I'm sure people have heard about this Web 2.0 phenomenon that's all over, about AJAX and mashups, blogging, podcasts, tagging, basically making the web usable for humans. Now, we're getting to the next upgrade to the web, or maybe a leap, called Web 3.0. It's the first time I've heard of this term, coming from this article from the New York Times.
Note: a Google search already shows that Web 3.0 has already been used a lot now, I just never knew about it!
Thanks to my supervisor for sending this to me. It's basically talking about when web sites begin to understand each other and when you make a request, then the results you get are relevant to what you're looking for. What do I mean? For example, right now, if you want to book a conference trip, you need to find a web site for the conference and do registration. Then, you need to book your flights so you go to a travel web site to find the lowest fares that suit your dates of travel. Then, you have to find the accommodations to stay at in the conference (if you don't want to stay at the conference hotel). On top of that, if you want to do some sightseeing, you have to go the city's web sites or Google or find other travellers who have gone to those places like TripAdvisor. Basically, this is all time consuming, I know for me it is! I spend so much time, trying to find the best bang for the buck and for the experience.
So, what if instead, I enter in the query that I want to book a conference and give the conference name and want the travel itinerary. I log in, it knows my profile and finds that my favorite airline is Air Canada, it also knows that I've stayed at many Best Western hotels so I have a discount for Best Western. Furthermore, it knows the dates that I'm travelling because it consults the conference web site and finds out the dates of the conference. It then also consults with my calendar to know what my schedule is, and then decides the best dates for me to travel with Air Canada, with the lowest cost (since I'm a grad student and I'm poor). Then, it knows how many days I'm staying at the city of the conference, and how much money I have from my bank account, so it recommends a schedule of places to go that will suit my budget and my time. That's what I want, and that's what the vision of what Web 3.0 will be like, it's the Semantic Web, touted for a long time by Tim Berners-Lee.
Basically, the web becomes an exchange of data and meaning associated behind that data, as well as translating the human queries into machine level web service transactions divided into mini transactions and rules that execute the query of "Booking a conference". What are the technologies that Web 3.0 will involve? Right now, the ground work is ontologies, or creating categorizations of data. We need to have classifications so that web sites are able to talk to each other. The Semantic Web effort at the W3C is dealing with RDF and OWL-S, and there's lots of research being done in academia and research labs on semantic web. For example, MIT has something called the Simile project, and you can easily Google to find more people working on Semantic Web.
There also will be a need of inference and AI type of work. I'm a big fan of this kind of stuff, I did a little bit of semantic web research as part of my Masters thesis when I was investigating disconnections and crashes in mobile pervasive environments, and how web services can be used to stitch this together as service-oriented computing where computing is not about dealing with data but it's about finding and interacting with services.
When will we see patches to Web 2.0 or incremental releases like Web 2.0a or Web 2.1 , will there even be a Web 4.0 or will the numbering change to like Web 2007 just like software releases? Maybe there maybe alphas and betas and RTWs (Release to Web, just like RTMs like Release To Manufacturing in Microsoft speak).
On Technorati: Web 3.0, Semantic Web
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