Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve have been worried about the US Dollar. So what? We have seen some relatively small currency changes in the world of banking. In the world of techno-marketing there is serious inflation.
We were just getting used to the fact that a bright idea to help collaboration between academic researchers had blossomed into the massive public information resource and engine for e-commerce that the World-wide Web is today, when people started speaking about Web 2.0. This topic came up on day 2 of The Open Group conference in San Diego last week, as I reported in my last blog. Then, on day 3, I heard talk of web 3.0. The hype-dollar is clearly depreciating, and at a rate of several thousand percent.
So what does it all mean? The basic Web enables you to interact with any information source anywhere in the world. Web 2.0 adds to this the ability to mix and match information sources on a single page - a so-called mashup. You can choose what you want from your favourite websites and arrange it to suit your individual taste and needs. Commercial organisations can combine and package information from their suppliers on their pages, providing a high-level virtual shop-front, as pioneered by Amazon. An architectural framework for this is becoming established, and there is a growing set of tools to support the web developer.
And now we have the idea of Web 3.0. This adds semantics and intelligent agents, so that information can be found and assembled through its meaning. Suppose you are interested in standards for open systems (well, some of us are). You want a web page that shows you the latest trends, so you create a mashup with information from W3C, the IETF, OASIS, OMG, and The Open Group. This is fine, but you have to know that these are the organisations of interest to you in order to create the page. If another interesting source of information emerges then it doesn't get added automatically - you have to identify it and program it in. With the semantic capabilities of web 3.0, you will just need to say what your interests are. The intelligent agents will find the relevant sites, and detect and add new ones automatically as they emerge.
Talking of semantics, whatever happened to the Semantic Web? When Sir Tim Berners-Lee announced this as the wonderful new thing that the Web would become, nobody understood him. We saw the value of his original idea for the Web, and we took his new idea on trust. Commercial realisation has not yet happened, but there is a flourishing community of academics and commercial researchers that is pursuing the Semantic Web. The key standards, RDF and OWL, are established. There is a growing body of software - often open-source - that is based on them. Learning how to use them effectively is turning out to be difficult. But some developers are learning and, as they do, the concepts of the Semantic Web will have a growing effect on the commercial Web.
Web 3.0, if it happens, will be a part of that effect. Meaning is about connections between things. The family pet that I played with as a child, the tigers that I saw at the zoo, all the cats of whatever shape or description that I have ever seen are connected in my mind with the word "cat". Similarly, the Semantic Web can connect all web resources to do with cats with an RDF statement identifying "cat" as a resource. A Frenchman would connect in his mind the cats that he had seen with the word "chat". The French-English dictionary connects the French word "chat" with the English word "cat", so that French and English people can understand each other. Similarly, using OWL, the semantic Web can define connections between concepts, enabling communication between different communities of web users. Intelligent agents can follow these connections, and process information on the web by its meaning. This is the promise of Web 3.0.
But will it happen? Computers and people process information in different ways. Computers are good at handling things that are precise and unambiguous, such as numbers. People are good at handling things that are fuzzy. In James Baldwin's Another Country, Belle tells Vivaldo, "You're a real groovy cat;" but she is talking to a human, not a feline. People can easily cope with this kind of ambiguity, but computers find it hard. Perhaps with more processing power and faster networks than we have today, and with development of more advanced software techniques, they will cope better. For now, we will be wise not to expect too much from semantic computing.
We should at least get enough that Web 3.0 will deliver significant improvements, and enhance our web experience. Progress towards truly intelligent computing is gradual. This will be another step. If, after many further steps, we can achieve really effective semantic processing, the effect will be revolutionary. Computers will handle human language, with all its absurdities and inconsistencies. The web will provide all the information you can ask for - and perhaps even information that you want or need but don't know how to ask for.
When this happens, the hype-dollar will have to be re-valued. Web 3.0? In future terms, this could be worth only about Web 1.03.
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