web 3.0 Layers

Web 3.0 is divided into three distinct layers:

API services form the foundation layer. These are the raw hosted services that have powered Web 2.0 and will become the engines of Web 3.0 — Google’s search and AdWords APIs, Amazon’s affiliate APIs, a seemingly infinite ocean of RSS feeds, a multitude of functional services, such as those included in the StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace, and many other examples. Some of the providers, like Google and Amazon, are important players, but there is a huge long tail of smaller providers. One of the most significant characteristics of this layer is that it is a commodity layer. As Web 3.0 matures, an almost perfect market will emerge and squeeze out virtually all of the profit margin from the highest-volume services — and sometimes squeeze them into loss-leading or worse.

Aggregation services form the middle layer. These are the intermediaries that take some of the hassle out of locating all those raw API services by bundling them together in useful ways. Obvious examples today are the various RSS aggregators, and emerging web services marketplaces like the StrikeIron service.

Application services form the top layer, and this is where I believe the biggest, most durable profits will be found. These will not be like the established application categories we are used to, such as CRM, ERP or office, but a new class of composite applications that bring together functionality from multiple services to help users achieve their objectives in a flexible, intuitive and self-evident way.

Web 3.0 Technologies:

Web 3.0 is sometimes called Semantic Web, a term coined by Tim Berners Lee, the man who first invented www.

Web 3.0 will have 4 main features like a Semantic Web where a machine or robot can read a website or check our daily schedules; 3D Web-a virtual walk through unfamilier places without leaving one’s own seat; Media-centric searches understanding natural-lauguage queries or photos, and the Pervasive Web that’s everywhere-on your PC, on your cellphone, on your cloths, jewelry, your kitchen, bathroom and office. Web 3.0 is here for sure. But it has to be experienced.

What is Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. It derives from W3C director Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.

The Semantic Web is a set of technologies which are designed to enable a particular vision for the future of the Web – a future in which all knowledge exists on the Web in a format that software applications can understand and reason about. By making knowledge more accessible to software, software will essentially become able to understand knowledge, think about knowledge, and create new knowledge. In other words, software will be able to be more intelligent than – not as intelligent as humans perhaps, but more intelligent than say, your word processor is today.

Semantic Web promises to put a lot more intelligence — artificial intelligence — out there in the network of networks, and is certainly a step in the right direction

At its core, the semantic web comprises a set of design principles, collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies. Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that are yet to be implemented or realized. Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications. Some of these include Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.

Features of Semantic web:

1) The Semantic Web is not just a single Web. There won't be one Semantic Web, there will be thousands or even millions of them, each in their own area. They will connect together over time, forming a tapestry. But nobody will own this or run this as a single service.

2) The Semantic Web is not separate from the existing Web. The Semantic Web won't be a new Web apart from the Web we already have. It simply adds new metadata to the existing Web. It merges right into the existing HTML Web just like XML does, except this new metadata is in RDF.

3) The Semantic Web is not just about unstructured data. In fact, the Semantic Web is really about structured data: it provides a means (RDF) to turn any content or data into structured data that other software can make use of. This is really what RDF enables.

4) The Semantic Web does not require complex ontologies. Even without making use of OWL and more sophisticated ontologies, powerful data-sharing and data-integration can be enabled on the existing Web using even just RDF alone.

5) The Semantic Web does not only exist on Web pages. RDF works inside of applications and databases, not just on Web pages. Calling it a "Web" is a misnomer of sorts — it's not just about the Web, it's about all information, data and applications.

6) The Semantic Web is not only about Artificial Intelligence (AI) , and doesn't require it. There are huge benefits from the Semantic Web without ever using a single line of artificial intelligence code. While the next-generation of AI will certainly be enabled by richer semantics, is not the only benefit of RDF. Making data available in RDF makes it more accessible, integratable, and reusable — regardless of any AI. The long-term future of the Semantic Web is AI for sure — but to get immediate benefits from RDF no AI is necessary.

7) The Semantic Web is not only about mining, search engines and spidering. Application developers and content providers, and end-users, can benefit from using the Semantic Web (RDF) within their own services, regardless of whether they expose that RDF metadata to outside parties. RDF is useful without doing any data-mining — it can be baked right into content within authoring tools and created transparently when information is published. RDF makes content more manageable and frees developers and content providers from having to look at relational data models. It also gives end-users better ways to collect and manage content they find.