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Facets of Web3.0

November 24th, 2010

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Facets of Web 3.0-

A Boon for Netizens

B.MAHESHWARI

Abstract

With more than 10 years’ work on the Semantic Web’s foundations and more than five years since the phrase became popular, it’s an opportune moment to look at the field’s current state and future opportunities. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL)–the languages that power the Semantic Web–have become standards and new technologies are reaching maturity for embedding semantics in existing Web pages and querying RDF knowledge stores. Something exciting is clearly happening in this area. That is none other than web 3.0

• Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.

Before this people were very curious about ‘Web 3.0’ as they asked to Tim Berner about the full-fledged information of Web 3.0 as Tim Berners-Lee stated in May 2006:

“People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics – everything rippling and folding and looking misty – on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource.”- Tim Berners Lee

Web 2.0 services are now the commoditized platform, not the final product. In a world where a social network, wiki, or social bookmarking service can be built for free and in an instant, what’s next?

Web 2.0 services like digg and YouTube evolve into Web 3.0 services with an additional layer of individual excellence and focus. As an example, funnyordie.com leverages all the standard YouTube Web 2.0 feature sets like syndication and social networking, while adding a layer of talent and trust to them.

A version of digg where experts check the validity of claims, corrected errors, and restated headlines to be more accurate would be the Web 3.0 version. However, I’m not sure if the digg community will embrace that any time soon.

Wikipedia, considered a Web 1.5 service, is experiencing the start of the Web 3.0 movement by locking pages down as they reach completion, and (at least in their German version) requiring edits to flow through trusted experts.

Also of note, is what Web 3.0 leaves behind? Web 3.0 throttles the “wisdom of the crowds” from turning into the “madness of the mobs” we’ve seen all too often, by balancing it with a respect of experts. Web 3.0 leaves behind the cowardly anonymous contributors and the selfish blackhat SEOs that have polluted and diminished so many communities.

Web 3.0 is a return to what was great about media and technology before Web 2.0: recognizing talent and expertise, the ownership of ones words, and fairness. It’s time to evolve, shall we?

Basic Web 3.0 Concepts

Knowledge domains

A knowledge domain is something like Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Politics, the Web, Sociology, Psychology, History, etc. There can be many sub-domains under each domain each having their own sub-domains and so on.

Information vs. Knowledge

To a machine, knowledge is comprehended information (aka new information produced through the application of deductive reasoning to exiting information). To a machine, information is only data, until it is processed and comprehended.

Ontologies

For each domain of human knowledge, an ontology must be constructed, partly by hand [or rather by brain] and partly with the aid of automation tools.

Ontologies are not knowledge nor are they information. They are meta-information. In other words, ontologies are information about information. In the context of the Semantic Web, they encode, using an ontology language, the relationships between the various terms within the information. Those relationships, which may be thought of as the axioms (basic assumptions), together with the rules governing the inference process, both enable as well as constrain the interpretation (and well-formed use) of those terms by the Info Agents to reason new conclusions based on existing information, i.e. to think. In other words, theorems (formal deductive propositions that are provable based on the axioms and the rules of inference) may be generated by the software, thus allowing formal deductive reasoning at the machine level. And given that an ontology, as described here, is a statement of Logic Theory, two or more independent Info Agents processing the same domain-specific ontology will be able to collaborate and deduce an answer to a query, without being driven by the same software.

Inference Engines

In the context of Web 3.0, Inference engines will be combining the latest innovations from the artificial intelligence (AI) field together with domain-specific ontologies (created as formal or informal ontologies by, say, Wikipedia, as well as others), domain inference rules, and query structures to enable deductive reasoning on the machine level.

Info Agents

Info Agents are instances of an Inference Engine, each working with a domain-specific ontology. Two or more agents working with a shared ontology may collaborate to deduce answers to questions. Such collaborating agents may be based on differently designed Inference Engines and they would still be able to collaborate.

Proofs and Answers

The interesting thing about Info Agents that I did not clarify in the original post is that they will be capable of not only deducing answers from existing information (i.e. generating new information [and gaining knowledge in the process, for those agents with a learning function]) but they will also be able to formally test propositions (represented in some query logic) that are made directly or implied by the user. For example, instead of the example I gave previously (in the Wikipedia 3.0 article) where the user asks “Where is the nearest restaurant that serves Italian cuisine” and the machine deduces that a pizza restaurant serves Italian cuisine, the user may ask “Is the moon blue?” or say that the “moon is blue” to get a true or false answer from the machine. In this case, a simple Info Agent may answer with “No” but a more sophisticated one may say “the moon is not blue but some humans are fond of saying ‘once in a blue moon’ which seems illogical to me.”

This test-of-truth feature assumes the use of an ontology language (as a formal logic system) and an ontology where all propositions (or formal statements) that can be made can be computed (i.e. proved true or false) and were all such computations are decidable in finite time. The language may be OWL-DL or any language that, together with the ontology in question, satisfy the completeness and decidability conditions.

“The Future Has Arrived But It’s Not Evenly Distributed”

Currently, Semantic Web (aka Web 3.0) researchers are working out the technology and human resource issues and folks like Tim Berners-Lee, the Noble prize recipient and father of the Web, are battling critics and enlightening minds about the coming human-machine revolution.

The Semantic Web (aka Web 3.0) has already arrived, and Inference Engines are working with prototypical ontologies, but this effort is a massive one, which is why I was suggesting that its most likely enabler will be a social, collaborative movement such as Wikipedia, which has the human resources (in the form of the thousands of knowledgeable volunteers) to help create the ontologies (most likely as informal ontologies based on semantic annotations) that, when combined with inference rules for each domain of knowledge and the query structures for the particular schema, enable deductive reasoning at the machine level.

Definitions and Roadmap

There are several definitions of the web, but usually Web 3.0 is defined as a term, which has been coined with different meanings to describe the evolution of web usage and interaction among the several separate paths.

These include transforming the Web into a database, a move towards making content accessible by multiple non-browser applications, the leveraging of artificial intelligence technologies, the Semantic web, or the Geospatial Web. According to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, “Web 3.0 is a third generation of Internet based Web services, which emphasize m a c h i n e – f a c i l i t a t e d understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.”. The third generation of Internet services is collectively consists of semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents that is known as Artificial Intelligence technologies or Intelligent Web.

According to some experts, “Web 3.0 is characterized and fueled by the successful carriage of artificial intelligence and the web”. While some experts have summarized the definition defining as “Web 3.0 is the next step in the progression of the tubes that are the Internets”.

According to Nova Spivack, the CEO of Radar Networks, one of the leading voices of this new age Internet, “Web 3.0 is a set of standards that turns the Web into one big database.”

Steve, a famous Blog author has defined the term Web 3.0 as, “ Web 3.0 is highly specialized information structures, moderated by a group of personality, validated by the community, and put into context with the inclusion of meta-data through widgets”. While Leiki, the Finland based pioneer company of Semantic Web describes: “Web 3.0 makes the discovery of content streams effortless. It introduces automatic discovery of likeminded users and automatic tagging.”

The term ‘Web 3.0’ was first coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, while it first appeared prominently in early 2006 in a Blog article written by Jeffrey Zeldman in the “Critical of Web 2.0 and associated technologies such as Ajax”.

A ‘more revolutionary’ Web

The term Web 3.0 has became a subject of interest and debate since late 2006 to till date. But no exact definition has been created that everyone accepts it.

Web 3.0 Debates over Definition

Since the origins of the concept of Web 3.0, the debate continues goes on about exactly what the term Web 3.0 means, and what a suitable definition might be. As emerging the new technology, a new definition emerged:

Transforming the Web into a database

Transforming the Web into database is the beginning step towards transforming definition of Web 3.0 when the technology of ‘Data Web’ emerged as structured data records that can be published to the Web in reusable and remotely query able formats, such as XML, RDF and microformats. The Data Web is the initial step in the way of full Semantic web that enables a new level of data integration and application interoperability, which makes the data openly accessible and linkable as Web pages. To make available structured data using RDF is primarily focused in Data Web phase. The full Semantic Web stage will so expand the scope that both structured and semi structured or unstructured content will be widely available in RDF and OWL semantic formats.

An evolutionary path to artificial intelligence

Web 3.0 has also been used to describe the rend of artificial intelligence, which is being popular in the web like a quasi-human fashion. Some cynic believes that it is an unobtainable vision. However, this is being used new technologies on mass level that yields amazing information like making predictions of hit songs from mining information on college music Web sites. There is also debate on the driving force behind Web 3.0. Will it be the intelligent systems, or whether intelligence will emerge in a more organic fashion and how people interact with it?

The realization of the Semantic Web and Service Oriented Architecture

Another debate originates over the artificial intelligence direction in which Web 3.0 can be extent to Semantic web concept. Academic research is going on to develop such reasoning software that must be based on description logic and intelligent agents. These sorts of applications can perform logical reasoning operations through using sets of rules expressing logical relationships between concepts and data on the Web.

But some critics are disagree on the viewpoint, which describes that Semantic Web would be the core of the 3rd generation of the Internet and suggests a formula to summarize Web 3.0.

Web 3.0 has also been associated to a possible hub of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and Semantic web.

Evolution towards 3D

The evolution of 3D technology is also being connected to Web 3.0 as Web 3.0 may be used on massive scale due to its characteristics. In this process Web 3.0 would transform into a series of 3D spaces, taking the concept realized by Second Life expansion. This could open up new ways to connect and collaborate using 3D shared spaces.

Proposed Expanded Definitions of Web 3.0

Nova Spivack has proposed the expanded definition of

Web 3.0 that indulge in itself the collection of various foremost harmonizing technology developments that are growing to a new level of maturity simultaneously includes:

• Ubiquitous Connectivity, broadband adoption, mobile Internet access and mobile devices

• Network computing, s o f t w a r e -a s – a – s e r v i c e business models, Web services interoperability, distributed computing, grid computing and cloud computing

• Open technologies, Open APIs and protocols, open data formats, open-source software platforms and open data (e.g. Creative Commons, Open Data License)

• Open identity, OpenID, open reputation, roaming portable identity and personal data

• The intelligent web, Semantic web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, Semantic application platforms, and statement based data stores.

•Distributed databases, the “World Wide Database” (enabled by Semantic Web technologies)

• Intelligent applications, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, and autonomous agents

Web 3.0 as Different Formats of Web

The Semantic Web

The term ‘Semantic Web’ refers to “Defined” Web that is an alliance of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and others to provide a standard for defining data structures on the Web. Semantic Web refers to the use of XMLtagged data that matches the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

Sometimes it is refers to” Web 3.0,” that is a debatable topic, but in the form of Web 3.0, the main goal of the Semantic Web becomes to identify exact required data that matches the keywords. e.g. if we search Web 3.0 in Google / yahoo / msn or any advance search engines using specific key words, there are millions of web pages appears on the window in which only very few have some information and all other pages are worthless.

Web 3.0 in terms of Semantic Web is the third generation of World Wide Web in which machines an read sites similar to human being and also follows our instructions. For example if you order to check your schedule against the schedules of all the dentists and doctors within a 10-mile radius if follows tour order and provide the appropriate information.

The 3D Web

3-D refers to the three dimensional design that represents the virtual looks of any object from three different sides simultaneously. A user can view the true picture of any building, any location or any object and walk through the location without leaving the computer desk on his/her system. Though these are the virtual pictures but seem to be real. These technologies are extensively being used in a wide range of services like computer games, Virtual Reality (VR) models and Multimedia solutions.

Now, 3-D technology has come on the Internet and has become a new trend of Web. Now user can go house hunting across town or take a tour of the world or can walk through a Second Life– style virtual world, surfing for data and interacting with others in 3D. The 3d web is being used massively in online computer games, virtual world tour, Geospatial engineering, online high tech research, online software development, online shopping, online telecommunication and social networking sites. Google Earth, Wiki Earth, MySpace, You Tube are the biggest examples of 3D web users

The Media-Centric Web

The terms Media-Centric Web refers to the web where users can find true similar graphics and sound on the other media, not just the keywords. E.g. if users searches any favorite movie/ graphics/ music in the search engines, can find the exact desired thing on the other media.

The Pervasive Web

The pervasive web refers the uses of web in the wide range of area in which the web has now been reached not only in computers and cell phones but also in clothing, appliances, and automobiles and much more, e.g. web based bedroom windows that checks weather and self open or close it according to climate.

Web 3.0 in terms of pervasive web refers to those websites, which are going to be transformed into web services and will depict and expand their information to the world.

Overview

As the times goes and he technology enriches, the experts feels to develop some thing better that can be more fruitful, advance, user friendly and intelligent. Thus originates the concept of web 3.0 and now it is taking a handsome shape. We 3.0 have some more features including the feature of Web 2.0.

Web 3.0 sites will only allow collaboration of content generated from an approved pseudo-random sequence of characters. Web 3.0 would have three main objectives:

1- Seeking Information

2- Seeking Validation

3- Seeking entertainment

Seeking Information

Searching information would be more compact in Web 3.0. Till now, the web uses keywords in order to comprehensive data into usable chunks. Search engines index the Internet in proper order and present it to the end user in order of relevance. The users select the information that is nearer to their requirement. Sometimes this becomes a very hectic process. But Web 2.0 goes one step ahead and brought us a change in the basic way of searching. It applies the tags in the searching data e.g. if anyone wants to look for car. He/she types the word in the specified space of the search engine. The search engine displays many webs, but if the user type BMW cars, it displays all the relevant site only\y related to BMW cars. So BMW works as a tag.

Web 3.0 will be more advance in searching the information for example of Cars, Web 3.0 uses the further research beyond the engines, it also uses the sub search engines that would provide more compact information and user can find the nearest desired data. It would go to all major categories like pictures, videos, blog posts, news articles, commerce etc. Each of these would happen because of RSS feed so that user can get alerts when something new would add to his/her search profile.

Seeking Validation

If the user wants to go the news not the information, it will work in a different way. It would provide the exact data what user wants. It would also search the available people on the net. The user have to type the words what he/she wants to access, Web 3.0 would provide the relevant information in order of its proximity, algorithms, tagging, and validation through user voting.

Seeking Entertainment

Entertainment, the most popular trend of Web 2.0 would be more advance in Web 3.0 as it would be based around the sect of the personality. People Search will replace the social networks that are most popular fashion in this generation of web. For searching about any person, just type the name and all the information related to regarding person would be displayed with some attached tags. If would display the total wiki profile,

In which all the data would be specified whether the user would have created it or anyone else. All the related deeds would also show in the profile. Then People would be more universal rather than now.

The looks and shape of the blogging would be also changed; the current weblogs would be converted in to Microblogging. People will be able to blog from anywhere, without having to spend hours writing a properly formatted post. Web 3.0 will see a more complete integration between devices like cell phones and the World Wide Web. Posting pictures, videos and text from anywhere, anytime would be more tussles free.

Commerce

Here the terms of commerce means the criteria of earning that will be more advance, but the whole criteria would not primarily change. The product will carry on to sell online. Conversational advertising” and detrainment will take the place of stock ads and promotions. Sect of personality and their sponsorships will also be more specific as the advertisement companies will be narrower because of categorizing of the people.

The entire advertising landscape will change; the ultra specialized sub engines will search the tightly focused target audience to selling the product.

Contextual advertisement will take second seat to product placements on sites, search results and sub engines.

Web 3.0 Design

REST, AJAX, Silverlight, Widget Enabled, Taggable, Searchable everything…

RSS. A Web 3.0 Driver

In the coming ten years RSS and its related technologies will become the single most important Internet technology because of its specific quality to development of the new web as it’s really very simple. Any person who has a little bit knowledge of coding can generate 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, where machine read content like human beings then RSS will be its eyes. RSS technology is still in vast uses especially in the online news portals. The entire business models have already being created around aggregating metadata. IGoogle, MyIndiaTims and Netvibes allow the users to create their own personal homepage, drawing much of its content from RSS feeds that users select.

The trend of RSS tool will be increased in the future in which user can include a host of data-points. Each blog post, the future microblogging feed can be personalize according to users’ desire as every picture, every video clip, every music will be searchable, taggable and XML based collaborate. The biggest example of it’s already exists in a web portal named MyIndiaTims.com’. The real power of Web 3.0 will be in the used in creating data and transferring it effectively. Candidate Web 3.0 technologies Web 3.0 would be used in various technologies of computer and Internet. Here is the list of web 3.0 users:

• Artificial intelligence

• Automated reasoning

• Cognitive architecture

• Composite applications

• Distributed computing

•Knowledge representation

•Ontology (computer science)

•Recombinanttext

• Scalable vector graphics.

• Semantic Web

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