Web 3.0 & Semantic Web

According to technology expert and entrepreneur Nova Spivack, the development of the Web moves in 10-year cycles. In the Web's first decade, most of the development focused on the back end, or infrastructure, of the Web. This is often referred to as Web 1.0. Programmers created the protocols and code languages we use to make Web pages. In the second decade, focus shifted to the front end and the era of Web 2.0 began. Now people use Web pages as platforms for other applications. They also create mashups and experiment with ways to make Web experiences more interactive. We're at the end of the Web 2.0 cycle now. The next cycle will be Web 3.0, and the focus will shift back to the back end. Programmers will refine the Internet's infrastructure to support the advanced capabilities of Web 3.0 browsers. Once that phase ends, we'll enter the era of Web 4.0. Focus will return to the front end, and we'll see thousands of new programs that use Web 3.0 as a foundation [source: <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Nova Spivack<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">].

Past: Web 1.0
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Think of <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Web 1.0 <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;"> as a library. You can use it as a source of information, but you can't contribute to or change the information in any way

Present: Web 2.0
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Web 2.0<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;"> is more like a big group of friends and acquaintances. You can still use it to receive information but you also contribute to the conversation and make it a richer experience. In the beginning stages of the formation of the <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">World Wide Web<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">, users were limited to passive viewing of online content. The term <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">"Web 2.0"<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;"> was coined in 1999 by <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Darcy DiNucci<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;"> as people became increasingly able to interact and cooperate online through <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">social media platforms<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">virtual communities<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;"> and user-generated content. Some examples include <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">blogs<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">wikis<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">social networks<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">forums<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">, and <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">media sharing sites<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">. <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Web 2.0<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;"> technologies encompass a variety of different meanings that include an increased emphasis on user generated content, data and content sharing, collaborative effort, new ways of interacting with Web-based applications, and the use of the Web as a social platform for generating, repositioning and consuming content. <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">"Web 2.0"<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;"> refers to a perceived second generation of Web development and design that facilitates communications and secures information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Web 2.0<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;"> concepts have led to the development and evolution of Web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">social networking sites<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">, video-sharing sites[LINK], <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">blogs<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">wikis<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">, and folksonomies " (Web 2.0, 2009). The emphasis on user participation also known as the "Read/Write" Web - characterizes most people's definitions of <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Web 2.0<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">.

Characteristics of Web 2.0

 * <span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">The ability for visitors to make changes to Web pages: Amazon allows visitors to post product reviews. Using an online form, a visitor can add information to Amazon's pages that future visitors will be able to read.


 * <span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">Using Web pages to link people to other users: <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are popular in part because they make it easy for users to find each other and keep in touch.


 * <span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">Fast and efficient ways to share content: YouTube is the perfect example. A YouTube member can create a video and upload it to the site for others to watch in less than an hour.


 * <span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">New ways to get information: Today, Internet surfers can subscribe to a Web page's Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds and receive notifications of that Web page's updates as long as they maintain an Internet connection.


 * <span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">Expanding access to the Internet beyond the computer: Many people access the Internet through devices like cell phones or video game consoles; before long, some experts expect that consumers will access the Internet through television sets and other devices.

Current Problems with Web 2.0
<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">1) <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">High recall and low precision<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">. The most relevant pages are retrieved, but so are many other irrelevant or semi-relevant pages

<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">2) <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Low recall<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">:  Sometimes we don’t get the answer we want at all

<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">3) Results are too vocabulary-sensitive: Semantically similar words do not return similar results

<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">4) Results return only single Web pages. We must travel to separate places, extract information, then bring together a solid body of information. This requires several queries

<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">5) <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Search engines<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;"> are not integrated with software; they often stand isolated.

"Therefore the term <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">information retrieval<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">, used in assocation with search engines[LINK], is somewhat midleading; location finder might be a more appropriate term." The <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">semantic meaning<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;"> behind what information we with to retrieve is "not machine-accessible." The computer cannot interpret sentences the way humans can.

Future: Web 3.0 & Beyond
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.15;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">Some Internet experts believe we are moving towards the next generation of the web, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Web 3.0<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">. Also referred to as <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">"The Semantic Web"<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;"> <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Web 3.0<span style="line-height:22px;font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;"> is predicted to solve many of the problems that users experience when browsing the Internet. <span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">Using the same pattern as the above Wikipedia definition, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Web 3.0 could be defined as: “<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called ‘the intelligent Web’ — such as those using <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">semantic web, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">microformats, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">natural language search, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">data mining, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">machine learning, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">recommendation agents, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">machine learning, and <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">artificial intelligence, <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">machine learning technologies — which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.” <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">“<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Web 3.0 might be defined as a third-generation of the Web enabled by the convergence of several key emerging technology trends:

<ul><li>Ubiquitous Connectivity<ul><li>Broadband adoption</li><li>Mobile Internet access</li><li>Mobile devices</li></ul></li> <li>Network Computing<ul><li>Software-as-a-service business models</li><li>Web services interoperability</li><li>Distributed computing (P2P, grid computing, hosted "cloud computing" server farms such as Amazon S3)</li></ul></li> <li>Open Technologies<ul><li>Open APIs and protocols</li><li>Open data formats</li><li>Open-source software platforms</li><li>Open data (Creative Commons, Open Data License, etc.)</li></ul></li> <li>Open Identity<ul><li>Open identity (OpenID)</li><li>Open reputation</li><li>Portable identity and personal data (for example, the ability to port your user account and search history from one service to another)</li></ul></li> <li>The Intelligent Web<ul><li>Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, Semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores such as triplestores, tuplestores and associative databases)</li><li>Distributed databases - or what I call "The World Wide Database" (wide-area distributed database interoperability enabled by Semantic Web technologies)</li><li>Intelligent applications (natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents)</li></ul></li></ul>

Beyond Web 3.0
<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;line-height:1.4em;white-space:pre-wrap;">The Web will evolve into a three-dimensional environment. Rather than a <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">Web 3.0, we'll see a Web 3D. Combining virtual reality elements with the persistent online worlds of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">(MMORPGs), the Web could become a digital landscape that incorporates the illusion of depth. You'd navigate the Web either from a first-person perspective or through a digital representation of yourself called an avatar (to learn more about an avatar's perspective, read <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">How the Avatar machine Works).

<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">​ <span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">The Web will build on developments in distributed computing and lead to true <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">artificial intelligence. In <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">distributed computing, several computers tackle a large processing job. Each computer handles a small part of the overall task. Some people believe the Web will be able to think by distributing the workload across thousands of computers and referencing deep <span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap;">ontologies. The Web will become a giant brain capable of analyzing data and extrapolating new ideas based off of that information.

<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial;font-size:15px;white-space:pre-wrap;line-height:1.4em;">The Web will extend far beyond computers and cell phones. Everything from watches to television sets to clothing will connect to the Internet. Users will have a constant connection to the Web, and vice versa. Each user's software agent will learn more about its respective user by electronically observing his or her activities. This might lead to debates about the balance between individual privacy and the benefit of having a personalized Web browsing experience. The Web will merge with other forms of entertainment until all distinctions between the forms of media are lost. Radio programs, television shows and feature films will rely on the Web as a delivery system.

[Return To Rad Students]