Web 3.0 Seminar_Report

8/7/2019 Web 3.0 Seminar_Report

1/29

WEB 3.0 - EVOLUTION AND LEVERAGING OF

SEMANTIC WEB

DHANANJAYA KT

1MJ06CS029

8th

SEM,CSE,MVJCE,BLR-67

Abstract-- Web 3.0 is a term that has beencoined with different meanings to describe theevolution of Web usage and interaction among

several separate paths. These include

transforming the Web into a database, a movetowards making content accessible by multiple

non-browser applications, the leveraging of

artificial intelligence technologies, the Semanticweb, or the Geospatial Web. Before going for

the web 3.0 first lets glance the overview ofwhat are the weak points of web 1.0 & web 2.0.

The Semantic Web is an evolvingdevelopment of the World Wide Web in whichthe meaning (semantics) of information and

services on the web is defined, making it

possible for the web to "understand" and satisfythe requests of people and machines to use the

web content. It derives from World Wide WebConsortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee'svision of the Web as a universal medium for

data, information, and knowledge exchange.

At its core, the semantic web comprises a

set of design principles, collaborative working

groups, and a variety of enabling technologies.Some elements of the semantic web are

expressed as prospective future possibilities thatare yet to be implemented or realized. Otherelements of the semantic web are expressed in

formal specifications. Some of these include

XML, XML Schema, Resource Description

Frameworkits a variety of data interchange

formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples),

and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) andthe Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of

which are intended to provide a formal

description of concepts, terms, and relationships

within a given knowledge domain.

INTRODUCTION

Just when were all getting comfortable withthe hyper-connected world of Web 2.0, the nextwave of technologies collectively known as

Web3.0 will transform communications andpublicrelations once again. An intelligent Web3.0will expand and energize todays social-media conversation, providing the meaning,background and context of any question orconversation. It will dramatically acceleratecommunication, increase the productivity of PRprofessionals and enhance knowledge transferand understanding in ways that willrevolutionize every information-basedcommunication business. Why should we care?Because in short order Web 3.0 will start to

influence how we all do our jobs. New ways offinding and sharing information are alreadymaking previous media research, contact andmonitoring tools look antiquated. And newintelligent measurement technologies soon willrequire all marketing and PR professionals tostart demonstrating quantifiable return-on-investment (ROI). Communicators who fail tomaster the new Web 3.0 tools or learn to speak


2/29

the quantitative and analytic language ofbusiness will rapidly fall behind. This CisionWhite Paper will tell you what you need to knowabout the new environment by answering thecritical question, What is Web 3.0 and whatdoes it mean to me? The Third Generation of

the Web The first generation of the web, fromabout 1990 to 2000, was characterized by staticHTML web sites and early search engines suchas Yahoo and Altavista. The second phase, from2000 to the present, has seen the rise of Googleand the Web 2.0 social media revolution. In theWeb 3.0 era, social media will vastly increaseconnections and conversation, and searchengines will become more intelligent by an orderof magnitude. Today, search algorithms identifydocuments on the web containing key words. Inthe next generation, all the data within those

documents will be identified, mined, linked andpresented to provide specific answers to thesearchers questions. Natural-languagesemantic queries will provide exact answers toyour questions, backed up by information thatexplains the answers Tim Berners-Lee, thecomputer scientist credited with inventing theWorld Wide Web, has said Web 3.0technologies will become capable of analyzingall the data on the Web the content, links, andtransactions between people and computers. ASemantic Web, which should make this

possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, theday-today mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy andour daily lives will be handled by machinestalking to machines. CommunicationIntelligence = Intelligent Communication Web3.0 will automate and manage most of todaystime-consuming tactical work, freeingcommunication professionals to use mediaintelligence more strategically and productively.It will put more and better intelligence at yourfingertips, dramatically increasing youreffectiveness in situations where good

informationespecially the ability to access andleverage it in real timeequals power. TheOpenCalais project (www.OpenCalais.com) isalready doing just that. Open Calais goes beyondkey words by tagging all the data within web-based documents, providing information,context and insight into them. By linking all thecontextual data in millions of documents in amassive public database, Open Calais is

providing the foundation for the next generationof intelligent search. It will enable faster andbetter real-time understanding of issues, newsand the media environment that PRprofessionals must navigate as they deliver morestrategic counsel and results. Web 3.0 will also

revolutionize monitoring and trend analysis. Inthe Web 1.0 era, trend analysis consisted mainlyof looking at numbers of clicks, impressions andvisitors. Todays Web 2.0 toolssuch as theRadian6 monitoring engine integrated intoCisions social media dashboard go beyondtraffic measurement to assess and analyzeconversation and engagement levels. They rankthe influence of organizations and individualsbased on the number of web-based commentsthey attract, on the number of other sitesproviding links to them, and on other social-

engagement metrics. Web 3.0 will extend thesecapabilities into real-time monitoring andanalysis, ranking the influence and importanceof individuals, ideas, issues, organizations andthe web sites where they reside.

In the past 20 years, the Web hasdeveloped from a niche technology to a mass-media providing new forms of communicationand interaction between people. Web 1.0 was atechnical platform a common set of protocols

and formats that allowed machines tocommunicate and present information from aremote server to a local user. Web 2.0 used thetechnical platform of Web 1.0 to build moreinteractive web sites where users contribute andshare content and become creators and ownersof content rather than passive consumers.

Web 2.0 has reached the limits of what can beachieved on the technical platform of Web 1.0;new technologies must be put in place to providea fundamentally new technical infrastructure, or

platform, to enable the next generation ofinnovative web applications. Key to this Web3.0 platform is a set of protocols and formatsthat allow the communication of subjects andpeople's perceptions of those subjects betweencomputers, and that enable new applications tobe built that allow users to create, share andintegrate information and knowledge seamlessly.


3/29

The new Web platform will no longer beabout using a browser window to retrieveinformation from one server and then fromanother server. Nor will this platform be basedon portals or search engines that provide us withlinks to pages. The new Web will be based on

applications that bring us relevant informationfrom all across the Internet and bind it togetherfor us, presenting us with our own personal viewcreated from semantic structures taken fromsources we trust and new sources we want toexplore. This platform will also allow us to seeauthoritative content from trusted sourcesalongside commentary from our peers and willenable us to contribute to debate and form newsocial networks focused around the subjects andsemantic structures we are interested in.

Imagine an application that knows all aboutmusic. It knows about all the great composersand their works, it knows about theperformances of those works and the recordingsof them, it knows about every gig that theBeatles ever played and it knows about all thefuture gigs of all the Beatles tribute bands outthere, including the ones in you area in the nextmonth.

Not only that but it is able to connect you toother classical-music-loving Beatles fans out

there so that you can discuss your sharedpassions, and it is able to act as a channel,constantly receiving updates from all around theWeb so that any time you return to that aspect ofyour life you can instantly see what is happeningaround the world in that area. It also acts as abroadcast channel on which our own comments,thoughts and new insights can be made availableto anyone who is interested and which doesn'trely on artificial measures of popularity such aslinks in and out of pages.

In the rest of this paper we discuss the basicconcepts of the Web 3.0 platform. Rememberthat we are talking about the technical platformfor a new generation of web applications, we canonly start to guess at the applications that couldresult from a combination of the platform we areproposing and the creative genius of webdevelopers everywhere.

WEB 3.0

Definition- Highly specialized informationsilos, moderated by a cult of personality,validated by the community, and put into context

with the inclusion of meta-data through widgets

Web 3.0 Basics

Internet experts think Web 3.0 is going to belike having a personal assistant who knowspractically everything about you and can accessall the information on the Internet to answer anyquestion. Many compare Web 3.0 to a giantdatabase. While Web 2.0 uses the Internet tomake connections between people, Web 3.0 will

use the Internet to make connections withinformation. Some experts see Web 3.0replacing the current Web while others believe it

will exist as a separate network.

It's easier to get the concept with an example.

Let's say that you're thinking about going on a

vacation. You want to go someplace warm and

tropical. You have set aside a budget of $3,000

for your trip. You want a nice place to stay, but

you don't want it to take up too much of your

budget. You also want a good deal on a flight.

With the Web technology currently availableto you, you'd have to do a lot of research to findthe best vacation options. You'd need to researchpotential destinations and decide which one isright for you. You might visit two or threediscount travel sites and compare rates forflights and hotel rooms. You'd spend a lot ofyour time looking through results on varioussearch engine results pages. The entire process

could take several hours.

According to ome Internet experts, with Web3.0 you'll be able to sit back and let the Internetdo all the work for you. You could use a searchservice and narrow the parameters of yoursearch. The browser program then gathers,analyzes and presents the data to you in a waythat makes comparison a snap. It can do this


4/29

because Web 3.0 will be able to understand

information on the Web.

Right now, when you use a Web searchengine, the engine isn't able to really understandyour search. It looks for Web pages that contain

the keywords found in your search terms. Thesearch engine can't tell if the Web page isactually relevant for your search. It can only tellthat the keyword appears on the Web page. Forexample, if you searched for the term "Saturn,"you'd end up with results for Web pages about

the planet and others about the car manufacturer.

A Web 3.0 search engine could find not onlythe keywords in your search, but also interpretthe context of your request. It would returnrelevant results and suggest other content related

to your search terms. In our vacation example, ifyou typed "tropical vacation destinations under$3,000" as a search request, the Web 3.0browser might include a list of fun activities orgreat restaurants related to the search results. Itwould treat the entire Internet as a massive

database of information available for any query.

Web 3.0 Approaches

You never know how future technology willeventually turn out. In the case of Web 3.0, mostInternet experts agree about its general traits.They believe that Web 3.0 will provide userswith richer and more relevant experiences. Manyalso believe that with Web 3.0, every user willhave a unique Internet profile based on thatuser's browsing history. Web 3.0 will use thisprofile to tailor the browsing experience to eachindividual. That means that if two differentpeople each performed an Internet search withthe same keywords using the same service,they'd receive different results determined by

their individual profiles.

The technologies and software required forthis kind of application aren't yet mature.Services like TiVO and Pandora provideindividualized content based on user input, butthey both rely on a trial-and-error approach thatisn't as efficient as what the experts say Web 3.0will be. More importantly, both TiVO and

Pandora have a limited scope -- television showsand music, respectively -- whereas Web 3.0 willInvolve all the information on the Internet.

Some experts believe that the foundation forWeb 3.0 will be application programming

interfaces (APIs). An API is an interfacedesigned to allow developers to createapplications that take advantage of a certain setof resources. Many Web 2.0 sites include APIsthat give programmers access to the sites' uniquedata and capabilities. For example, Facebook'sAPI allows developers to create programs thatuse Facebook as a staging ground for games,quizzes, product reviews and more.

One Web 2.0 trend that could help thedevelopment of Web 3.0 is the mashup. A

mashup is the combination of two or moreapplications into a single application. Forexample, a developer might combine a programthat lets users review restaurants with GoogleMaps. The new mashup application could shownot only restaurant reviews, but also map themout so that the user could see the restaurants'locations. Some Internet experts believe thatcreating mashups will be so easy in Web 3.0 thatanyone will be able to do it.

Paul Otellini, CEO and President of Intel,

discusses the increasing importance of mobile

devices on the Web at the 2008 International

Consumer Electronics Show.

Here are just a few:

y According to technology expert andentrepreneur Nova Spivack, thedevelopment of the Web moves in 10-year cycles. In the Web's first decade,

most of the development focused on theback end, or infrastructure, of the Web.Programmers created the protocols andcode languages we use to make Webpages. In the second decade, focusshifted to the front end and the era ofWeb 2.0 began. Now people use Webpages as platforms for other


5/29

applications. They also create mashupsand experiment with ways to make Webexperiences more interactive. We're atthe end of the Web 2.0 cycle now. Thenext cycle will be Web 3.0, and thefocus will shift back to the back end.

Programmers will refine the Internet'sinfrastructure to support the advancedcapabilities of Web 3.0 browsers. Oncethat phase ends, we'll enter the era ofWeb 4.0. Focus will return to the frontend, and we'll see thousands of newprograms that use Web 3.0 as a

foundation [source: Nova Spivack].

y The Web will evolve into a three-dimensional environment. Rather than aWeb 3.0, we'll see a Web 3D.

Combining virtual reality elements withthe persistent online worlds of massivelymultiplayer online roleplaying games(MMORPGs), the Web could become adigital landscape that incorporates theillusion of depth. You'd navigate theWeb either from a first-personperspective or through a digitalrepresentation of yourself called anavatar (to learn more about an avatar'sperspective, read How the Avatar

Machine Works).

y The Web will build on developments indistributed computing and lead to trueartificial intelligence. In distributedcomputing, several computers tackle alarge processing job. Each computerhandles a small part of the overall task.Some people believe the Web will beable to think by distributing theworkload across thousands of computersand referencing deep ontologies. TheWeb will become a giant brain capable

of analyzing data and extrapolating newideas based off of that information.

y The Web will extend far beyondcomputers and cell phones. Everythingfrom watches to television sets toclothing will connect to the Internet.Users will have a constant connection to

the Web, and vice versa. Each user'ssoftware agent will learn more about itsrespective user by electronicallyobserving his or her activities. Thismight lead to debates about the balancebetween individual privacy and the

benefit of having a personalized Webbrowsing experience.

y The Web will merge with other forms ofentertainment until all distinctionsbetween the forms of media are lost.Radio programs, television shows andfeature films will rely on the Web as adelivery system.

It's too early to tell which (if any) of these futureversions of the Web will come true. It may be

that the real future of the Web is even moreextravagant than the most extreme predictions.We can only hope that by the time the future ofthe Web gets here, we can all agree on what to

call it.

The net effect - Web Sites become Web

Services

Here is an illustration of the net effect of apps

like Dapper and Teqlo:

So bringing together Open APIs (like theAmazon E-Commerce service) andscraping/mashup technologies, gives us a way totreat any web site as a web service that exposesits information. The information, or to be more


6/29

exact the data, becomes open. In turn, thisenables software to take advantage of thisinformation collectively. With that, the Webtruly becomes a database that can be queried and

remixed.

Why Web Sites should offer Web Services

There are several good reasons why WebSites (online retailers in particular), should thinkabout offering an API. The most importantreason is control. Having an API will makescrapers unnecessary, but it will also allowtracking of who is using the data - as well ashow and why. Like Amazon, sites can do this ina way that fosters affiliates and drives the trafficback to their sites.

The old perception is that closed data is acompetitive advantage. The new reality is thatopen data is a competitive advantage. Thelikely solution then is to stop worrying aboutprotecting information and instead start chargingfor it, by offering an API. Having a small fee perAPI call (think Amazon Web Services) is likelyto be acceptable, since the cost for any givensubscriber of the service is not going to be high.But there is a big opportunity to make money onvolume. This is what Amazon is betting on withtheir Web Services strategy and it is probably a

good bet.

Seeking Information

The web as it is now uses keywords in orderto aggregate data into usable chunks. Searchengines index the internet en masse and presentit to the end user in order of relevance. They

determine relevance by using complexalgorithms. Web 2.0 brought us a change in thebasic way that we search, tagging. With taggingyou could describe anything as anything andsearch for items in a fashion that is more in line

with the way people really look for things.

Web 3.0 will take this one step further. If youare searching for information on Cars, forexample, you would use the search engine asyou normally would, but your results would bemore specialized subengines. I would find BMWSearch or Kia Search. From there, I would beable to dig deeper and find items that have beentagged as relating to BMW and sort them intotheir major categories (pictures, videos, blogposts, news articles, commerce etc) Each ofthese could be captured as an RSS feed so that Ican be alerted when something new is added to

by search profile.

The way the engines would order these itemswould be a combination of the old and the new.The strong algorithms that are currently usedwould be kept, but in addition some weightwould be given to items that the community has

flagged as interesting or voted on.

Meme: Community built around search results.

Seeking Validation

If I am not necessarily looking forinformation, but instead am looking for news(I use news in as loose a fashion as I can) the

way I would use search would be slightlydifferent. Along with the specialized searchengines, People Search would be available. Youcould type in what you were looking for,conservative viewpoint on Darwin forexample and it would pull up results ordered byrelevance (algorithms), tagging, and validation

through user voting.


7/29

Seeking Entertainment

StumbleUpon may be the closest analogy tohow we will be entertained in Web 3.0. You fillout a profile, define your tags and then flip thechannel. It will be a lot like services like Joost as

well, where you can interact with the contentthat you are seeing and generate communities

around it.

Meme: Relevance through user interaction

Related Companies: Swicki, StumbleUpon,

Joost

Where Do Social Networks Fit In?

Remember when I said that Web 3.0 wouldbe based around cults of personality? Imagine aworld where you could search a name and bringup that person, all the social networks they

belong to, and produce a feed around them.

In this world, the idea of Social Networkswill be completely replaced by People Search. IfI put a proper name into the search engine ofWeb 3.0 it would provide the running profile ofmy presence on the web; it would showeverything in the webosphere that has been

tagged as belonging to me, ordered bycommunity validation and relevance. Onceagain, this would not necessarily be a simplesearch. In this Wikiality my page would containboth information that I have written aboutmyself and information that has been written

about me.

Meme: Everyone will have Page Rank.

Related Companies: Explode, Spock, The Gorb,

Orangeply.

Blogging, Websites andEverything Else

Now that I have found the page that I amlooking for, what will those pages look like?

PersonalPages

While I dont believe that classical bloggingwill ever disappear, alongside it will be a vastincrease in Microblogging. People want to be

able to blog from anywhere, without having tospend hours writing a properly formatted post.Web 3.0 will see a more complete integrationbetween devices like cell phones and the worldwide web (does anything still use that term?)Posting pictures, videos and text from anywhere,

anytime with as little hassle as possible.

Included in my personal page will be meta-data from around the rest of my Web Empire.Our pages will be little more than our personalinterpretations of all the data available on the

web, plugged into these pages through agrowing array of widgets and shared with theworld.

Meme: The Widget Web

Related Companies: Jaiku, Twitter, Tumblr,

Blidget, Netvibes, iGoogle

Commerce

While Commerce as a whole will not change,new developments in advertising and how mediais presented while distinctly alter the wayproducts are sold online. Conversationaladvertising and Advertainment will take theplace of stock ads and promotions. Cults ofpersonality and their sponsorships will alsobecome driving forces in a world where the line

between advertising and entertainment blurs.

The entire advertising landscape will change, ascompanies do their best to target the niche

audiences produced by the inclusion of PeopleSearch and ultra specialized subengines.Contextual advertisement will take second seatto product placements on sites, search resultsand subengines relating to the messages that

companies are trying to get out.

Meme: We are all our own brands


8/29

Related Companies: MySpace

Web 3.0 Design

REST, AJAX, Silverlight, Widget Enabled,

Taggable, Searchable everything

Meme: Draggable, droppable, searchable

Enabling Technologies

All great web movements are driven by theirenabling technologies. If it was not for the Wikiand the idea of community voting then Web2.0 would never have occurred. Going backfurther, CMS technology along with the Forumwere the first glimmers that something new was

on the horizen for the web. Even before theconcept of blogging entered the collectiveconscious, online journaling existed. The onlyway to understand a movement is through itstechnology, and many of the technologies thatwill enable Web 3.0 are currently here.

Even beyond its formal definition, what Web3.0 will mean for the world is that the internetwhile be transformed into a massive, universallysearchable database and our place in it will be toorganize this well-spring of information into

slices that are palatable to us. One of the mainorganization tools that we will use are widgetsand a host of data management technologies.Many of these technologies are here today, in

one form or another.

RSS. A Web 3.0 Driver

In ten years RSS and its related technologieswill be seen as the single most important internettechnology since Tim Berners-Lee and RobertCailliau created the World Wide Web at CERN

around 17 years ago.

Real Simple Syndication is crucial to thedevelopment of the new web because its justthat, really simple. Anyone with a Wordpressaccount or a tiny bit of coding knowledge cangenerate an extensible, standards based database

of information that can be transferred to almost

any other modern web site.

If Web 3.0 is the Semantic Web, wherecomputer agents read content like human beingsdo then RSS will be its eyes (or at least its

corrective lenses). Already, entire businessmodels are being created around aggregatingmeta-data. Netvibes allows you to create yourown personal homepage, drawing much of itscontent from RSS feeds that you select. iGoogledoes the exact same thing, and a host of othersare jumping on the concept that the easiest wayto give users relevant content is to give them theability to define relevance for themselves.

In this future, RSS will be extended to includea host of data-points it currently does not. Each

blog post (or microblogging feed), every picture,every video clip will have searchable, taggable,XML based syndication around it.

People Search

The web as a database means that your onlinepersona is apt to become an entry in it. If youlook at technologies like FOAF you will seewhat I mean. FOAF is a project founded byLibby Miller and Dan Brickley. You can thinkof it as RSS but for Social Networks. It takescommon profile data and puts it into a form thatmakes it cross-compatible with other socialnetworks. Once Search Engines are properlyable to manage meta-data like RSS, FOAF andthe half-dozen other protocols out there andpresent it more intuitively the concept of a truly

universal internet is well without our grasp.

DefiningContext

Finally, RSS enables users to define their own

contexts for information. Imagine a word wherecreating a mashup between Google maps andyour Twitter account was no more difficult thansticking a few widgets together. This type ofwidgetizing of the web is not too far off, alreadyYahoo has a mashup creator Yahoo Pipesthat lets you do just this. Web 3.0s real powerwill be in the ability to create data and transfer it

effectively, even now we are well on our way.


9/29

Meme: The transportable web

Related Products: iGoogle, Netvibes, Yahoo

Pipes

Software Agents AndExpert Systems

Human beings are intrinsically lazy creatures.That might not sit well with you, but intuitivelyyou know its true. OK, fine, for the sake ofdiscussion lets exchange the word lazy forefficient. Feel better now? Now for a few

definitions to seed our discussion:

Expert System: An expert system, also known asa knowledge based system, is a computer

program that contains some of the subject-

specific knowledge, and contains the knowledgeand analytical skills of one or more human

experts.

If you have ever had a sniffle and gone toWebMD for advice, then you understand whatan Expert System is. The short version is that itis a software agent that takes user input, runs itthrough a knowledge database and thengenerates an output using fancy technologieslike neural nets (which since this is not a hard

science blog, is beyond the scope of this post).

Ten years from now, Expert Systems wont onlybe designed for general cases, but will be able tobe easily generated to understand individualstastes. Already we see contextual advertisingand contextual search, but what if you couldextend this concepts to a web browser or to yourmobile phone. Imagine a world where yourcomputer would generate a profile, a meme mapabout you based on your interactions with theweb and refine your experience based on this

map.

If you used a search engine, your results wouldbe weighted based not only on the standard Web3.0 metrics, but also on what you care about asdefined by all your previous interactions withthis particular search engine and all of thiswould be completely transparent.

It is a world defined not by the strength of aarbitrary search algorithm, but one of masspersonalization where every search that youmake and every result that you decide to followup on means that your next search will be moreand more personalized. You push all of this data

into your FOAF, and you really have something.

Meme: Mass customization and the personalized

web.

Related Products: Google Search History,

WebMD, Contextual Advertising

Software Agent: In computer science, asoftware agent is a piece of software that actsfor a user or other program in a relationship of

agency. Such action on behalf of implies the

authority to decide when (and if) action isappropriate. The idea is that agents are not

strictly invoked for a task, but activate

themselves.

Programs that surf the web for you willbecome more and more powerful. In a worldwhere your personal profile containing yourlikes, dislikes and search history is as easy toupload as it is to add a feed to your RSS reader,it is no surprise that a major industry will be

software that does your searching for you.

Imagine a scenario where you want to find anew camera. Since you have personal mememap containing a listing of all the cameras youhave ever searched and this list is ordered by thefrequency of those searches, you can set yoursoftware agent to continue this search for you inyour absence. When you return home you wouldbe presented with a list of sites ordered by price,relevance (to you) and features that have beenfound based on your preference. What you dowith this list is fed back into the system,

improving future searches.

Meme: Self-serve search is history

Related Projects: MIT Media Lab


10/29

Software Agents and Expert systems will be

our off line access point to Web 3.0.

The Privacy Caveat

Reputation management, Meme managementand Data privacy will be the major issues of theday. When you have a world where everythingthat you do is being written into an RSS feed (inone form or another), the ability to protect thisfeed will be crucial. New industries that arecurrently being developed will be expanded on.Professional and Semi-Professional netizens willhire SEO experts to ensure that their reputations

are being properly managed.

Where once there was only an industry forcorporate level intelligence and brandprotection, bloggers with a vested interest inhow they are perceived online (the RobertScobles and Mike Arringtons of the world) willjoin into the mix.

Also, lets not forget the improvement inprivacy features. The ability to block certainactions from being indexed, or limit the accessto your profile by third party sources will be thenext big push in internet security and privacy.

Meme: Reputation hacking / Reputation gaming

Related Products: RepuTrace

The Future OfBlogging

If there is any concept that has become a partof the daily life of the average netizen, its theidea of the blog. In the last ten years, blogginghas developed from HTML entries on a personalwebpage, to hosed journaling sites like LiveJournal to the pseudo-journalistic, CMS based

juggernaut it has become.

What does the future hold for blogging? Itsimpossible to truly know, but as the web iscurrently developing it looks like what weconsider blogging will become more rich andtechnologies will improve to the point where ourentire lives can be streamed online.

Microblogging

Microblogging will be the critical change inthe way we write in Web 3.0. Imagine a worldwhere your mobile phone, your email, and youtelevision could all produce feedback that could

easily be pushed to any or all bloggingplatforms. If you take a picture from your smart-phone, it would be automatically tagged, baggedand forwarded to your lifestream. If you rateda television show that you were watching, your

review would be forwarded into the stream.

This is the type of seamless integration thatwill finally bring the concept of blogging to themasses. Posts will become shorter and moretopical, the world of rehashing the meme will bereplaced by one where life and news generation

go hand in hand. Blogging wont be a hobbyreserved for internet enthusiasts, but a past time

for the MySpace generation.

Of course, the allure of any individual blogwould be much more limited. As the popularityof micro-blogging explodes, more and morebasically unreadable blog will start to populatethe blogosphere. Its not hard to imagine a worldwhere the vast majority of your posts amount to,stuck in traffic, ugh

Fortunately, microblogging also opens up theworld to new opportunities. Live blogging, atechnique usually reserved for important events,would become common. If you cant actually beat a conference, pictures, video and commentarycould be pushed to you in real time. The entire

world would become an Op-Ed piece.

Refined searching methods would alsotransform blog writers into brands themselves.Since everything would be happening in nearreal-time, its the writer who can get to the eventand convey it most convincingly that will drawthe crowds. Everyone has the same information,the question will be who makes you want to

read it.

Meme: Blogging, life recorded

Related Companies: Jiaku, Tumblr, Twitter


11/29

RSS Integration

Web 3.0 will be the age of the RSS. Webservices will enable you to blog from anywhere,and RSS will enable you to combine all of thesedivergent feeds into one coherent picture. Blogs

themselves will be reduced to a stream ofconsciousness interspersed with longer,traditional news pieces. Where once we couldonly hope to get one or two posts written a day,it wont be strange to have two dozen posts inone afternoon on a Web 3.0 enabled blog.

If you want to take a peek into the future, lookat web services like Twitter or Facebookstatus.These streams only ask for one line worthof information describing exactly what you aredoing at the moment. As a result, they provide

extremely concise, constantly updatedinformation. Now that you have the ability tostream these services through RSS, the amountof information that you can easily generate fromanywhere that you have mobile phone or webaccess as exploded.

Think of your blog as a combination off all thepseudo-blogging tools that you will be using in afew years. Your Flickr feed and your Jaikuaccount, your Upcoming calendar and the latestGoogle maps mashup. Your blog will, in short,

be a living, breathing approximation to who youare.

Meme: My blog knows more about me than myfriends do.

Related Companies: iGoogle, Netvibes

Choosing Not To Blog

As blogging becomes more invasive, a

common societal backlash will be those whosimply refuse to do it. Even if they do blog, itwill be from within walled gardens (like socialnetworks) that they can tightly control.Generally, people are more than willing to giveinformation out online, as long as they are giventhe option to make that information private. InWeb 3.0, access control and role based privacy

features will be the speaking points of the day.

Mobile Technology

Some new places that you will be able to push

information to your blog from.

y Mobile Phonesy Video Game Consolesy Smart Watchesy Pedometersy Your Local Gym

If it produces data, it is likely that there willbe a method to upload that data. If data can beuploaded into a universal format (like RSS) itwill be able to be pushed into whicheverreceptacle you deem appropriate.

Meme: Is there anywhere that we arent

connected?

Related Projects:Lifebits

Advertising

If you take a look at the evolution of onlineadvertising in the last decade you will see amarket that has evolved from purely banneradvertising to painful pop-ups to the rich arrayof advertising alternatives that we currently

tolerate. What will the future look like? We willseem a movement towards blurring the linesbetween advertising and content. Not only this,but rich media will become all the more

important.

Publishing

The first thing that we should look at are thedifferent publishing options that are currentlycoming into fashion. As our ability to producenew content and promote this content improves,

the move will be from purely text options toricher media like podcasting and video blogging.

Podcasting

Ease of production, increased quality and thecreation of more strongly branded Podcastingnetworks will mark the next evolution inPodcasting. Networks like TWiT and PodTech


12/29

are prime examples of this movement. As genresbecome more tightly defined, PodCasters atleast those who aspire towards a widedistribution will realize that combining theircontent will allow them to scale their operationsto the point where advertisers will be much more

willing to take them seriously.

Adplacements

The first and probably most common form ofadvertising that will define Podcasting in Web3.0 are pre and post-roll advertising. Sincecontent will be longer, and it will be streamedcontinuously, podcasting will more closelyresemble terrestrial radio stations. As such, thesepodcasting networks will be able to attractadvertisers who have a specific interest in

courting the extremely specialized niches ofmost podcasts.

Advertising itself will have to be redesigned toproperly exploit a listening audience that is sodeeply segmented. At present, most advertisingis designed for audiences with little knowledgeof the technical specifications of products;however, listeners of for example techpodcasts may be turned off by advertisers whothey feel produce patronizing content.Advertising will have to become more

sophisticated and provide more value by bothentertaining and informing the listening

audience.

Meme: We want to be sold on value, not

patronized.

Related Companies: PodTech, TWiT

Contextual Advertising

Google is currently experimenting withcontextual advertising designed for rich mediacontent, startups like LiveRail are also taking asimilar approach. These contextual ads willlikely take the form of pre and post-rolladvertising as well as ads placed inside thecontent itself.

The current technical barriers are that thesoftware needed to actually transcribe thepodcast content such that keywords can beextracted is in its infancy. Web 3.0 will mark asubstantial improvement in audio analytics, and

will enable the use of contextual advertising.

The major sociological hurdle is how to placeadvertising without distracting from the content.Right now, most people are used to ad bannersand have learned to ignore them. When it comesto rich media content these ads will beimpossible to ignore. Since all of this contentwill streamed it wont be long before software isdeveloped to strip these ads from the rich media

content itself.

Alternate Advertising

Portal Advertising

While the vast majority of podcasts will bedistributed through content distribution systemslike iTunes, there will still be a substantialamount of viewers who get their content straightfrom the media portals themselves. Instead ofplacing advertising inside of the content itself,an alternative method may be to place the adsaround the content. This is especially true inservices that use specialized flash players todeliver their content. Text based advertisingmight be a way to move into a new media while

still retaining the strengths of a previous one.

ProductPlacement

Like radio before it, as Podcasts begin toproduce personalities the move towardsproduct placement will only increase. It hasalways been more effective to have a realperson promote a product than to do so throughtraditional advertising. Thats why sponsorshipcontracts are so lucrative. That brings up theidea of the advertorial, an idea that has recentlycome over from traditional media into theblogosphere.

Conversational Media


13/29

As readers, writers and entrepreneurs we areconditioned to filter out that which, does notmatter. About fifteen minutes after the bannerad was created, sometime near the dawn of time,it was added to that list. As a result, youraverage web surfer does not even see ads, let

alone respond to them in any of the ways thatadvertisers would prefer us to.

Click Thru Rate is not the king of the hill anylonger, advertisers need to be sure that they aregetting their message across. As a result, newmodes of getting the attention of an increasingly

jaded public have to be devised.

The Advetorial

Conversational Media involves generatingbuzz through linking an idea (meme) toendorsers that have credibility in associatedfields. An example would be a be sportsbloggers being quoted as describing in whatsituations they have been called on to, Just DoIt! and how that has positively affected their

lives.

The way this media works is to use cults ofpersonality to add creditability to claims madeabout a product or brand. This is done notthrough a clear endorsement, but throughdiscussing a topic of the sponsors choosing.Of course, this is most effective when this topicis a registered trademark of the company doing

the sponsorship.

This is a wildly effective way of turning anincredibly boring topic into something worthy ofdiscussion. This conversation will occasionallybecome a meme, causing other bloggers to startusing the phrase and linking ideas of trust andcreditability back to the advertiser who devised

it.

Meme: I blog therefore I ad.

Related Concepts: Endorsements

AllPress Is Good

Conversational Media is one of those trendsthat works regardless of how you slice it. Ifpeople blindly believe the endorsers (as weoccasional do when we see quotes from moviereviewers) then the catch phrase becomesassociated with warm feelings, and the company

sees a small spike in customer contentment andbrand recognition.

If things go horribly wrong, brands that areinteresting but have a hard time evoking thepassion of the masses (Microsoft) get their 15minutes in the limelight. Everyone involved inthe controversy gets a bit of a traffic boost, andthree days letter the blogosphere forgets why itwas angry to begin with. It also createsevangelists, there is nothing like a controversy to

drive people away from the fence.

All in all, at worse it can temporarily hurt PRwhile substantially improving brand cohesionfor the people who like your company. It alsogreatly improves exposure of the idea, and hasbuilt in viral effects should things get out of

hand.

Meme: I love controversy, it drives up my ad

sales.

Related Companies: Federated Media, Gawkers,

Pay Per Post

Credibility Caveat

As cults of personality become more dominantin the Web 3.0 culture, they will need to applychecks and balances to the way that they usetheir celebrity. Public trust is a finite thing, andonce you lose it you cant get it back very easily.Publishers and advertisers will need to strike abalance between the needs of a particular adcampaign, and the loss of creditability associatedwith paid endorsements. I think Robert Scoblesaid it best, do whatever you want but if youdont want to leave yourself open to attack discloseit.

Niche Marketing


14/29

For PodCasts, advertisers will have theadvantage of being able to target very specificniches. Clever companies will be able to use thisfact to substantially increase their conversionrates by creating cheaper advertisements gearedtowards describing the added benefits of their

products over their competitors. In a lot of way,Web 3.0 advertising will more closely resembletelevision advertising in the 1950s. Companieswill rely heavily on product placement andinformational advertising directed specifically

towards a tech savvy audience.

Meme: Smart Advertising

Related Companies: PodZinger, CallMiner

Blogging

As pay per click loses its appeal in the wake oflower and lower conversion rates, the future ofonline advertising for blogs and otherinformation portals will take on a pay for timemodel. Instead of advertisers paying for thenumber of clicks, they will contract bloggers outfor particular periods of time. Depending on theplacement of the ads, and the nature of theadvertisement, the advertisers will pay a flat fee.The contracts will be renewed should theblogger maintain a high enough conversion rate.Text Link Ads currently follows a similarmodel, offering a residual for the right to selltext links on your site.

Alternate Forms

As blogging becomes a more importantmedium, direct sales of advertising will becomemore common. Major companies will developsimple ways to price advertising based on trafficand popularity statistics. Using this, they willbe able to more easily treat bloggers in the sameway that they treat other more mainstream newssources, purchasing advertising space for blogs

that meet specific demographic criteria.

The biggest enabling technology for such achange in how advertising operates will be in theability to match companies to bloggers with

minimum friction. Currently, selling advertisingdirectly to companies requires a substantialamount of effort. In Web 3.0, the system will bemade more smooth through freely available and

highly accurate statistical data.

Meme: Paying for air time

Related Companies: TextLinkAds, Pay Per Post,Compete

What Will Ads Look Like?

For this section I am concentrating specificallyon rich media advertising. Text based Ads andbanners will continue to become prettier andthe biggest change will be the ability tobookmark ads for later viewing. Asadvertising more closely resemblesentertainment, people will want the ability to goback and look at their favorite ads. More notablethan banner ads, however, will be the future of

video advertising.

As it stands, the line between advertising andentertainment has already blurred. In Web 3.0,this line will simply cease to exist. Advertisingwill be such that it is completelyindistinguishable from entertainment. Ads willbe designed to make brands memorable, anddrive people to seek out more information forthemselves. Viral marketing will come to thefore, as advertisers attempt to tap the huge

number of eyeballs that the internet offers them.

Success in the new advertising model is in thenumber of people that you can get to actuallyview your ads. Assuming that only a tinyfraction of people will ever be converted byadvertising, developing extremely viral,extremely popular content will maximize thenumber of people available to convert.

Look forward to advertising networks onportals like YouTube and Joost, and longeradvertising blocks that seem more like shortfilms than commercials.

Meme: Sell the sizzle, not the steak.


15/29

Related Products: YouTube, Joost

Media

No matter how technology evolves there will

always be a constant, people want to beentertained. In this Web 3.0 world,entertainment will become far more interactiveand a much stronger part of our daily lives.Whether it is video, audio or advertising excitingnew methods of viewing media are in

development.

YouTube TV

As it stands, people are watching less TVbecause of services like YouTube. As peoplehave less time to sit in front of a set-top box andspend more of their leisure time sitting in frontof their computer screens, greater shifts seemalmost inevitable. This paradigm shiftnotwithstanding no matter what direction oursociety moves, we are always looking forentertainment. Systems like YouTube and now

Joost will become more popular. Their mainadvantage is that they allow us to consumeentertainment in small, manageable chucks and

then get back to work.

Actively Entertained

The future of the web will provide us withmore dense media. Instead of passiveentertainment (which will still have its place),Web 3.0 will see the introduction of ActiveMedia. The next time you are watching reruns of

Buffy the Vampire Slayer you might be

presented with a side-panel containing other,similar programs.

Youll have a social network available to youof others who are watching the episode at thesame time. You will be able to find programswith similar actors, similar styles, similarlengths or maybe something as obscure assimilar musical scores. Youll have statisticalinformation available to you like the highestrated episodes and youll be able to interact with

your media, voting on your favorite everything.

For those who prefer to let themselves beentertained, then software agents will keep trackof what you have been watching and pushprograms to you that you should like as a result.The point is that we will watch media along aspectrum ranging from the familiar passiveentertainment that we are used to, to a richmedia experience combining every aspect ofsocial networking with media.

The newest version of YouTube takes a stab at

adding social networking elements to onlinevideo, and Pandora everyones favoritedigital radio station allows you to create aplaylist of music that you will enjoy based on aninitial selection.

Set Top Boost

What will you do with your Plasma Screen andHD-DVD set top boxes in Web 3.0? No fear,they will be as important a part of your life asalways. Companies like Joost are taking the first

step to move digital content to the set-top box asthey attempt to make deals with hardwaremanufacturers. In this future, all digital contentwill available alongside traditional mass media.Youll be able to see watch Lostand Ask A Ninjaone after another, and use all the features of aDVR to remix them to your hearts content.


16/29

Traditional channels will still be available, butthe majority of entertainment from televisionconnoisseurs will come in the form ofplaylists. Tell your television what you wantto see, and it will scour the Media Web forcontent that you will like based on your

preferences and the preferences of those withsimilar entertainment tastes. All of this will be

presented in HD quality.

This isnt that far off, already systems likeTiVo can keep track of your preferences andrecord content that it believes you will enjoy.This just takes that, adds social networkingelements from systems like YouTube and

embeds them into your set-top.

Meme: Take your media anywhere.

Related Companies: YouTube, Pandora, Joost

Season One BETA

The way television programs are producedwill be the next big change in media. Take alook at any of the major networks. An enormousamount money is spent creating pilots and

advertiser dollars are wasted when those pilotstank. Unfortunately, some of those shows laterbecome incredibly popular in niche markets. Aprime example is Firefly, which failed on itsinitial run on Fox, but is now one of the mostpopular Sci-Fri television programs to date.

A way to correct this in the Web 3.0landscape is by making every new show aBETA. The networks can film the pilots, presentthem online and then allow the public to decidewhich should be given a traditional media run.

The winners end up on television, the losersfinish their one season runs online, where theyhave a chance to redeem themselves if it turnsout that initial impressions failed to take

something into account.

Current.tv currently does this on a small scale,allowing users to submit content which ends upbeing broadcast on their television network if it

is popular enough. The real power of Web 3.0will come into effect when program managersgive over some of their power to the consumerand every television program is vetted by the

public.

Taken one step further, the public will be ableto rate whether they believe a show is too longor too short, whether they like particular actorsand what changes should be made to make theprograms better. Since the feedback loop is sotight, corrections could be made from episode toepisode. Of course, these changes would have tobe within reason and at the end of the day, theprogram managers will always have the finalsay. Consider it a massive suggestion box rather

than fully democratized television.

Meme: All television shows are BETA projects

Related Companies: Current.tv

You TV

The biggest change to come out of Web 3.0will be the lifestream. I define a lifestream as amedia stream (podcast, video, blog) by you andabout your life. As the barriers to entry forcreating decent quality digital video becomelower, and companies spring up that allow youto aggregate this video more easily, more andmore people will see this as a way tocommunicate with the world around them.

Take a look at PBS (Public Access Television)and imagine if there was a system that wouldallow you to use the soapbox that it provideswithout the strong barriers to entry that currentlylimits it.

Bloggers, some of whom currently runpodcasts will start recording themselves andpresenting it for public consumption (ChrisPirillo is a fine example). New televisionpersonalities will be created as this contentmigrates to the set-top and is picked up asrelated content through the social network.Your average person with a good idea will beable to become a wildly popular media star from


17/29

the comfort of his or her basement. Advertiserswill sponsor the most popular of these programs,and well liked new media stars will spin offprograms and form ad hoc channels around

their content.

YouTube currently does something similar tothis with their channels, Justin.tv is alifestream that has spun off a sister programJustine TV, and Your Truman Show is a youngcompany that seeks to make it easier for peopleto generate lifestreams and aggregate them

through a social network.

Related Companies: Your Truman Show,

Justin.tv, Chris Pirillo Live, uStream

Search

The start of almost everyones journey throughthe web begins at the search engine.Understanding how search will evolve isunderstanding how the Web will evolve. As theamount of information available becomesgreater, our means of getting at that informationwill need to become more sophisticated. Web3.0 will provide us with a new paradigm as

search is concerned.

SpecializedSearch Engines

As it stands now, search is usually a hit or missproposition. You begin the trek for anyparticular piece of information at one of themajor content portals. You type in your queryand you have results pushed to you that havebeen sorted algorithmically. For the most part, it

works, but the biggest problem that searchengines face today is context.

Dedupe

When I search for my name, for instance, Iwould likely end up with a much more famousversion of Steven appearing at the top of theSERP. If I am interested in knowing who istalking about me online, the imdb page onSteven Spielberg is completely irrelevant. TheWeb 3.0 solution is one that Google and many

others have been toying with for quite some timenow, specialized search engines.

Searchlets

The work flow for systems like this are asfollows. Before I ever query a term, I firstchoose my context. It could be something asbroad as authors or something as narrowlydefined as Gainesville, FL authors. Thiscontext acts as filter over which my query is run.A prime example of this is Googles BlogSearch. Quite a few times, I am not interested inan eCommerce site about the iPod, what I aminterested in is the blogospheres opinion on thedevice. By allowing me to set my contextinitially, I got a lot more value from my

searches.

Web 3.0 will expand upon this idea. Instead ofthinking of a search engine in terms of a hugeaggregation of everything imaginable. Thesearch engine itself will be nothing more than aportal to smaller searchlets. Lets not confusethis with a directory structure. In directory basedsearch, youre forced to wade your way throughoften obscure multi-level link trees to findinformation. It also relies strictly on a humanbeing to sort that information properly. Thisleads to tiny, often irrelevant datasets.

Tagging


18/29

In Web 3.0 search engines will need to have abetter understanding of context. One way toaccomplish this is to take a nod from directoriesand allow results to be tagged. These tags can bevoted on by the community and would only bean addition to, not a replacement for, traditional

sorting algorithms. Thus, if an eCommerce siteis tagged as being a source for information oniPods, the community has validated this withtheir votes and the algorithm acknowledges thatthis is true, it would appear high on the listing

for searches within the context iPod.

Context

Context is the major driving force behind allWeb 3.0 thinking. As the amount of data we aresubjected to on a daily basis increases, the only

way we will have any chance of using iteffectively is if systems are put into place toallow us to refine our context. Everything in the

terrestrial world works like this.

When you are looking for a book, you go into abook store or library. If you are looking for amovie, you go to a movie theater or video rentalshop. Nowhere in the natural world is there aneverything store that just contains ahodgepodge of unsorted products. Schools arebroken into classes and Malls are broken into

stores. The point is that in the real world whenwe ask a question or look for something, we getanswers that are relevant to the context we arecurrently in. In order for search to truly evolve,

it must act like this.

Meme: My search engine understands me better

than you do!

Related Projects: Swicki, Google Blog Search,WebMD

Natural Language Search

The second biggest hurdle to search as itstands today is that we cant really ask searchengines questions. The issue has always beenthat search engines dont understand context

very well

. When people ask each other questions, thereis generally enough feedback available that

allows us, with very little trouble, to understandwhat the other person is really asking. Ifsomeone who is coughing comes up to you andasks, What do you know about the commoncold? chances are good you will recommend adecent cough suppressant. Machines dont havethis luxury. Up until now, the answer to thequestion has always been to either ignore naturallanguage search or to tell the users of such anengine to be more specific or to use morestrongly phrased questions. Web 3.0 is a webthat understands context, thus in it the power of

natural language search can be more fullyexploited.

Search My Past

If, for example, I have spent a lot of timeresearching the causes and cures for a cough andall of my searches have fallen into associatedcontexts, the engine will be able to understandthat when I query, What do you know about thecold? that I am not talking about what it knowsabout the Antarctic, my real concern is in the

common cold and its cures.

This sort of intelligence will require that wechange the way that we understand searchengines. Search engines will become full webservices that we will have control over and beable to train to understand our behavior. Insteadof it taking the moving average of the


19/29

populations behavior like the current trendsdictate, it will start with this moving average andbecome more personalized to our needs as we

use it.

Privacy

In order to make this useful, stronger privacyinfrastructure will need to be put into place. Aslikely as not, these search profiles would bestored locally instead of being kept on the searchengines servers. The advantage of this is thatthese profiles would then be portable to otherengines and could be loaded or not at thesearchers discretion. Storing this informationlocally would also somewhat limit searchengines ability to use this information asdemographic data for advertising, unless the end

user wished for that to be the case.

DigitalBody Language

Having a universal search profile would alsobe useful to flesh out our digital persona.What machine lack right now is the digitalequivalent to body language. They have no wayof understanding us based on their interactionswith us. Having a portable, shareable, locallystored search profile will allow us to shareinformation with web applications that willallow us to interact with them in a way morereminiscent of real conversation.

In the identity space, systems like OpenID aredoing a tiny subset of this. They are giving usthe ability to take our profile data with us. In theWeb 3.0 world this will be expanded to include

a much larger set of information.

Meme: Digital body language

Related Projects: Powerset, Ask.com, GoogleSearch History, OpenID

People Search

A huge part of Web 3.0 search will besurrounding People Search. As our socialnetworks expand, and more cults of personality

make their way into the digital wastelands we

will want ways to find out who is who.

What Web 3.0 will allow us to do is not justfind websites related to concepts, but usingnatural language we will be able to find answers

to questions from experts who have writtenabout them previously. Think of it as a meldingof Digg and Googles specialized searchengines. If, for example, you wanted to knowabout the common cold and you found a greatblog post on curing it, you could then vote forthis post and if others agreed, over time whensomeone asked that question or if someonesearched for that author, what would appear is alisting of that persons core competencies.This listing will contain articles, profiles,images, videos and so on that the

recommendation engine most closely relates tothat person. Since we are dealing in context, theresults of this search would be as good as thecontext you are in. I, for example, would neitherappear in searches around the common cold nor

searches for movies.

GuidedSearch

Guided search engines always belong in thecontext of their creators. The reason that guidedsearch, in at of itself, is not sufficient is that itignores the wisdom of the crowds by seeingsearch through an editors eyes. Guided searchsolves the problem of context while ignoring the


20/29

problems associated with a purely editorial

infrastructure.

The future of systems like this will be incombining them with more traditionalalgorithms to produce a search engine that

allows you to fill in the blanks with the aid ofguides. Guides and human based search is mostpowerful when the other types of search haveabsolutely failed. If, for example, you arelooking for some very specific piece ofinformation on an obscure subject matter, asearch engine quite often fails to understandwhat you are trying to accomplish. Editoriallypowered search, when combined with fast searchalgorithms, natural language and a strongdatabase of previously answered questions could

plug this hole.

Meme: My search guides database is better thanyours!

Related Projects: Mahalo, ChaCha, About.com

SEMANTICWEB

The Semantic Web is an evolvingdevelopment of the World Wide Web in whichthe meaning (semantics) of information andservices on the web is defined, making itpossible for the web to "understand" and satisfythe requests of people and machines to use theweb content. It derives from World Wide WebConsortium director Sir Tim Berners Lee'svision of the Web as a universal medium for

data, information, and knowledge exchange.

At its core, the semantic web comprises a setof design principles, collaborative workinggroups, and a variety of enabling technologies.Some elements of the semantic web areexpressed as prospective future possibilities thatare yet to be implemented or realized Otherelements of the semantic web are expressed informal specifications. Some of these include

Resource Description Framework (RDF), avariety of data interchange formats (e.g.RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), andnotations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and theWeb Ontology Language (OWL), all of whichare intended to provide a formal description of

concepts, terms, and relationships within a givenknowledge domain.

Purpose

Humans are capable of using the Web tocarry out tasks such as finding the Finnish wordfor "monkey", reserving a library book, andsearching for a low price for a DVD. However, acomputer cannot accomplish the same taskswithout human direction because web pages aredesigned to be read by people, not machines.

The semantic web is a vision of information thatis understandable by computers, so that they canperform more of the tedious work involved infinding, combining, and acting upon information

on the web.

Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed thevision of the semantic web as follows:

I have a dream for the Web [in whichcomputers] become capable of analyzing all thedata on the Web the content, links, andtransactions between people and computers. ASemantic Web, which should make thispossible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, theday-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracyand our daily lives will be handled by machinestalking to machines. The intelligent agentspeople have touted for ages will finally

materialize.

Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

Semantic publishing will benefit greatly fromthe semantic web. In particular, the semanticweb is expected to revolutionize scientificpublishing, such as real-time publishing andsharing of experimental data on the Internet.This simple but radical idea is now beingexplored by W3C HCLS group's Scientific

Publishing Task Force.


21/29

Semantic Web application areas areexperiencing intensified interest due to the rapidgrowth in the use of the Web, together with theinnovation and renovation of informationcontent technologies. The Semantic Web isregarded as an integrator across different content

and information applications and systems, andprovide mechanisms for the realisation ofEnterprise Information Systems. The rapidity ofthe growth experienced provides the impetus forresearchers to focus on the creation anddissemination of innovative Semantic Webtechnologies, where the envisaged SemanticWeb is long overdue. Often the termsSemantics, metadata, ontologies andSemantic Web are used inconsistently. Inparticular, these terms are used as everydayterminology by researchers and practitioners,

spanning a vast landscape of different fields,technologies, concepts and application areas.Furthermore, there is confusion with regards tothe current status of the enabling technologiesenvisioned to realise the Semantic Web. In apaper presented by Gerber, Barnard and Van derMerwe the Semantic Web landscape are chartedand a brief summary of related terms andenabling technologies are presented. Thearchitectural model proposed by Tim Berners-Lee is used as basis to present a status modelthat reflects current and emerging technologies

Semantic Web solutions

The Semantic Web takes the solution further.It involves publishing in languages specificallydesigned for data: Resource DescriptionFramework (RDF), Web Ontology Language(OWL), and Extensible Markup Language(XML). HTML describes documents and thelinks between them. RDF, OWL, and XML, bycontrast, can describe arbitrary things such aspeople, meetings, or airplane parts. Tim Berners-

Lee calls the resulting network of Linked Datathe Giant Global Graph, in contrast to theHTML-based World Wide Web.

These technologies are combined in order toprovide descriptions that supplement or replacethe content of Web documents. Thus, contentmay manifest itself as descriptive data stored in

Web-accessible databases or as markup withindocuments (particularly, in Extensible HTML(XHTML) interspersed with XML, or, moreoften, purely in XML, with layout or renderingcues stored separately). The machine-readabledescriptions enable content managers to add

meaning to the content, i.e., to describe thestructure of the knowledge we have about thatcontent. In this way, a machine can processknowledge itself, instead of text, using processessimilar to human deductive reasoning andinference, thereby obtaining more meaningfulresults and helping computers to perform

automated information gathering and research.

An example of a tag that would be used in a

non-semantic web page:

cat

Encoding similar information in a semantic webpage might look like this:

Cat

Relationship to object oriented programming

A number of authors highlight the similaritieswhich the Semantic Web shares with object-oriented programming (OOP). Both the semanticweb and object-oriented programming haveclasses with attributes and the concept ofinstances or objects. Linked Data usesDereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifiers ina manner similar to the common programmingconcept of pointers or "object identifiers" inOOP. Dereferenceable URIs can thus be used toaccess "data by reference". The Unified

Modeling Language is designed to communicateabout object-oriented systems, and can thus beused for both object-oriented programming and

semantic web development.

When the web was first being created in thelate 1980s and early 1990s, it was done usingobject-oriented programming languages such asObjective-C, Smalltalk and CORBA. In the mid-


22/29

1990s this development practice was furtheredwith the announcement of the Enterprise ObjectsFramework, Portable Distributed Objects andWebObjects all by NeXT, in addition to theComponent Object Model released byMicrosoft. XML was then released in 1998, and

RDF a year after in 1999.

Similarity to object oriented programming alsocame from two other routes: the first was thedevelopment of the very knowledge-centric"Hyperdocument" systems by DouglasEngelbart[13, and the second comes from theusage and development of the HypertextTransfer Protocol.The idea of a semantic web,able to describe, and associate meaning withdata, necessarily involves more than simpleXHTML mark-up code. It is based on an

assumption that, in order for it to be possible toendow machines with an ability to accuratelyinterpret web homed content, far more than themere ordered relationships involving letters andwords is necessary as underlying infrastructure,(attendant to semantic issues). Otherwise, mostof the supportive functionality would have beenavailable in Web 2.0 (and before), and it wouldhave been possible to derive a semantically

capable Web with minor, incremental additions.

Additions to the infrastructure to support

semantic functionality include latent dynamicnetwork models that can, under certainconditions, be 'trained' to appropriately 'learn'meaning based on order data, in the process'learning' relationships with order (a kind ofrudimentary working grammar). See for

example latent semantic analysis

Components

The semantic web comprises the standards andtools of XML, XML Schema, RDF, RDF

Schema and OWL that are organized in theSemantic Web Stack. The OWL Web OntologyLanguage Overview describes the function andrelationship of each of these components of the

semantic web:

The Semantic Web Stack.

y XML provides an elemental syntax forcontent structure within documents, yetassociates no semantics with themeaning of the content containedwithin.

y XML Schema is a language forproviding and restricting the structureand content of elements contained

within XML documents.y RDF is a simple language for expressing

data models, which refer to objects("resources") and their relationships. AnRDF-based model can be represented inXML syntax.

y RDF Schema is a vocabulary fordescribing properties and classes ofRDF-based resources, with semanticsfor generalized-hierarchies of suchproperties and classes.

y OWL adds more vocabulary fordescribing properties and classes:among others, relations between classes(e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g."exactly one"), equality, richer typing ofproperties, characteristics of properties(e.g. symmetry), and enumeratedclasses.


23/29

y SPARQL is a protocol and querylanguage for semantic web data sources.

Current ongoing standardizations include:

y Rule Interchange Format (RIF) as theRule Layer of the Semantic Web Stack

Not yet fully realized layers include:

y Unifying Logic and Proof layers areundergoing active research.

The intent is to enhance the usability andusefulness of the Web and its interconnected

resources through:

yServers which expose existing datasystems using the RDF and SPARQLstandards. Many converters to RDFexist from different applications.Relational databases are an importantsource. The semantic web serverattaches to the existing system withoutaffecting its operation.

y Documents "marked up" with semanticinformation (an extension of the HTML tags used in today's Web pagesto supply information for Web search

engines using web crawlers). This couldbe machine-understandable informationabout the human-understandable contentof the document (such as the creator,title, description, etc., of the document)or it could be purely metadatarepresenting a set of facts (such asresources and services elsewhere in thesite). (Note that anything that can beidentified with a Uniform ResourceIdentifier(URI) can be described, so thesemantic web can reason about animals,people, places, ideas, etc.) Semanticmarkup is often generated automatically,rather than manually.

y Common metadata vocabularies(ontologies) and maps betweenvocabularies that allow documentcreators to know how to mark up theirdocuments so that agents can use theinformation in the supplied metadata (so

that Authorin the sense of 'the Author ofthe page' won't be confused with Authorin the sense of a book that is the subjectof a book review).

y Automated agents to perform tasks forusers of the semantic web using this data

y Web-based services (often with agentsof their own) to supply informationspecifically to agents (for example, aTrust service that an agent could ask ifsome online store has a history of poor

service orspamming)

[edit] Challenges

Some of the challenges for the Semantic Webinclude vastness, vagueness, uncertainty,inconsistency and deceit. Automated reasoning

systems will have to deal with all of these issuesin order to deliver on the promise of theSemantic Web.

y Vastness: The World Wide Webcontains at least 48 billion pages as of

this writing (August 2, 2009). The

SNOMED CT medical terminology

ontology contains 370,000 class names,

and existing technology has not yet

been able to eliminate all semantically

duplicated terms. Any automatedreasoning system will have to deal with

truly huge inputs.

y Vagueness: These are impreciseconcepts like "young" or "tall". This

arises from the vagueness of user

queries, of concepts represented by

content providers, of matching query

terms to provider terms and of trying to

combine different knowledge bases

with overlapping but subtly different

concepts. Fuzzy logic is the most

common technique for dealing with

vagueness.

y Uncertainty: These are precise conceptswith uncertain values. For example, a

patient might present a set of

symptoms which correspond to a


24/29

number of different distinct diagnoses

each with a different probability.

Probabilistic reasoning techniques are

generally employed to address

uncertainty.

y Inconsistency: These are logicalcontradictions which will inevitably

arise during the development of large

ontologies, and when ontologies from

separate sources are combined.

Deductive reasoning fails

catastrophically when faced with

inconsistency, because "anything

follows from a contradiction".

Defeasible reasoning and

paraconsistent reasoning are two

techniques which can be employed todeal with inconsistency.

y Deceit: This is when the producer of theinformation is intentionally misleading

the consumer of the information.

Cryptography techniques are currently

utilized to alleviate this threat.

This list of challenges is illustrative rather thanexhaustive, and it focuses on the challenges to

the "unifying logic" and "proof" layers of theSemantic Web. The World Wide WebConsortium (W3C) Incubator Group forUncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web(URW3-XG) final report lumps these problemstogether under the single heading of"uncertainty". Many of the techniquesmentioned here will require extensions to theWeb Ontology Language (OWL) for example toannotate conditional probabilities. This is anarea of active research.[22]

[edit] Projects

This article may contain excessive, poor or

irrelevant examples. You can improve the

article by adding more descriptive text. See

Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for

further suggestions. (March 2010)

This section provides some example projects andtools, but is very incomplete. The choice ofprojects is somewhat arbitrary but may serveillustrative purposes. It is also remarkable that inthis early stage of the development of semanticweb technology, it is already possible to compile

a list of hundreds of components that in one wayor another can be used in building or extending

semantic webs.[23]

[edit] DBpedia

DBpedia is an effort to publish structured dataextracted from Wikipedia: the data is publishedin RDF and made available on the Web for useunder the GNU Free Documentation License,thus allowing Semantic Web agents to provideinferencing and advanced querying over theWikipedia-derived dataset and facilitatinginterlinking, re-use and extension in other data-sources.

[edit] FOAF

A popular application of the semantic web isFriend of a Friend (or FoaF), which uses RDF todescribe the relationships people have to otherpeople and the "things" around them. FOAFpermits intelligent agents to make sense of the

thousands of connections people have with eachother, their jobs and the items important to theirlives; connections that may or may not beenumerated in searches using traditional websearch engines. Because the connections are sovast in number, human interpretation of theinformation may not be the best way of

analyzing them.

FOAF is an example of how the Semantic Webattempts to make use of the relationships within

a social context.

[edit] GoodRelations for e-commerce

A huge potential for Semantic Web technologieslies in adding data structure and typed links tothe vast amount of offer data, product modelfeatures, and tendering / request for quotation

data.


25/29

The GoodRelations ontology is a popularvocabulary for expressing product information,prices, payment options, etc. It also allows

expressing demand in a straightforward fashion.

GoodRelations has been adopted by BestBuy,

Yahoo, OpenLink Software, O'Reilly Media, theBook Mashup, and many others.

[edit] SIOC

The SIOC Project - Semantically-InterlinkedOnline Communities provides a vocabulary ofterms and relationships that model web dataspaces. Examples of such data spaces include,among others: discussion forums, weblogs,blogrolls / feed subscriptions, mailing lists,

shared bookmarks, image galleries.

[edit] SIMILE

Semantic Interoperability of Metadata andInformation in unLike Environments

SIMILE is a joint project, conducted by the MITLibraries and MIT CSAIL, which seeks toenhance interoperability among digital assets,schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, meta data,

and services.

[edit] NextBio

A database consolidating high-throughput lifesciences experimental data tagged and connectedvia biomedical ontologies. Nextbio is accessiblevia a search engine interface. Researchers cancontribute their findings for incorporation to thedatabase. The database currently supports geneor protein expression data and is steadily

expanding to support other biological data types.

[edit] Linking Open Data

Datasets in the Linking Open Data project, as ofSept 2008

Class linkages within the Linking Open Data

datasets

The Linking Open Data project is a W3C-ledeffort to create openly accessible, andinterlinked, RDF Data on the Web. The data inquestion takes the form ofRDF Data Sets drawnfrom a broad collection of data sources. There isa focus on the Linked Data style of publishing

RDF on the Web.

[edit] OpenPSI

OpenPSI the (OpenPSI project) is a community

effort to create UK government linked dataservice that supports research. It is acollaboration between the University ofSouthampton and the UK government, lead byOPSI at the National Archive and is supported

by JISC funding.

[edit] Erfgoedplus.be

Erfgoedplus.be ('heritage-plus') is a projectaimed at disclosing all types of heritage from theprovinces of Limburg and Vlaams-Brabant and

the city of Leuven to the public by applyingsemantic web technology. Erfgoedplus.be usesRDF/XML, OWL and SKOS to describerelationships to heritage types, concepts, objects,people, place and time. Data are normalized andenriched by means of thesauri (AAT) and anontology (CIDOC CRM), available for input,

conversion and navigation.


26/29

Erfgoedplus.be is a regional aggregator forEuropeanaLocal (Europeana) and an example ofhow semantic web technology is applied within

the heterogeneous context of heritage.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide

Web in 1989. He created it as an interfacefor the Internet and a way for people toshare information with one another. Berners-Lee disputes the existence ofWeb 2.0,calling it nothing more than meaninglessjargon [source: Register]. Berners-Leemaintains that he intended the World WideWeb to do all the things that Web 2.0 issupposed to do.

Berners-Lee's vision of the future Web is

similar to the concept of Web 3.0. It's calledthe Semantic Web. Right now, the Web'sstructure is geared for humans. It's easy forus to visit a Web page and understand whatit's all about. Computers can't do that. Asearch engine might be able to scan forkeywords, but it can't understand how thosekeywords are used in the context of thepage.

With the Semantic Web, computers will

scan and interpret information on Web pagesusing software agents. These softwareagents will be programs that crawl throughthe Web, searching for relevant information.They'll be able to do that because theSemantic Web will have collections ofinformation called ontologies. In terms ofthe Internet, an ontology is a file that definesthe relationships among a group of terms.For example, the term "cousin" refers to thefamilial relationship between two people

who share one set of grandparents. ASemantic Web ontology might define eachfamilial role like this:

y Grandparent: A direct ancestor twogenerations removed from the subject

y Parent: A direct ancestor onegeneration removed from the subject

y Brother or sister: Someone who sharesthe same parent as the subject

y Nephew or niece: Child of the brotheror sister of the subject

y Aunt or uncle: Sister or brother to aparent of the subject

y Cousin: child of an aunt or uncle of thesubject

For the Semantic Web to be effective,ontologies have to be detailed andcomprehensive. In Berners-Lee's concept,they would exist in the form ofmetadata.Metadata is information included in the codefor Web pages that is invisible to humans,but readable by computers.

Constructing ontologies takes a lot of work.In fact, that's one of the big obstacles theSemantic Web faces. Will people be willingto put in the effort required to makecomprehensive ontologies for their Websites? Will they maintain them as the Websites change? Critics suggest that the task ofcreating and maintaining such complex filesis too much work for most people.

On the other hand, some people really enjoylabeling ortagging Web objects andinformation. Web tags categorize the taggedobject or information. Several blogs includea tag option, making it easy to classifyjournal entries under specific topics. Photosharing sites like Flickr allow users to tagpictures. Google even has turned it into agame: Google Image Labeler pits twopeople against each other in a labelingcontest. Each player tries to create thelargest number of relevant tags for a series

of images. According to some experts, Web3.0 will be able to search tags and labels andreturn the most relevant results back to theuser. Perhaps Web 3.0 will combineBerners-Lee's concept of the Semantic Webwith Web 2.0's tagging culture.


27/29

Even though Web 3.0 is more theory thanreality, that hasn't stopped people fromguessing what will come next. Keep readingto learn about the far-flung future of theWeb

RESOURCE DESCRIPTION

FRAMEWORK

RDF was originally written by Tim Brayin 1998 and updated by Dan Brickley in 2001.Recently it seemed like time for another

update, particularly to relate RDF and theSemantic Web to the cutting edge of web

development.

Building the Semantic Web

On the Semantic Web (SemWeb), computersdo the browsing (and searching, and querying,and...) for us. The SemWeb enables computersto seek out knowledge distributed throughout theWeb, mesh it, and then take action based on it.Take an analogy: the current web is adecentralized platform for distributed

presentations, while the SemWeb is adecentralized platform for distributedknowledge. Resource Description Framework(RDF) is the W3C standard for encodingknowledge.

There, of course, is knowledge on the currentweb, but it's off limits to computers. Consider aWikipedia page, which might convey a lot