Web 3.0

Just in case you missed it, the web now has version numbers. Nearly three years ago, amid continued hand-wringing over the dot-com crash, a man named Dale Dougherty dreamed up something called Web 2.0, and the idea soon took on a life of its own. In the beginning, it was little more than a rallying cry, a belief that the Internet would rise again. But as Dougherty's O'Reilly Media put together the first Web 2.0 Conference in late 2005, the term seemed to trumpet a particular kind of online revolution, a World Wide Web of the people.

Web 2.0 came to describe almost any site, service, or technology that promoted sharing and collaboration right down to the Net's grass roots. That includes blogs and wikis, tags and RSS feeds, del.icio.us and Flickr, MySpace and YouTube. Because the concept blankets so many disparate ideas, some have questioned how meaningful—and how useful—it really is, but there's little doubt it owns a spot in our collective consciousness. Whether or not it makes sense, we now break the history of the Web into two distinct stages: Today we have Web 2.0, and before that there was Web 1.0.
Which raises the question: What will Web 3.0 look like?
Yes, it's too early to say for sure. In many ways, even Web 2.0 is a work in progress. But it goes without saying that new Net technologies are always under development—inside universities, think tanks, and big corporations, as much as Silicon Valley start-ups—and blogs are already abuzz with talk of the Web's next generation.

The problem is that a complete reannotation of the Web is a massive undertaking. "The Semantic Web is a good-news, bad-news thing," says R. David Lankes, an associate professor at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies. "You get the ability to do all these very complex queries, but it takes a tremendous amount of time and metadata to make that happen."
To many, Web 3.0 is something called the Semantic Web, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the (first) World Wide Web. In essence, the Semantic Web is a place where machines can read Web pages much as we humans read them, a place where search engines and software agents can better troll the Net and find what we're looking for. "It's a set of standards that turns the Web into one big database," says Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, one of the leading voices of this new-age Internet.
But some are skeptical about whether the Semantic Web—or at least, Berners-Lee's view of it—will actually take hold. They point to other technologies capable of reinventing the online world as we know it, from 3D virtual worlds to Web-connected bathroom mirrors. Web 3.0 could mean many things, and for Netheads, every single one is a breathtaking proposition.

Tim, Lucy, and The Semantic Web The Semantic Web isn't a new idea. This notion of a Web where machines can better read, understand, and process all that data floating through cyberspace—a concept many refer to as Web 3.0—first entered the public consciousness in 2001, when a story appeared in Scientific American. Coauthored by Berners-Lee, the article describes a world in which software "agents" perform Web-based tasks we often struggle to complete on our own.

The article begins with an imaginary girl named Lucy, whose mother has just been told by her doctor that she needs to see a specialist. "At the doctor's office, Lucy instructed her Semantic Web agent through her handheld Web browser," we read. "The agent promptly retrieved information about Mom's prescribed treatment from the doctor's agent, looked up several lists of providers, and checked for the ones in-plan for Mom's insurance within a 20-mile radius of her home and with a rating of excellent on trusted rating services."
That's quite a mouthful, but it only begins to describe Berners-Lee's vision of a future Web. Lucy's Semantic Web agent can also check potential appointment times against her mother's busy schedule, reschedule other appointments if need be, and more—all on its own, without help from Lucy. And Lucy is just one example. A Semantic Web agent could be programmed to do almost anything, from automatically booking your next vacation to researching a term paper.
How will this actually work? In Berners-Lee's view, it involves a reannotation of the Web, adding all sorts of machine-readable metadata to the human-readable Web pages we use today (see "Questions of Semantics," opposite). Six years after the Scientific American article, official standards describing this metadata are in place—including the Recourse Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL)—and they're already trickling into real-world sites, services, and other tools. -Semantic Web metadata underpins Yahoo!'s new food site. Spivack's Radar Networks is building a kind of Semantic Web portal. A development platform, Jena, is in the works at HP. And you'll find Semantic Web structures in Oracle's Spatial database tool.

The problem is that a complete reannotation of the Web is a massive undertaking. "The Semantic Web is a good-news, bad-news thing," says R. David Lankes, an associate professor at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies. "You get the ability to do all these very complex queries, but it takes a tremendous amount of time and metadata to make that happen."