Web 3.0 - A matter of semantics?
‘Web 2.0 is a fresh-faced starlet on the intertwingled longtail to the disruptive experience of tomorrow. Web 3.0 thinks you are so 2005.’ (Jeffrey Zeldman) It’s the appliance of Science, Rodney When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 so that physicists could share research papers, he probably had little idea that in less than two decades time ordinary people would be using it to hunt down old school friends, watch back episodes of ‘Only Fools and Horses’ and share pictures of their virtual world avatars in soft porn poses. Technology futures are notoriously hard to predict with any accuracy. The last people in the world to forsee the runaway success of text messaging, for example, were the product development people who put SMS functionality into mobile phones. Similarly Web 2.0 came out of left field for many because its emergence had as much to do with socio-economics and shifts in consumer behaviour as with technological progress, and was an equally ‘bottom-up’ phenomenon. Web 2.0 was driven from the start by ‘small self-directed teams powered by Pareto’s Principle’, in the words of Jeffrey Zeldman the highly influential US web designer credited with coining the phrase Web 3.0: ‘More often than not, big teams have slowly and expensively labored to produce overly complex web applications whose usability was nil on behalf of clients with at best vague goals’. Innovation – or at least, innovation that succeeded – was coming from the grass roots. Zeldman compares Web 2.0 brands such as Flikr, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. to the hundreds of garage bands that sprang up with every Velvet Underground record sold. All of which ought to act as something of a deterrent to anybody getting into futurecasting vis-a-vis the World Wide Web, where, as we have often seen, “unexpected outcomes can emerge from unanticipated places”. Nevertheless, since the appearance of Zeldman’s article about Web 3.0 in January 2006 more and more people are beginning to talk around themes that indicate what the Web’s next big iteration is going to look like – even if, as in the case of Tim Berners-Lee, their natural tendency is to fall shy of buzzy terms such as Web 3.0. Web 3.0 Definition So what is Web 3.0? According to Wikipedia, “a term that has been coined with different meanings to describe the evolution of Web usage and interaction along several separate paths”. In other words, people have different ideas. Wikipedia cites hi-tech entrepreneur Nova Spivack’s proposal of an expanded definition of Web 3.0 characterised as “a convergence of several major complementary technology trends that are reaching new levels of maturity simultaneously”. These include (warning: this about to get technical): - Ubiquitous Connectivity, broadband adoption, mobile Internet access and mobile devices
- Network computing, software-as-a-service business models, Web services interoperability, distributed computing, grid computing and cloud computing
- Open technologies, Open APIs and protocols, open data formats, open-source software platforms and open data (e.g. Creative Commons, Open Data License)
- Open identity, OpenID, open reputation, roaming portable identity and personal data
- The intelligent web, Semantic web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, Semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores
- Distributed databases, the ‘World Wide Database’ (enabled by Semantic Web technologies)
- Intelligent applications, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents
One of the most important of these is The Semantic Web, brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee’s 1998 roadmap for the Semantic Web visions (in rather scary language) “a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful”. This involves spreading a common ‘mark-up’ language and set of protocols which would allow easy cross-referencing of countless databases, effectively turning the web into one giant database. At a conference speech in May 2006 reported in the International Herald Tribune Berners-Lee gave an example of how this vision might translate into reality, giving the example of a website announcing a conference. “A user could click on a link and immediately transfer the time and date of the conference to his or her electronic calendar. The location - address, latitude, longitude, perhaps even altitude - could be sent to his or her GPS device, and the names and biographies of others invited could be sent to an instant messenger list”. Another aspect of this vision relates to the use of intelligent agents. Rather than go to Google and trawl through endless flat lists of links, users will be able to issue ‘high-level information requests’ via web-enabled devices and have a distilled answer delivered back to them that takes all the hard work out of searching - Moneysupermarket.com on steroids. Personal profiles will also become portable, so we no longer have to spend half our lives filling in online forms. Web 2.0, great though it is, has given us a lot of low level admin tasks to do on a daily basis (Note to self: update profiles on Facebook, Linkedin, get new winter gauntlets for Second Life Avatar...) which Web 3.0 will automate and rationalise. The ultimate life hack. Shopping becomes a dream. Just turn up to a virtual clothing store, and the virtual retailer already knows your inside leg measurement (or cup size). Web 3.0 builds on and expands the power-of-the-network idea that underlies Web 2.0 but adds to that a greater degree of independence for information itself. Information is cut free from 2D web pages and can be reshaped, repacked and repurposed, independently of formatting, with software doing much of the initial processing that is nowadays done by human brains. The other, complementary revolution is in delivery of that processed information. The Web is no longer tethered to the desktop PC. Computing is distributed, wearable, mobile – out in the world instead of in a library or on a desktop. Furthermore, that real external world can be linked, on a point-to-point basis, to a 3D virtual world (or worlds) hosted on the internet. In a brain-boggling presentation given at the Serious Virtual Worlds conference at Coventry University Fabrio Cardinali of Giunti Labs outlined some of implications of this revolution for learning (yes, we will not only have Web 3.0, but also E-learning 3.0). A student visiting a museum who is studying Leonardo Da Vinci (well, it had to be an Italian) could automatically have exhibit-relevant information pushed to their web-enabled mobile device depending on where they were in the museum. Related works in the same museum could be referenced which might be in a different gallery or on a different floor – a 3D representation of the museum will give directions. The information, already liberated from its current constraints as described above, now also gains extra potencies for personalisation in the shape of location awareness and context awareness. In ways like this, Web 3.0 will intensify an already existing trend in learning toward personalisation, and away from formal, top-down, course-led training. It also promises to mitigate one of the less attractive features of e-learning, as it is often perceived: the threat that learners will be increasingly tied to computer screens. Virtual worlds, or the 3D Internet, is another strand in Web 3.0, and an important one. Google Earth, which has already photographed the surface of the earth in two dimensions, is now going 3D – and you don’t need funny glasses to view it. Take a look if you haven’t been there for a while: Manhattan is no longer just a flat plan of streets whose names remind you of Bob Dylan songs: a familiar, gap-toothed skyline is rising from the grid. Firemen rushing to a fire in one of these buildings will one day have 3D virtual models to guide them in fighting fires. And fears are already being raised about the human rights implications of being able to link sat-nav-style location awareness to a photo-accurate virtual model of the world, with individual profile information added. Jesus might not be watching you, but Google soon will. And it won’t just be Google, but marketing professionals, and other species of robbers. The hairs of your head might not be numbered but your bank accounts are. Timescales So how far away is it, this next paradigm shift for the Web? 5-10 years says Nigel Shadbolt, a professor who teaches artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton. Academics, Gurus and Journalists might make educated (or in some cases quite uneducated) guesses, but venture capitalists have to put serious time-locked money behind those bets - and investment is beginning to flow into Semantic Web ventures. 3i has financed two such early-stage companies this year, both in Britain (Europe leads the world in semantic Web research). “I believe the semantic Web will be profound,” says Patrick Sheehan, a partner in 3i Investments, in the same Herald Tribune article. “In time, it will be as obvious as the Web seems obvious to us today.”
John Helmer
|
