Collaborating Using Web 3.0

Mid 204 Dale Dougherty dreamed up the Web 2.0 concept. Web 2.0, the social web was about consumers sharing content and ideas.

Web 2.0 included almost any site, service, or technology that promoted sharing and collaboration: blogs and wikis, tags and RSS feeds, del.icio.us and Flickr, MySpace and YouTube.

The Web 2.0 concept blankets so many disparate ideas, it serves little more than a reality in our collective consciousness.

Whilst Web 2.0 is still very much 'work in progress', technology platform developments are already heralding Web 3.0 and beyond.

Web 3.0 Semantic Web

Web 3.0 is often called the Semantic Web, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the first World Wide Web.

The Semantic Web is a set of standards that uses machines to read Web pages and search engines and software agents to troll the Net to find what we're looking for. Web 3.0 effectively turns the Web into one big database.

A semantic web agent does more than just search out solutions to your problems. It can be programmed to do almost anything. Ask your machine to check your schedule against the schedules of all the dentists and doctors within a 10-mile radius—and it obeys.

Web 3.0 Standards

Web 3.0 requires a reannotation of the Web, adding all sorts of machine-readable metadata to the human-readable Web pages used today. Official Web 3.0 standards describing this metadata are in place:

• Recourse Description Framework (RDF)
• Web Ontology Language (OWL)

These standards are already being adopted into real-world sites, services, and other tools. - Semantic Web metadata underpins Yahoo!'s new food site.

Such a complete reannotation of the Web is a massive undertaking and will underpin the rollout and success of Web 3.0 To resolve this, developers are instead building smarter software agents that can better understand Web pages as they exist today.

Web 3.0 Applied

BlueOrganizer from AdaptiveBlue is a good example of Web3.0 in use. When you visit a Web page, this browser plug-in can understand what the page is about, automatically retrieving related information from other sites and services. If you visit a movie blog, for instance, it immediately links to sites where you can buy or rent that film. Whilst this may not appear far from Amazons Contextual Product Recommendations, its a long way from agents being able to think on their own.

Tags are a first step towards making pages more intelligent to machines. Semantic, or meaning, can be clarifed by the publisher to place the information in a close contextual boundary. But with so many words spelt the same, having distinctly different meanings, tags are limited in use for semantic web.

Keyword phrases are also assisting - as we move beyond single keyword searches toward multi-word natural-language queries. Multiple words tend to add context to the individual words.

New companies such as Powerset and TextDigger are working toward this aim; working on semantic search engines based on the open-source academic project WordNet.

Beyond Word Based Searches

As we move into full multimedia domains, searches based on words are fast becoming outmoded. Search also needs to encompass images, space and sound. 3D Web, a Web you can walk through as an extension of the "virtual worlds" concept is already being trialled in online shopping malls and expos, real estate walk-throughs and Google Earth.

3D Virtual Entertainment

Second Life and There.com are both using this capability in an entertainment world that is driving big business. Many view this a inappropriate for non-entertainment uses of the Web; seeing such alternate universea as merely a re-creation of our existing world, and not an expansion of it.

Media Search

In reality, they are right - 3D doesn't enhance 2D words, pictures, and video to give us full media search. Companies like Ojos and Polar Rose are working to reinvent media search

Three new services—image-crunchers Like.com and Polar Rose, and music-matchmaker Pandora—have already taken the first steps toward this new breed of media search.

Like.com is a shopping engine, where you can select a photo of a product that best represents what you're looking for, and the service shows all sorts of similar products. It is a good proof-of-concept for semantic search.

Polar Rose browser plug-in uses face recognition with any photo posted to any Web site. This currently just means tagging images automatically—much like Riya, but unlike Riya, Polar Rose already works across the entire Net.

Pandora does a similar thing with audio. The Music Genome Project, started in 2000, has analyzed songs from over 10,000 artists, notating the music makeup of each track. Using this data and a list of your favorite artists, Pandora can instantly construct a new collection of songs that suit your tastes.

Ojos and Polar Rose are tackling the image side of the problem. Last spring, Ojos unveiled a Web-based photo-sharing tool called Riya, which automatically tags your pictures using face recognition. Ojos quickly realized that the Riya face-rec engine—which also identifies objects and words—could be used for Web-wide image search.

Pervasive Web

Pervasive Web, a Web that's everywhere. The Web already extends beyond the desktop, to cell phones and handhelds, and will in time, extend into our everyday surroundings.

MIT Media Lab is already working on web integrated bathroom mirrors to provide news updates and entertainment.

Institute for the Future envisions the Web automating much of what goes on in the home. Your windows, for instance, could automatically open when the weather changes.

In Collaboration

Many companies, from HP and Yahoo! to Radar Networks, are adopting official Semantic Web standards. Polar Rose and Ojos are improving image search. Google and Microsoft are moving toward 3D.

Next Versions

Net marketing guru, Seth Godin envisions Web 4.0 as tighter online connections to friends, family, and colleagues. Using profiles on each person, their activities and scheduled exchanges with each other, it can co-ordinate your life with theirs, automatically. Of course, this is a totally concentual action, but it does provide businesses with instand alert of contacts in other businesses already dealing with persons in your business etc.

Web 4 will bring horizontal relationships and vertical relationships between different entities into a mesh of interconnectivity that will provide meaning and context to every action we initiate.

In summary, where previously we mined the Net based on data, Web 3.0 will enable us to mine the Web based on meaning. Will this give marketers, among others, the ability to identify, understand and manipulate us - without our knowledge or awareness?

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