Web 3.0 gains focus as we enter the web's 3rd decade
While Hilary Clinton complains that she gets all the hard questions, the country's top technology CEO's continue to be pelted by one hard question at most of their public appearances: What is Web 3.0 going to be? Tim Berners-Lee has offered that Web 3.0 is going to be all about the Semantic Web (or a web based on markup code like RDF or OWL that can be read by machines, not just people, allowing machines to deduce and infer what data is important and share it in real time). Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, stated that he believed Web 3.0 would be defined by applications (api's) that are distributed virally and that work universally with the 'cloud' of data that is retrievable from anywhere. Jerry Yang, found of Yahoo!, sees a Web 3.0 where consumers will create software that services their needs and the division between software producers and consumers will blur.
These visions of a future web have their critics, and many of the models they have talked about over the last several years have failed to materialize in any broad way, but several notable instances of their feasibility are well documented.
My favorite summation of what Web 3.0 might be in the next decade comes from Nova Spivack, founder of Radar Networks, who defines Web 3.0 as the third decade of the Web (2010–2020) during which he suggests several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously, including:
* transformation of the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.
* ubiquitous connectivity, broadband adoption, mobile Internet access and mobile devices;
* network computing, software-as-a-service 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, GRDDL, semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores;
* distributed databases, the "World Wide Database" (enabled by Semantic Web technologies); and
* intelligent applications, natural language processing.[13], machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents
What effect this third decade of the web will have on interface design / engineering will be a topic for next week...