Web 3.0 – Creating a more intelligent Web
Last week I attended the Web 3.0 conference in NYC put on by MediaBistro. It is my job to keep my finger on the pulse of new technology and trends and this event gave me an interesting perspective on the status of Web 3.0.
What is Web 3.0?
In the Web 1.0 phase of the web people mostly publish read only websites with very little interaction.
Web 2.0 opened up the doors for us to creating read and write content, where publishers could publish data and users could interact with the data by commenting with text, voice, or video (Blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook)
Web 3.0 is about creating a more “intelligent” Web. It is a way for us to tell computers how to take the enormous amount of data that already exists and each of us generate on a daily basis and deliver it to us in a more meaningful and usable way. Web 3.0 promises to take away the repetitive tasks that machines can do at a fraction of the speed, and enable people to do what is uniquely human… to simplify and humanize our online experience.
Web 3.0 is a collection of technologies that consist of the semantic web, linked data, natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence, mashups, & APIs. Regardless of the specific technology the core idea behind Web 3.0 is that when your information is organized you can extract much more meaningful and actionable insight from that information.
Real World Uses for Web 3.0
- Finding relevant information fast – When you look for anything, 90% of your search is wasted on looking through the wrong info. Wolfram|Alpha is attempting to solve the search problem. It is not a search engine but a “computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.”
- Serving Contextual Ads – Peer39 uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to look at the structure of a sentence and interpret word meaning. It’s semantic text analysis relies on synonyms and relationships between concepts, rather than just keyword search.
- Connect better with friends – Glue, developed by Adaptive Blue, enables you to connect with your friends on the web around the things you visit online. Glue is powered by semantic recognition technology that automatically identifies books, music, movies, wines, stocks, movie stars, recording artists, and more. Glue works hard to make it easy for you to find out what your friends think about things you’re visiting online.
- Share knowledge and information – Twine is built on the semantic web technologies and it’s aim is to connect people with each other “for a purpose”…it’s sole purpose is to share and organize information you’re interested in.
- Simplify tasks at hand – Ubiquity is an extension for Firefox, that empowers users to control the web browser with language-based instructions and allow everyone (not just Web developers) to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing. Watch the great demo video on how it works.
- There are many more companies that are at the forefront of leveraging the Web 3.0 technologies.
The challenges of Web 3.0
- Creating structuring data – unfortunately, the first step in making Web 3.0 a reality is in the web developer hands. Web developers have to start using RDFa and Microformats to “mark up human-readable data with machine-readable indicators for browsers and other programs to interpret” (get more info about the differences between RDFa and microformats ). During his presentation at the conference, Aza Raskin, head of User experience of Mozilla Labs, stated that “we have the chicken and the egg problem”…we know RDFa & microformats are good but no one uses them because there are very few use cases right now for the general public to widely adapt the practice and use cases can’t be created until the public starts to mark up their data.
- Sharing Data across the Web – Another challenge that we are facing is convincing organizations to share their data so it can be re-used in a more functional way. In the Web 3.0 world, content developers have to get over the notion that users have to come to their website to get the information they need.
- User Interfaces – Deciding the best way to display the massive amounts of data in a usable and meaningful way will be challenge for all of us and we will all have to experiment with what works best. One of the ways to solve this problem is to open your application code to users via an API and let the users decide how they want to consume your data by developing their own interfaces for the devices of their choice.
- Indexing and Scaling all the data – The semantic web will not happen any time in the near future because of scale…the technology is just not there and right now it’s impossible to index all of the content from all of the people creating content in the world.
Web 3.0 is still in it’s infancy and we still have a lot of challenges that need to be solved. According to Peter Sweeney, Founder & CTO of Primal fusion, in order to push Web 3.0 through we have to have another “industrial revolution”….”In 1996 Web 1.0 was just about getting us online. Web 2.0 was revolutionary. Getting consumers involved in content was absurd until companies started doing it”.
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Nice article with good information and presentation