Are You Ready for Web 3.0, the Semantic Web?

The next iteration of the web will enable individuals to evaluate information. Web 1.0 allowed us to have read access to info. Web 2.0 is about communication, collaboration, and community-driven content development via blogs, wikis, and social networks. The next phase of the Internet has been identified as the Semantic Web. Semantic Web will supposedly turn the Web into one large application; yet, the journey is fraught with challenges.

Semantics is the meaning or interpretation of language, communication, or other information. The Semantic Web is about deriving meaning from the data on the Internet. The goal is to be able to make the information on the Internet machine-readable. Ideally, this would call for “tagging” all of the information on the web using predefined standards. There are several companies that are currently using semantic web technologies including: Hakia and Evri, semantic search engines; Powerset, a semantic search engine for Wikipedia articles; and, Twine, a knowledge networking application.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has created standards for Semantic Web and is working towards the goal of a machine-readable web. Tim-Berners-Lee, the Director of W3C, mentioned in a recent interview that the task of getting the Web’s data into the W3C’s standard language is difficult – particularly because a lot of the data resides in databases.

Google has a product called Base that encourages users to document information ranging from recipes to possessions using either an interactive form or XML. What is the motivation for submitting this information? There is none. Moreover, the W3C standards are even complicated for scientists and engineers to implement. There are more difficulties that must be overcome in the effort to build the semantic web from the bottom up.

The bottom-up approach to building the Semantic Web is inefficient. It sounds like boiling the ocean to make a cup of tea. The Pareto Principle could be put to good use here. Individuals and organizations would get 80% of their utility from only 20% of the data. We don’t need new standards with googols of tagged data – we need to figure out how to develop new tools and capabilities that leverage the existing architecture of the web to provide added value to individuals and businesses. Web 3.0 should actually be about making the right data available so that users can execute applications that evaluate information.