WEB 3.0

Web 3.0

There are many views of what web 3.0 is, what it would be like and what would make it possible. Without disputing any of the many views, I would like to add that, what I see for the fast approaching future of the web, web 3.0, is what I would like to call “the Active Web”.

Definition

By “the Active Web”, I intend to describe how the web would become more or less personified, possessing inherent capabilities to actively interact with people and for people, when all the technologies required for realizing web 3.0 are fully explored and the multi-vision web 3.0 completely materializes.

An example of such maturity can be observed from the current state of web 2.0 now; at its peak of functionality and relevance with the evidences of; web communities, user generated contents, web syndication, “state-full web transactions on the stateless web protocols” etc.

When it finally arrives, the web would be able to perform intelligent and useful actions with little or no supervision, and it will be able to learn new trends, accumulate knowledge and exhibit even greater and more useful smartness. At this stage, the web would be richly endowed with smart protocols and applications capable of analyzing and completing intelligent user tasks with the help of enabling technologies such as embedded sensors on the hardware side, and ontologies on the software side, for example.

Such knowledge gathering for effective representation and efficient role-playing would be possible seeing that the web is one such rich data warehouse housing nearly everything one could ever think of… “in one way or the other”… think of the readily available user preference statements or some sort of profiles, user web-behaviors or browsing patterns, user generated and professional contents etc the fact is the web is content rich such that useful content analysis for intelligent behaviors is possible come web 3.0.

The general characteristic of web 3.0 is that it will make life for web patrons a lot much easier and entertaining while being very robust and intelligent in solving user needs. This will be possible by shifting attention and expertise (systems design and development) much closer to human language and behaviors, in other words, human intelligence; immediately understanding and inferring user intent and making suitable and friendly suggestions, eliminating unnecessary and boring “usually-required” user interactions, thereby completing tasks much faster, more intelligently and granting the user more satisfaction and relaxation.

For example, a search could accept any level of complexity in the “search description” and return only the most relevant hit(s) only, eliminating less useful and out-of-context hits. Or, enabled mail clients and email services that are able to filter and analyze the usefulness of messages from all incoming messages and act accordingly. A user could even be alerted in some cases, depending on the real situation with a mail, since user’s often also can connect with their mobile phones. These and many more smartness and proactivity would be witnessed in the era of web 3.0.

The vision is, since web 2.0 is able to allow users personal presence on the web through web communities, blog sites etc, given some significant improvements and inventions, evolution to a new web experience is generally feasible. That is, we may come to a state where the web becomes very familiar with its users and possibly learn certain of their behaviors to be able to make certain suggestions to them and/or decisions for them. The former is common place on the present web. The later might not be that evident, but with the full materialization of web 3.0, the activeness of the web would be quite visible.

The necessary technological enablers required for this experience are numerous and non-exhaustive as still many are yet to be determined.

The most basic of these enablers include: -

Ø                  Content definition and representation technologies such as XML: with appropriate content definition and representation such as metadata, web 3.0 agents are able to uniquely identify and analyze web contents for better reactions such as discriminate retrieval etc.

Ø                  Ontology Definitions: defining meaning and relationships between data and data elements about the many subjects on the web. Web Ontology Language (OWL): allows relationships to be inferred between data that is stored in different parts of the same application.

Ø                  More agile protocols, intelligent or smart devices etc