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 been
coined with different meanings to describe the
evolution of Web usage and interaction among
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. Before going for
the web 3.0 first let’s glance the overview of
what are the weak points of web 1.0 & web 2.0.
The Semantic Web is an evolving
development of the World Wide Web in which
the meaning (semantics) of information and
services on the web is defined, making it
possible for the web to "understand" and satisfy
the requests of people and machines to use the
web content. It derives from World Wide Web
Consortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee's
vision 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 that
are yet to be implemented or realized. Other
elements of the semantic web are expressed in
formal specifications. Some of these include
XML, XML Schema, Resource Description
Framework it’s a variety of data interchange
formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples),
and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and
the 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 we’re all getting comfortable
with
the hyper-connected world of Web 2.0, the next
wave of technologies collectively known as
“Web3.0” will transform communications and
publicrelations once again. An intelligent Web
3.0will expand and energize today’s social-
media conversation, providing the meaning,
background and context of any question or
conversation. It will dramatically accelerate
communication, increase the productivity of PR
professionals and enhance knowledge transfer
and understanding in ways that will
revolutionize every information-based
communication business. Why should we care?
Because in short order Web 3.0 will start to
influence how we all do our jobs. New ways of
finding and sharing information are already
making previous media research, contact and
monitoring tools look antiquated. And new
intelligent measurement technologies soon will
require all marketing and PR professionals to
start demonstrating quantifiable return-on-
investment (ROI). Communicators who fail to
master the new Web 3.0 tools or learn to speak
the quantitative and analytic language of
business will rapidly fall behind. This Cision
White Paper will tell you what you need to
know about the new environment by answering
the critical question, “What is Web 3.0 and what
does it mean to me?” The Third Generation of
the Web The first generation of the web, from
about 1990 to 2000, was characterized by static
HTML web sites and early search engines such
as Yahoo and Altavista. The second phase, from
2000 to the present, has seen the rise of Google
and the Web 2.0 social media revolution. In the
Web 3.0 era, social media will vastly increase
connections and conversation, and search
engines will become more intelligent by an
order of magnitude. Today, search algorithms
identify documents on the web containing key
words. In the next generation, all the data within
those documents will be identified, mined,
linked and presented to provide specific answers
to the searcher’s questions. Natural-language
“semantic” queries will provide exact answers to
your questions, backed up by information that
explains the answers Tim Berners-Lee, the
computer scientist credited with inventing the
World Wide Web, has said Web 3.0
technologies “will become capable of analyzing
all the data on the Web – the content, links, and
transactions between people and computers. A
‘Semantic Web,’ which should make this
possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the
day-today mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and
our daily lives will be handled by machines
talking to machines.” Communication
Intelligence = Intelligent Communication Web
3.0 will automate and manage most of today’s
time-consuming tactical work, freeing
communication professionals to use media
intelligence more strategically and productively.
It will put more and better intelligence at your
fingertips, dramatically increasing your
effectiveness in situations where good
information—especially the ability to access and
leverage it in real time—equals power. The
OpenCalais project (www.OpenCalais.com) is
already doing just that. Open Calais goes beyond
key words by tagging all the data within web-
based documents, providing information,
context and insight into them. By linking all the
contextual data in millions of documents in a
massive public database, Open Calais is
providing the foundation for the next generation
of intelligent search. It will enable faster and
better real-time understanding of issues, news
and the media environment that PR
professionals must navigate as they deliver more
strategic counsel and results. Web 3.0 will also
revolutionize monitoring and trend analysis. In
the Web 1.0 era, trend analysis consisted mainly
of looking at numbers of clicks, impressions and
visitors. Today’s Web 2.0 tools—such as the
Radian6 monitoring engine integrated into
Cision’s social media dashboard— go beyond
traffic measurement to assess and analyze
conversation and engagement levels. They rank
the influence of organizations and individuals
based on the number of web-based comments
they attract, on the number of other sites
providing links to them, and on other social-
engagement metrics. Web 3.0 will extend these
capabilities into real-time monitoring and
analysis, ranking the influence and importance
of individuals, ideas, issues, organizations and
the web sites where they reside.
In the past 20 years, the Web has
developed from a niche technology to a mass-
media providing new forms of communication
and interaction between people. Web 1.0 was a
technical platform – a common set of protocols
and formats that allowed machines to
communicate and present information from a
remote server to a local user. Web 2.0 used the
technical platform of Web 1.0 to build more
interactive web sites where users contribute and
share content and become creators and owners
of content rather than passive consumers.
Web 2.0 has reached the limits of what can be
achieved on the technical platform of Web 1.0;
new technologies must be put in place to provide
a fundamentally new technical infrastructure, or
platform, to enable the next generation of
innovative web applications. Key to this Web
3.0 platform is a set of protocols and formats
that allow the communication of subjects and
people's perceptions of those subjects between
computers, and that enable new applications to
be built that allow users to create, share and
integrate information and knowledge
seamlessly.
The new Web platform will no longer be
about using a browser window to retrieve
information from one server and then from
another server. Nor will this platform be based
on portals or search engines that provide us with
links to pages. The new Web will be based on
applications that bring us relevant information
from all across the Internet and bind it together
for us, presenting us with our own personal view
created from semantic structures taken from
sources we trust and new sources we want to
explore. This platform will also allow us to see
authoritative content from trusted sources
alongside commentary from our peers and will
enable us to contribute to debate and form new
social networks focused around the subjects and
semantic structures we are interested in.
Imagine an application that knows all about
music. It knows about all the great composers
and their works, it knows about the
performances of those works and the recordings
of them, it knows about every gig that the
Beatles ever played and it knows about all the
future gigs of all the Beatles tribute bands out
there, including the ones in you area in the next
month.
Not only that but it is able to connect you to
other classical-music-loving Beatles fans out
there so that you can discuss your shared
passions, and it is able to act as a channel,
constantly receiving updates from all around the
Web so that any time you return to that aspect of
your life you can instantly see what is happening
around the world in that area. It also acts as a
broadcast channel on which our own comments,
thoughts and new insights can be made available
to anyone who is interested and which doesn't
rely on artificial measures of popularity such as
links in and out of pages.
In the rest of this paper we discuss the basic
concepts of the Web 3.0 platform. Remember
that we are talking about the technical platform
for a new generation of web applications, we can
only start to guess at the applications that could
result from a combination of the platform we are
proposing and the creative genius of web
developers everywhere.
WEB 3.0
Definition- Highly specialized information
silos, 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 be
like having a personal assistant who knows
practically everything about you and can access
all the information on the Internet to answer any
question. Many compare Web 3.0 to a giant
database. While Web 2.0 uses the Internet to
make connections between people, Web 3.0 will
use the Internet to make connections with
information. Some experts see Web 3.0
replacing 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 available
to you, you'd have to do a lot of research to find
the best vacation options. You'd need to research
potential destinations and decide which one is
right for you. You might visit two or three
discount travel sites and compare rates for
flights and hotel rooms. You'd spend a lot of
your time looking through results on various
search engine results pages. The entire process
could take several hours.
According to ome Internet experts, with Web
3.0 you'll be able to sit back and let the Internet
do all the work for you. You could use a search
service and narrow the parameters of your
search. The browser program then gathers,
analyzes and presents the data to you in a way
that makes comparison a snap. It can do this
because Web 3.0 will be able to understand
information on the Web.
Right now, when you use a Web search
engine, the engine isn't able to really understand
your search. It looks for Web pages that contain
the keywords found in your search terms. The
search engine can't tell if the Web page is
actually relevant for your search. It can only tell
that the keyword appears on the Web page. For
example, 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 only
the keywords in your search, but also interpret
the context of your request. It would return
relevant results and suggest other content related
to your search terms. In our vacation example, if
you typed "tropical vacation destinations under
$3,000" as a search request, the Web 3.0
browser might include a list of fun activities or
great restaurants related to the search results. It
would treat the entire Internet as a massive
database of information available for any query.
Web 3.0 Approaches
You never know how future technology will
eventually turn out. In the case of Web 3.0, most
Internet experts agree about its general traits.
They believe that Web 3.0 will provide users
with richer and more relevant experiences. Many
also believe that with Web 3.0, every user will
have a unique Internet profile based on that
user's browsing history. Web 3.0 will use this
profile to tailor the browsing experience to each
individual. That means that if two different
people each performed an Internet search with
the same keywords using the same service,
they'd receive different results determined by
their individual profiles.   year cycles. In the Web's first decade,
The technologies and software required for
this kind of application aren't yet mature.
Services like TiVO and Pandora provide
individualized content based on user input, but
they both rely on a trial-and-error approach that
isn't as efficient as what the experts say Web 3.0
will be. More importantly, both TiVO and
Pandora have a limited scope -- television shows
and music, respectively -- whereas Web 3.0 will
Involve all the information on the Internet.
Some experts believe that the foundation for
Web 3.0 will be application programming
interfaces (APIs). An API is an interface
designed to allow developers to create
applications that take advantage of a certain set
of resources. Many Web 2.0 sites include APIs
that give programmers access to the sites' unique
data and capabilities. For example, Facebook's
API allows developers to create programs that
use Facebook as a staging ground for games,
quizzes, product reviews and more.
One Web 2.0 trend that could help the
development of Web 3.0 is the mashup. A
mashup is the combination of two or more
applications into a single application. For
example, a developer might combine a program
that lets users review restaurants with Google
Maps. The new mashup application could show
not only restaurant reviews, but also map them
out so that the user could see the restaurants'
locations. Some Internet experts believe that
creating mashups will be so easy in Web 3.0 that
anyone 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:
 According to technology expert and
entrepreneur Nova Spivack, the
development of the Web moves in 10-
most of the development focused on the
back end, or infrastructure, of the Web.
Programmers created the protocols and
code languages we use to make Web
 pages. In the second decade, focus
shifted to the front end and the era of
Web 2.0 began. Now people use Web
pages as platforms for other
applications. They also create mashups
and experiment with ways to make Web
experiences more interactive. We're at
the end of the Web 2.0 cycle now. The
next cycle will be Web 3.0, and the
focus will shift back to the back end.
Programmers will refine the Internet's
infrastructure to support the advanced
capabilities of Web 3.0 browsers. Once
that phase ends, we'll enter the era of
Web 4.0. Focus will return to the front
end, and we'll see thousands of new
programs that use Web 3.0 as a
foundation [source: Nova Spivack].
 The Web will evolve into a three-
dimensional environment. Rather than a
Web 3.0, we'll see a Web 3D.
Combining virtual reality elements with
the persistent online worlds of massively
multiplayer online roleplaying games
(MMORPGs), the Web could become a
digital landscape that incorporates the
illusion of depth. You'd navigate the
Web either from a first-person
perspective or through a digital
representation of yourself called an
avatar (to learn more about an avatar's
perspective, read How the Avatar
Machine Works).
 The Web will build on developments in
distributed computing and lead to true
artificial intelligence. In distributed
computing, several computers tackle a
large processing job. Each computer
handles a small part of the overall task.
Some people believe the Web will be
able to think by distributing the
workload across thousands of computers
and referencing deep ontologies. The
Web will become a giant brain capable
of analyzing data and extrapolating new
ideas based off of that information.
 The Web will extend far beyond
computers and cell phones. Everything
from watches to television sets to
clothing will connect to the Internet.
Users will have a constant connection to
the Web, and vice versa. Each user's
software agent will learn more about its
respective user by electronically
observing his or her activities. This
might lead to debates about the balance
between individual privacy and the
benefit of having a personalized Web
browsing experience.
 The Web will merge with other forms of
entertainment until all distinctions
between the forms of media are lost.
Radio programs, television shows and
feature films will rely on the Web as a
delivery system.
It's too early to tell which (if any) of these future
versions of the Web will come true. It may be
that the real future of the Web is even more
extravagant than the most extreme predictions.
We can only hope that by the time the future of
the 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 the
Amazon E-Commerce service) and
scraping/mashup technologies, gives us a way to
treat any web site as a web service that exposes
its information. The information, or to be more
exact the data, becomes open. In turn, this
enables software to take advantage of this
information collectively. With that, the Web
truly becomes a database that can be queried and
remixed.
Why Web Sites should offer Web Services
There are several good reasons why Web
Sites (online retailers in particular), should think
about offering an API. The most important
reason is control. Having an API will make
scrapers unnecessary, but it will also allow
tracking of who is using the data - as well as
how and why. Like Amazon, sites can do this in
a way that fosters affiliates and drives the traffic
back to their sites.
The old perception is that closed data is a
competitive advantage. The new reality is that
open data is a competitive advantage. The
likely solution then is to stop worrying about
protecting information and instead start charging
for it, by offering an API. Having a small fee per
API call (think Amazon Web Services) is likely
to be acceptable, since the cost for any given
subscriber of the service is not going to be high.
But there is a big opportunity to make money on
volume. This is what Amazon is betting on with
their Web Services strategy and it is probably a
good bet.
Seeking Information
The web as it is now uses keywords in order
to aggregate data into usable chunks. Search
engines index the internet en masse and present
it to the end user in order of relevance. They
determine relevance by using complex
algorithms. Web 2.0 brought us a change in the
basic way that we search, tagging. With tagging
you could describe anything as anything and
search 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 you
are searching for information on Cars, for
example, you would use the search engine as
you normally would, but your results would be
more specialized subengines. I would find BMW
Search or Kia Search. From there, I would be
able to dig deeper and find items that have been
tagged as relating to BMW and sort them into
their major categories (pictures, videos, blog
posts, news articles, commerce etc…) Each of
these could be captured as an RSS feed so that I
can be alerted when something new is added to
by search profile.
The way the engines would order these items
would be a combination of the old and the new.
The strong algorithms that are currently used
would be kept, but in addition some weight
would 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 for
information, 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 slightly
different. Along with the specialized search
engines, People Search would be available. You
could type in what you were looking for,
“conservative viewpoint on Darwin” for
example and it would pull up results ordered by
relevance (algorithms), tagging, and validation
through user voting.
Seeking Entertainment
StumbleUpon may be the closest analogy to
how we will be entertained in Web 3.0. You fill
out a profile, define your tags and then flip the
channel. It will be a lot like services like Joost as
well, where you can interact with the content
that 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 would
be based around cults of personality? Imagine a
world where you could search a name and bring
up that person, all the social networks they
belong to, and produce a feed around them.
In this world, the idea of “Social Networks”
will be completely replaced by People Search. If
I put a proper name into the search engine of
Web 3.0 it would provide the running profile of
my presence on the web; it would show
everything in the webosphere that has been
tagged as belonging to me, ordered by
community validation and relevance. Once
again, this would not necessarily be a simple
search. In this Wikiality my page would contain
both information that I have written about
myself and information that has been written
about me.
Meme: Everyone will have Page Rank.
Related Companies: Explode, Spock, The Gorb,
Orangeply.
Blogging, Websites and Everything Else
Now that I have found the page that I
am looking for, what will those pages look like?
Personal Pages
While I don’t believe that classical blogging
will ever disappear, alongside it will be a vast
increase in Microblogging. People want to 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 (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 personal
interpretations of all the data available on the
web, plugged into these pages through a
growing array of widgets and shared with the
world.
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 media
is presented while distinctly alter the way
products are sold online. “Conversational
advertising” and Advertainment will take the
place of stock ads and promotions. Cults of
personality and their sponsorships will also
become driving forces in a world where the line
between advertising and entertainment blurs.
The entire advertising landscape will change, as
companies do their best to target the niche
audiences produced by the inclusion of People
Search and ultra specialized subengines.
Contextual advertisement will take second seat
to product placements on sites, search results
and subengines relating to the messages that
companies are trying to get out.
Meme: We are all our own brands
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 their
enabling technologies. If it was not for the Wiki
and the idea of “community voting” then Web
2.0 would never have occurred. Going back
further, CMS technology along with the Forum
were the first glimmers that something new was
on the horizen for the web. Even before the
concept of “blogging” entered the collective
conscious, online journaling existed. The only
way to understand a movement is through its
technology, and many of the technologies that
will enable Web 3.0 are currently here.
Even beyond its formal definition, what Web
3.0 will mean for the world is that the internet
while be transformed into a massive, universally
searchable database and our place in it will be to
organize this well-spring of information into
slices that are palatable to us. One of the main
organization tools that we will use are widgets
and 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 technologies
will be seen as the single most important internet
technology since Tim Berners-Lee and Robert
Cailliau created the World Wide Web at CERN
around 17 years ago.
Real Simple Syndication is crucial to the
development of the new web because it’s just
that, really simple. Anyone with a Wordpress
account or a tiny bit of coding knowledge 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
computer agents read content like human beings
do — then RSS will be its eyes (or at least its
corrective lenses). Already, entire business
models are being created around aggregating
meta-data. Netvibes allows you to create your
own personal homepage, drawing much of its
content from RSS feeds that you select. iGoogle
does the exact same thing, and a host of others
are jumping on the concept that the easiest way
to give users relevant content is to give them the
ability to define relevance for themselves.
In this future, RSS will be extended to include
a 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 online
persona is apt to become an entry in it. If you
look at technologies like FOAF you will see
what I mean. FOAF is a project founded by
Libby Miller and Dan Brickley. You can think
of it as RSS but for Social Networks. It takes
common profile data and puts it into a form that
makes it cross-compatible with other social
networks. Once Search Engines are properly
able to manage meta-data like RSS, FOAF and
the half-dozen other protocols out there and
present it more intuitively the concept of a truly
universal internet is well without our grasp.
Defining Context
Finally, RSS enables users to define their own
contexts for information. Imagine a word where
creating a mashup between Google maps and
your Twitter account was no more difficult than
sticking a few widgets together. This type of
widgetizing of the web is not too far off, already
Yahoo has a mashup creator — Yahoo Pipes
that lets you do just this. Web 3.0’s real power
will be in the ability to create data and transfer it
effectively, even now we are well on our way.
Meme: The transportable web
Related Products: iGoogle, Netvibes, Yahoo
Pipes
Software Agents And Expert Systems
Human beings are intrinsically lazy creatures.
That might not sit well with you, but intuitively
you know its true. OK, fine, for the sake of
discussion lets exchange the word lazy for
efficient. Feel better now? Now for a few
definitions to seed our discussion:
Expert System: An expert system, also known as
a knowledge based system, is a computer
program that contains some of the subject-
specific knowledge, and contains the knowledge
and analytical skills of one or more human
experts.
If you have ever had a sniffle and gone to
WebMD for advice, then you understand what
an Expert System is. The short version is that it
is a software agent that takes user input, runs it
through a knowledge database and then
generates an output using fancy technologies
like neural nets (which since this is not a hard
science blog, is beyond the scope of this post).
Ten years from now, Expert Systems won’t only
be designed for general cases, but will be able to
be easily generated to understand individuals
tastes. Already we see contextual advertising
and contextual search, but what if you could
extend this concepts to a web browser or to your
mobile phone. Imagine a world where your
computer would generate a profile, a meme map
about you based on your interactions with the
web and refine your experience based on this
map.
If you used a search engine, your results would
be weighted based not only on the standard Web
3.0 metrics, but also on “what you care about” as
defined by all your previous interactions with
this particular search engine and all of this
would be completely transparent.
It is a world defined not by the strength of a
arbitrary search algorithm, but one of mass
personalization where every search that you
make and every result that you decide to follow
up on means that your next search will be more
and 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, a
software agent is a piece of software that acts
for a user or other program in a relationship of
agency. Such “action on behalf of” implies the
authority to decide when (and if) action is
appropriate. The idea is that agents are not
strictly invoked for a task, but activate
themselves.
Programs that surf the web for you will
become more and more powerful. In a world
where your personal profile containing your
likes, dislikes and search history is as easy to
upload 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 a
new camera. Since you have personal meme
map containing a listing of all the cameras you
have ever searched and this list is ordered by the
frequency of those searches, you can set your
software agent to continue this search for you in
your absence. When you return home you would
be presented with a list of sites ordered by price,
relevance (to you) and features that have been
found based on your preference. What you do
with this list is fed back into the system,
improving future searches.
Meme: Self-serve search is history…
Related Projects: MIT Media Lab
Software Agents and Expert systems will be
our off line access point to Web 3.0.
The Privacy Caveat
Reputation management, Meme management
and Data privacy will be the major issues of the
day. When you have a world where everything
that you do is being written into an RSS feed (in
one form or another), the ability to protect this
feed will be crucial. New industries that are
currently being developed will be expanded on.
Professional and Semi-Professional netizens will
hire SEO experts to ensure that their reputations
are being properly managed.
Where once there was only an industry for
corporate level intelligence and brand
protection, bloggers with a vested interest in
how they are perceived online (the Robert
Scobles and Mike Arringtons of the world) will
join into the mix.
Also, lets not forget the improvement in
privacy features. The ability to block certain
actions from being indexed, or limit the access
to your profile by third party sources will be the
next big push in internet security and privacy.
Meme: Reputation hacking / Reputation gaming
Related Products: RepuTrace
The Future Of Blogging
If there is any concept that has become a part
of the daily life of the average netizen, it’s the
idea of the blog. In the last ten years, blogging
has developed from HTML entries on a personal
webpage, to hosed journaling sites like “Live
Journal” to the pseudo-journalistic, CMS based
juggernaut it has become.
What does the future hold for blogging? It’s
impossible to truly know, but as the web is
currently developing it looks like what we
consider blogging will become more rich and
technologies will improve to the point where our
entire lives can be streamed online.
Microblogging
Microblogging will be the critical change in
the way we write in Web 3.0. Imagine a world
where your mobile phone, your email, and you
television could all produce feedback that could
easily be pushed to any or all blogging
platforms. If you take a picture from your smart-
phone, it would be automatically tagged, bagged
and forwarded to your “lifestream”. If you rated
a television show that you were watching, your
review would be forwarded into the stream.
This is the type of seamless integration that
will finally bring the concept of blogging to the
masses. Posts will become shorter and more
topical, the world of rehashing the meme will be
replaced by one where life and news generation
go hand in hand. Blogging won’t be a hobby
reserved for internet enthusiasts, but a past time
for the MySpace generation.
Of course, the allure of any individual blog
would be much more limited. As the popularity
of micro-blogging explodes, more and more
basically “unreadable” blog will start to populate
the blogosphere. It’s not hard to imagine a world
where the vast majority of your posts amount to,
“stuck in traffic, ugh…”
 Fortunately, microblogging also opens up the
world to new opportunities. Live blogging, a
technique usually reserved for important events,
would become common. If you can’t actually be
at a conference, pictures, video and commentary
could be pushed to you in real time. The entire
world would become an Op-Ed piece.
Refined searching methods would also
transform blog writers into brands themselves.
Since everything would be happening in near
real-time, it’s the writer who can get to the event
and convey it most convincingly that will draw
the 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
RSS Integration
Web 3.0 will be the age of the RSS. Web
services will enable you to blog from anywhere,
and RSS will enable you to combine all of these
divergent feeds into one coherent picture. Blogs
themselves will be reduced to a stream of
consciousness interspersed with longer,
traditional news pieces. Where once we could
only hope to get one or two posts written a day,
it won’t be strange to have two dozen posts in
one afternoon on a Web 3.0 enabled blog.
If you want to take a peek into the future, look
at web services like Twitter or Facebook
status.These streams only ask for one line worth
of information describing exactly what you are
doing at the moment. As a result, they provide
extremely concise, constantly updated
information. Now that you have the ability to
stream these services through RSS, the amount
of information that you can easily generate from
anywhere that you have mobile phone or web
access as exploded.
Think of your blog as a combination off all the
pseudo-blogging tools that you will be using in a
few years. Your Flickr feed and your Jaiku
account, your Upcoming calendar and the latest
Google maps mashup. Your blog will, in short,
be a living, breathing approximation to who you
are.
Meme: My blog knows more about me than my
friends do.
Related Companies: iGoogle, Netvibes
Choosing Not To Blog
As blogging becomes more invasive, a
common societal backlash will be those who
simply refuse to do it. Even if they do blog, it
will be from within walled gardens (like social
networks) that they can tightly control.
Generally, people are more than willing to give
information out online, as long as they are given
the option to make that information private. In
Web 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.
 Mobile Phones
 Video Game Consoles
 Smart Watches
 Pedometers
 Your Local Gym
If it produces data, it is likely that there will
be a method to upload that data. If data can be
uploaded into a universal format (like RSS) it
will be able to be pushed into whichever
receptacle you deem appropriate.
Meme: Is there anywhere that we aren’t
connected?
Related Projects: Lifebits
Advertising
If you take a look at the evolution of online
advertising in the last decade you will see a
market that has evolved from purely banner
advertising to painful pop-ups to the rich array
of advertising alternatives that we currently
tolerate. What will the future look like? We will
seem a movement towards blurring the lines
between 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 the
different publishing options that are currently
coming into fashion. As our ability to produce
new content and promote this content improves,
the move will be from purely text options to
richer media like podcasting and video blogging.
Podcasting
Ease of production, increased quality and the
creation of more strongly branded Podcasting
networks will mark the next evolution in
Podcasting. Networks like TWiT and PodTech
are prime examples of this movement. As genres
become more tightly defined, PodCasters — at
least those who aspire towards a wide
distribution — will realize that combining their
content will allow them to scale their operations
to the point where advertisers will be much more
willing to take them seriously.
Adplacements
The first and probably most common form of
advertising that will define Podcasting in Web
3.0 are pre and post-roll advertising. Since
content will be longer, and it will be streamed
continuously, podcasting will more closely
resemble terrestrial radio stations. As such, these
podcasting networks will be able to attract
advertisers who have a specific interest in
courting the extremely specialized niches of
most podcasts.
Advertising itself will have to be redesigned to
properly exploit a listening audience that is so
deeply segmented. At present, most advertising
is designed for audiences with little knowledge
of the technical specifications of products;
however, listeners of — for example — tech
podcasts may be turned off by advertisers who
they feel produce patronizing content.
Advertising will have to become more
sophisticated and provide more value by both
entertaining 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 with
contextual advertising designed for rich media
content, startups like LiveRail are also taking a
similar approach. These contextual ads will
likely take the form of pre and post-roll
advertising as well as ads placed inside the
content itself.
The current technical barriers are that the
software needed to actually transcribe the
podcast content such that keywords can be
extracted is in its infancy. Web 3.0 will mark a
substantial improvement in audio analytics, and
will enable the use of contextual advertising.
The major sociological hurdle is how to place
advertising without distracting from the content.
Right now, most people are used to ad banners
and have learned to ignore them. When it comes
to rich media content these ads will be
impossible to ignore. Since all of this content
will streamed it won’t be long before software is
developed to strip these ads from the rich media
content itself.
Alternate Advertising
Portal Advertising
While the vast majority of podcasts will be
distributed through content distribution systems
like iTunes, there will still be a substantial
amount of viewers who get their content straight
from the media portals themselves. Instead of
placing advertising inside of the content itself,
an alternative method may be to place the ads
around the content. This is especially true in
services that use specialized flash players to
deliver their content. Text based advertising
might be a way to move into a new media while
still retaining the strengths of a previous one.
Product Placement
Like radio before it, as Podcasts begin to
produce “personalities” the move towards
product placement will only increase. It has
always been more effective to have a “real
person” promote a product than to do so through
traditional advertising. That’s why sponsorship
contracts are so lucrative. That brings up the
idea of the advertorial, an idea that has recently
come over from traditional media into the
blogosphere.
Conversational Media
As readers, writers and entrepreneurs we are
conditioned to filter out that which, “does not
matter”. About fifteen minutes after the banner
ad was created, sometime near the dawn of time,
it was added to that list. As a result, your
average web surfer does not even “see” ads, let
alone respond to them in any of the ways that
advertisers would prefer us to.
Click Thru Rate is not the king of the hill any
longer, advertisers need to be sure that they are
getting their message across. As a result, new
modes of getting the attention of an increasingly
jaded public have to be devised.
The Advetorial
Conversational Media involves generating
buzz through linking an idea (meme) to
endorsers that have credibility in associated
fields. An example would be a be sports
bloggers being quoted as describing in what
situations they have been called on to, “Just Do
It!” and how that has positively affected their
lives.
The way this media works is to use cults of
personality to add creditability to claims made
about a product or brand. This is done not
through a clear endorsement, but through
“discussing” a topic of the sponsors choosing.
Of course, this is most effective when this topic
is a registered trademark of the company doing
the sponsorship.
This is a wildly effective way of turning an
incredibly boring topic into something worthy of
discussion. This conversation will occasionally
become a meme, causing other bloggers to start
using the phrase and linking ideas of trust and
creditability back to the advertiser who devised
it.
Meme: I blog therefore I ad.
Related Concepts: Endorsements
All Press Is Good
Conversational Media is one of those trends
that works regardless of how you slice it. If
people blindly believe the endorsers (as we
occasional do when we see quotes from movie
reviewers) then the catch phrase becomes
associated with warm feelings, and the company
sees a small spike in customer contentment and
brand recognition.
If things go horribly wrong, brands that are
interesting but have a hard time evoking the
passion of the masses (Microsoft) get their 15
minutes in the limelight. Everyone involved in
the controversy gets a bit of a traffic boost, and
three days letter the blogosphere forgets why it
was angry to begin with. It also creates
evangelists, there is nothing like a controversy to
drive people away from the fence.
All in all, at worse it can temporarily hurt PR
while substantially improving brand cohesion
for the people who like your company. It also
greatly improves exposure of the idea, and has
built 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 dominant
in the Web 3.0 culture, they will need to apply
checks and balances to the way that they “use”
their celebrity. Public trust is a finite thing, and
once you lose it you can’t get it back very easily.
Publishers and advertisers will need to strike a
balance between the needs of a particular ad
campaign, and the loss of creditability
associated with paid endorsements. I think
Robert Scoble said it best, do whatever you want
but if you don’t want to leave yourself open to
attack — disclose it.
Niche Marketing
For PodCasts, advertisers will have the
advantage of being able to target very specific
niches. Clever companies will be able to use this
fact to substantially increase their conversion
rates by creating cheaper advertisements geared
towards describing the added benefits of their
products over their competitors. In a lot of way,
Web 3.0 advertising will more closely resemble
television advertising in the 1950s. Companies
will rely heavily on product placement and
informational 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 of
lower and lower conversion rates, the future of
online advertising for blogs and other
information portals will take on a “pay for time”
model. Instead of advertisers paying for the
number of clicks, they will contract bloggers out
for particular periods of time. Depending on the
placement of the ads, and the nature of the
advertisement, the advertisers will pay a flat fee.
The contracts will be renewed should the
blogger maintain a high enough conversion rate.
Text Link Ads currently follows a similar
model, offering a residual for the right to sell
text links on your site.
Alternate Forms
As blogging becomes a more important
medium, direct sales of advertising will become
more common. Major companies will develop
simple ways to price advertising based on traffic
and “popularity” statistics. Using this, they will
be able to more easily treat bloggers in the same
way that they treat other more mainstream news
sources, purchasing advertising space for blogs
that meet specific demographic criteria.
The biggest enabling technology for such a
change in how advertising operates will be in the
ability to match companies to bloggers with
minimum friction. Currently, selling advertising
directly to companies requires a substantial
amount of effort. In Web 3.0, the system will be
made 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 specifically
on rich media advertising. Text based Ads and
banners will continue to become “prettier” and
the biggest change will be the ability to
“bookmark” ads for later viewing. As
advertising more closely resembles
entertainment, people will want the ability to go
back and look at their favorite ads. More notable
than banner ads, however, will be the future of
video advertising.
As it stands, the line between advertising and
entertainment has already blurred. In Web 3.0,
this line will simply cease to exist. Advertising
will be such that it is completely
indistinguishable from entertainment. Ads will
be designed to make brands memorable, and
drive people to seek out more information for
themselves. Viral marketing will come to the
fore, as advertisers attempt to tap the huge
number of eyeballs that the internet offers them.

Success in the new advertising model is in the

number of people that you can get to actually
view your ads. Assuming that only a tiny
fraction of people will ever be converted by
advertising, developing extremely viral,
extremely popular content will maximize the
number of people available to convert.

Look forward to advertising networks on

portals like YouTube and Joost, and longer
advertising blocks that seem more like short
films than commercials.
Meme: Sell the sizzle, not the steak.
Related Products: YouTube, Joost
Media
No matter how technology evolves there will
always be a constant, people want to be
entertained. In this Web 3.0 world,
entertainment will become far more interactive
and a much stronger part of our daily lives.
Whether it is video, audio or advertising exciting
new methods of viewing media are in
development.
YouTube TV
As it stands, people are watching less TV
because of services like YouTube. As people
have less time to sit in front of a set-top box and
spend more of their leisure time sitting in front
of their computer screens, greater shifts seem
almost inevitable. This paradigm shift
notwithstanding no matter what direction our
society moves, we are always looking for
entertainment. Systems like YouTube and now
Joost will become more popular. Their main
advantage is that they allow us to consume
entertainment in small, manageable chucks and
then get back to work.
Actively Entertained
The future of the web will provide us with
more dense media. Instead of passive
entertainment (which will still have its place),
Web 3.0 will see the introduction of Active
Media. The next time you are watching reruns of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer you might be
presented with a side-panel containing other,
similar programs.

You’ll have a social network available to you

of others who are watching the episode at the
same time. You will be able to find programs
with similar actors, similar styles, similar
lengths or maybe something as obscure as
similar musical scores. You’ll have statistical
information available to you like the highest
rated episodes and you’ll be able to interact with
your media, voting on your favorite everything.
For those who prefer to let themselves be
entertained, then software agents will keep track
of what you have been watching and push
programs to you that you should like as a result.
The point is that we will watch media along a
spectrum ranging from the familiar passive
entertainment that we are used to, to a rich
media experience combining every aspect of
social networking with media.
The newest version of YouTube takes a stab at
adding social networking elements to online
video, and Pandora — everyone’s favorite
digital radio station — allows you to create a
playlist of music that you will enjoy based on an
initial selection.
Set Top Boost
What will you do with your Plasma Screen
and HD-DVD set top boxes in Web 3.0? No
fear, they will be as important a part of your life
as always. Companies like Joost are taking the
first step to move digital content to the set-top
box as they attempt to make deals with hardware
manufacturers. In this future, all digital content
will available alongside traditional mass media.
You’ll be able to see watch Lost and Ask A
Ninja one after another, and use all the features
of a DVR to remix them to your heart’s content.
Traditional “channels” will still be available, but
the majority of entertainment from television
connoisseurs will come in the form of
“playlists”. Tell your television what you want
to see, and it will scour the Media Web for
content that you will like based on your
preferences and the preferences of those with
similar entertainment tastes. All of this will be
presented in HD quality.
This isn’t that far off, already systems like
TiVo can keep track of your preferences and
record content that it believes you will enjoy.
This just takes that, adds social networking
elements 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
produced will be the next big change in media.
Take a look at any of the major networks. An
enormous amount money is spent creating pilots
and advertiser dollars are wasted when those
pilots tank. Unfortunately, some of those shows
later become incredibly popular in niche
markets. A prime example is Firefly, which
failed on its initial run on Fox, but is now one of
the most popular Sci-Fri television programs to
date.
A way to correct this in the Web 3.0
landscape is by making every new show a
BETA. The networks can film the pilots, present
them online and then allow the public to decide
which should be given a traditional media run.
The winners end up on television, the losers
finish their one season runs online, where they
have a chance to redeem themselves if it turns
out 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 up
being broadcast on their television network if it
is popular enough. The real power of Web 3.0
will come into effect when program managers
give over some of their power to the consumer
and every television program is vetted by the
public.
Taken one step further, the public will be able
to rate whether they believe a show is too long
or too short, whether they like particular actors
and what changes should be made to make the
programs better. Since the feedback loop is so
tight, corrections could be made from episode to
episode. Of course, these changes would have to
be within reason and at the end of the day, the
program managers will always have the final
say. Consider it a massive suggestion box rather Related Companies: Your Truman Show,
than fully democratized television. Justin.tv, Chris Pirillo Live , uStream

Meme: All television shows are BETA projects Search

The start of almost everyone’s journey through

Related Companies: Current.tv
You TV
The biggest change to come out of Web 3.0
will be the lifestream. I define a lifestream as a
media stream (podcast, video, blog) by you and
about your life. As the barriers to entry for
creating decent quality digital video become
lower, and companies spring up that allow you
to aggregate this video more easily, more and
more people will see this as a way to
communicate with the world around them.
the web begins at the search engine.
Understanding how search will evolve is
understanding how the Web will evolve. As the
amount of information available becomes
greater, our means of getting at that information
will need to become more sophisticated. Web
3.0 will provide us with a new paradigm as
search is concerned.
Specialized Search Engines

Take a look at PBS (Public Access Television)

and imagine if there was a system that would
allow you to use the soapbox that it provides
without the strong barriers to entry that currently
limits it.

Bloggers, some of whom currently run

podcasts will start recording themselves and
presenting it for public consumption (Chris
Pirillo is a fine example). New television
personalities will be created as this content
migrates to the set-top and is picked up as
“related content” through the social network.
Your average person with a good idea will be
able to become a wildly popular media star from
the comfort of his or her basement. Advertisers As it stands now, search is usually a hit or miss
will sponsor the most popular of these programs, proposition. You begin the trek for any
and well liked new media stars will spin off particular piece of information at one of the
programs and form ad hoc “channels” around major content portals. You type in your query
their content. and you have results pushed to you that have
been sorted algorithmically. For the most part, it
YouTube currently does something similar to works, but the biggest problem that search
this with their “channels”, Justin.tv is a engines face today is context.
lifestream that has spun off a sister program
Justine TV, and Your Truman Show is a young Dedupe
company that seeks to make it easier for people
to generate lifestreams and aggregate them When I search for my name, for instance, I
through a social network. would likely end up with a much more famous
version of “Steven” appearing at the top of the
SERP. If I am interested in knowing who is
talking about me online, the imdb page on
Steven Spielberg is completely irrelevant. The
Web 3.0 solution is one that Google and many
others have been toying with for quite some time
now, specialized search engines.
Searchlets
The work flow for systems like this are as
follows. Before I ever query a term, I first
choose my context. It could be something as
broad as “authors” or something as narrowly
defined as “Gainesville, FL authors”. This
context acts as filter over which my query is run.
A prime example of this is Google’s Blog
Search. Quite a few times, I am not interested in
an eCommerce site about the “iPod”, what I am
interested in is the blogosphere’s opinion on the
device. By allowing me to set my context
initially, I got a lot more value from my
searches.
Web 3.0 will expand upon this idea. Instead of
thinking of a search engine in terms of a huge
aggregation of “everything imaginable”. The
search engine itself will be nothing more than a
portal to smaller “searchlets”. Lets not confuse
this with a directory structure. In directory based
search, you’re forced to wade your way through
often obscure multi-level link trees to find
information. It also relies strictly on a human
being to sort that information properly. This
leads to tiny, often irrelevant datasets.
Tagging
In Web 3.0 search engines will need to have a
better understanding of “context”. One way to
accomplish this is to take a nod from directories
and allow results to be tagged. These tags can be
voted on by the community and would only be
an addition to, not a replacement for, traditional
sorting algorithms. Thus, if an eCommerce site
is tagged as being a source for information on
“iPods”, the community has validated this with
their votes and the algorithm acknowledges that
this is true, it would appear high on the listing
for searches within the context “iPod”.
Context
Context is the major driving force behind all
Web 3.0 thinking. As the amount of data we are
subjected to on a daily basis increases, the only
way we will have any chance of using it
effectively is if systems are put into place to
allow us to refine our context. Everything in the
terrestrial world works like this.
When you are looking for a book, you go into a
book store or library. If you are looking for a
movie, you go to a movie theater or video rental
shop. Nowhere in the natural world is there an
“everything” store that just contains a
hodgepodge of unsorted products. Schools are
broken into classes and Malls are broken into
stores. The point is that in the “real world” when
we ask a question or look for something, we get
answers that are relevant to the context we are
currently 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 it
stands today is that we can’t really ask search
engines questions. The issue has always been
that search engines don’t understand context
very well
. When people ask each other questions, there
is generally enough feedback available that
allows us, with very little trouble, to understand
what the other person is “really” asking. If
someone who is coughing comes up to you and
asks, “What do you know about the common
cold?” chances are good you will recommend a
decent cough suppressant. Machines don’t have
this luxury. Up until now, the answer to the
question has always been to either ignore natural
language search or to tell the users of such an
engine to be more specific or to use more
strongly phrased questions. Web 3.0 is a web
that understands context, thus in it the power of
natural language search can be more fully
exploited.
Search My Past
If, for example, I have spent a lot of time
researching the causes and cures for a cough and
all of my searches have fallen into associated
contexts, the engine will be able to understand
that when I query, “What do you know about the
cold?” that I am not talking about what it knows
about the Antarctic, my real concern is in the
common cold and its cures.
This sort of intelligence will require that we
change the way that we understand search
engines. Search engines will become full web
services that we will have control over and be
able to train to understand our behavior. Instead
of it taking the moving average of the
population’s behavior like the current trends
dictate, it will start with this moving average and
become more personalized to our needs as we
use it.
Privacy
In order to make this useful, stronger privacy
infrastructure will need to be put into place. As
likely as not, these search “profiles” would be
stored locally instead of being kept on the search
engines servers. The advantage of this is that
these profiles would then be portable to other
engines and could be loaded or not at the
searchers discretion. Storing this information
locally would also somewhat limit search
engines ability to use this information as
demographic data for advertising, unless the end
user wished for that to be the case.
Digital Body Language
Having a universal search profile would also
be useful to “flesh out” our digital persona.
What machine lack right now is the digital
equivalent to body language. They have no way
of understanding us based on their interactions
with us. Having a portable, shareable, locally
stored search profile will allow us to share
information with web applications that will
allow us to interact with them in a way more
reminiscent of real conversation.
In the identity space, systems like OpenID are
doing a tiny subset of this. They are giving us
the ability to take our profile data with us. In the
Web 3.0 world this will be expanded to include
a much larger set of information.
Meme: Digital body language
Related Projects: Powerset, Ask.com, Google
Search History, OpenID
People Search
A huge part of Web 3.0 search will be
surrounding “People Search”. As our social
networks 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 just
find websites related to concepts, but using
natural language we will be able to find answers
to questions from experts who have written
about them previously. Think of it as a melding
of Digg and Google’s specialized search
engines. If, for example, you wanted to know
about the common cold and you found a great
blog post on curing it, you could then vote for
this post and if others agreed, over time when
someone asked that question or if someone
searched for that author, what would appear is a
listing of that person’s “core competencies”.
This listing will contain articles, profiles,
images, videos and so on that the
recommendation engine most closely relates to
that person. Since we are dealing in context, the
results of this search would be as good as the
context you are in. I, for example, would neither
appear in searches around the common cold nor
searches for “movies”.
Guided Search
Guided search engines always belong in the
context of their creators. The reason that guided
search, in at of itself, is not sufficient is that it
ignores the “wisdom of the crowds” by seeing
search through an editor’s eyes. Guided search
solves the problem of context while ignoring the
problems associated with a purely editorial
infrastructure.
The future of systems like this will be in
combining them with more traditional
algorithms to produce a search engine that
allows you to “fill in the blanks” with the aid of
guides. Guides and human based search is most
powerful when the other types of search have
absolutely failed. If, for example, you are
looking for some very specific piece of
information on an obscure subject matter, a
search engine quite often fails to “understand”
what you are trying to accomplish. Editorially
powered search, when combined with fast search
algorithms, natural language and a strong
database of previously answered questions could
plug this hole.
Meme: My search guide’s database is better than
yours!
Related Projects: Mahalo, ChaCha, About.com
SEMANTIC WEB
The Semantic Web is an evolving
development of the World Wide Web in which
the meaning (semantics) of information and
services on the web is defined, making it
possible for the web to "understand" and satisfy
the requests of people and machines to use the
web content. It derives from World Wide Web
Consortium director Sir Tim Berners Lee's
vision 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 that
are yet to be implemented or realized Other
elements of the semantic web are expressed in
formal specifications. Some of these include
Resource Description Framework (RDF), a
variety of data interchange formats (e.g.
RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and
notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the
Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which
are intended to provide a formal description of
concepts, terms, and relationships within a given
knowledge domain.
Purpose
Humans are capable of using the Web to
carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word
for "monkey", reserving a library book, and
searching for a low price for a DVD. However, a
computer cannot accomplish the same tasks
without human direction because web pages are
designed to be read by people, not machines.
The semantic web is a vision of information that
is understandable by computers, so that they can
perform more of the tedious work involved in
finding, combining, and acting upon information
on the web.
Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the
vision of the semantic web as follows:
I have a dream for the Web [in which
computers] become capable of analyzing all the
data on the Web – the content, links, and
transactions between people and computers. A
‘Semantic Web’, which should make this
possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the
day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy
and our daily lives will be handled by machines
talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’
people have touted for ages will finally
materialize.
– Tim Berners-Lee, 1999
Semantic publishing will benefit greatly from
the semantic web. In particular, the semantic
web is expected to revolutionize scientific
publishing, such as real-time publishing and
sharing of experimental data on the Internet.
This simple but radical idea is now being
explored by W3C HCLS group's Scientific
Publishing Task Force.
Semantic Web application areas are
experiencing intensified interest due to the rapid
growth in the use of the Web, together with the
innovation and renovation of information
content technologies. The Semantic Web is
regarded as an integrator across different content
and information applications and systems, and
provide mechanisms for the realisation of
Enterprise Information Systems. The rapidity of
the growth experienced provides the impetus for
researchers to focus on the creation and
dissemination of innovative Semantic Web
technologies, where the envisaged ’Semantic
Web’ is long overdue. Often the terms
’Semantics’, ’metadata’, ’ontologies’ and
’Semantic Web’ are used inconsistently. In
particular, these terms are used as everyday
terminology by researchers and practitioners,
spanning a vast landscape of different fields,
technologies, concepts and application areas.
Furthermore, there is confusion with regards to
the current status of the enabling technologies
envisioned to realise the Semantic Web. In a
paper presented by Gerber, Barnard and Van der
Merwe the Semantic Web landscape are charted
and a brief summary of related terms and
enabling technologies are presented. The
architectural model proposed by Tim Berners-
Lee is used as basis to present a status model
that reflects current and emerging technologies
Semantic Web solutions
The Semantic Web takes the solution further.
It involves publishing in languages specifically
designed for data: Resource Description
Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language
(OWL), and Extensible Markup Language
(XML). HTML describes documents and the
links between them. RDF, OWL, and XML, by
contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as
people, meetings, or airplane parts. Tim
Berners-Lee calls the resulting network of
Linked Data the Giant Global Graph, in contrast
to the HTML-based World Wide Web.
These technologies are combined in order to
provide descriptions that supplement or replace
the content of Web documents. Thus, content
may manifest itself as descriptive data stored in
Web-accessible databases or as markup within
documents (particularly, in Extensible HTML
(XHTML) interspersed with XML, or, more
often, purely in XML, with layout or rendering
cues stored separately). The machine-readable
descriptions enable content managers to add
meaning to the content, i.e., to describe the
structure of the knowledge we have about that
content. In this way, a machine can process
knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes
similar to human deductive reasoning and
inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful
results and helping computers to perform
automated information gathering and research.
An example of a tag that would be used in a able to describe, and associate meaning with
non-semantic web page: data, necessarily involves more than simple
XHTML mark-up code. It is based on an
<item>cat</item> assumption that, in order for it to be possible to
endow machines with an ability to accurately
Encoding similar information in a semantic web interpret web homed content, far more than the
page might look like this: mere ordered relationships involving letters and
words is necessary as underlying infrastructure,
<item (attendant to semantic issues). Otherwise, most
rdf:about="http://dbpedia.org/re of the supportive functionality would have been
source/Cat">Cat</item> available in Web 2.0 (and before), and it would
have been possible to derive a semantically
capable Web with minor, incremental additions.
Relationship to object oriented programming
Additions to the infrastructure to support
semantic functionality include latent dynamic
A number of authors highlight the similarities
network models that can, under certain
which the Semantic Web shares with object-
conditions, be 'trained' to appropriately 'learn'
oriented programming (OOP). Both the semantic
meaning based on order data, in the process
web and object-oriented programming have
'learning' relationships with order (a kind of
classes with attributes and the concept of
rudimentary working grammar). See for
instances or objects. Linked Data uses
example latent semantic analysis
Dereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifiers in
a manner similar to the common programming
concept of pointers or "object identifiers" in Components
OOP. Dereferenceable URIs can thus be used to
access "data by reference". The Unified The semantic web comprises the standards and
Modeling Language is designed to communicate tools of XML, XML Schema, RDF, RDF
about object-oriented systems, and can thus be Schema and OWL that are organized in the
used for both object-oriented programming and Semantic Web Stack. The OWL Web Ontology
semantic web development. Language Overview describes the function and
relationship of each of these components of the
When the web was first being created in the semantic web:
late 1980s and early 1990s, it was done using
object-oriented programming languages such as
Objective-C, Smalltalk and CORBA. In the mid-
1990s this development practice was furthered
with the announcement of the Enterprise Objects
Framework, Portable Distributed Objects and
WebObjects all by NeXT, in addition to the
Component Object Model released by
Microsoft. XML was then released in 1998, and
RDF a year after in 1999.

Similarity to object oriented programming also

came from two other routes: the first was the
development of the very knowledge-centric
"Hyperdocument" systems by Douglas
Engelbart[13, and the second comes from the
usage and development of the Hypertext
Transfer Protocol.The idea of a semantic web,
  SPARQL is a protocol and query
language for semantic web data sources.

Current ongoing standardizations include:

 Rule Interchange Format (RIF) as the

Rule Layer of the Semantic Web Stack

Not yet fully realized layers include:

 Unifying Logic and Proof layers are

undergoing active research.

The intent is to enhance the usability and

usefulness of the Web and its interconnected
resources through:

 Servers which expose existing data

The Semantic Web Stack.
 XML provides an elemental syntax for
content structure within documents, yet
associates no semantics with the
meaning of the content contained
within.
 XML Schema is a language for
providing and restricting the structure
and content of elements contained
within XML documents.
 RDF is a simple language for expressing
data models, which refer to objects
("resources") and their relationships. An
RDF-based model can be represented in
XML syntax.
 RDF Schema is a vocabulary for
describing properties and classes of
RDF-based resources, with semantics
for generalized-hierarchies of such
properties and classes.
 OWL adds more vocabulary for
describing properties and classes:
among others, relations between classes
(e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g.
"exactly one"), equality, richer typing of
properties, characteristics of properties
(e.g. symmetry), and enumerated
classes.
systems using the RDF and SPARQL
standards. Many converters to RDF
exist from different applications.
Relational databases are an important
source. The semantic web server
attaches to the existing system without
affecting its operation.
 Documents "marked up" with semantic
information (an extension of the HTML
<meta> tags used in today's Web pages
to supply information for Web search
engines using web crawlers). This could
be machine-understandable information
about the human-understandable content
of the document (such as the creator,
title, description, etc., of the document)
or it could be purely metadata
representing a set of facts (such as
resources and services elsewhere in the
site). (Note that anything that can be
identified with a Uniform Resource
Identifier (URI) can be described, so the
semantic web can reason about animals,
people, places, ideas, etc.) Semantic
markup is often generated automatically,
rather than manually.
 Common metadata vocabularies
(ontologies) and maps between
vocabularies that allow document
creators to know how to mark up their
documents so that agents can use the
information in the supplied metadata (so
 that Author in the sense of 'the Author of
the page' won't be confused with Author
in the sense of a book that is the subject
of a book review).
 Automated agents to perform tasks for
users of the semantic web using this data
 Web-based services (often with agents
of their own) to supply information
specifically to agents (for example, a
Trust service that an agent could ask if
some online store has a history of poor
service or spamming)
[edit] Challenges
Some of the challenges for the Semantic Web
include vastness, vagueness, uncertainty,
inconsistency and deceit. Automated reasoning
systems will have to deal with all of these issues
in order to deliver on the promise of the
Semantic Web.
 Vastness: The World Wide Web
contains 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 automated
reasoning system will have to deal with
truly huge inputs.
 Vagueness: These are imprecise
concepts 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.
 Uncertainty: These are precise concepts
with uncertain values. For example, a
patient might present a set of
symptoms which correspond to a
number of different distinct diagnoses
each with a different probability.
Probabilistic reasoning techniques are
generally employed to address
uncertainty.
 Inconsistency: These are logical
contradictions 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 to
deal with inconsistency.
 Deceit: This is when the producer of the
information is intentionally misleading
the consumer of the information.
Cryptography techniques are currently
utilized to alleviate this threat.
This list of challenges is illustrative rather than
exhaustive, and it focuses on the challenges to
the "unifying logic" and "proof" layers of the
Semantic Web. The World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) Incubator Group for
Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web
(URW3-XG) final report lumps these problems
together under the single heading of
"uncertainty". Many of the techniques
mentioned here will require extensions to the
Web Ontology Language (OWL) for example to
annotate conditional probabilities. This is an
area 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 and
tools, but is very incomplete. The choice of
projects is somewhat arbitrary but may serve
illustrative purposes. It is also remarkable that in
this early stage of the development of semantic
web technology, it is already possible to compile
a list of hundreds of components that in one way
or another can be used in building or extending
semantic webs.[23]
[edit] DBpedia
DBpedia is an effort to publish structured data
extracted from Wikipedia: the data is published
in RDF and made available on the Web for use
under the GNU Free Documentation License,
thus allowing Semantic Web agents to provide
inferencing and advanced querying over the
Wikipedia-derived dataset and facilitating
interlinking, re-use and extension in other data-
sources.
[edit] FOAF
A popular application of the semantic web is
Friend of a Friend (or FoaF), which uses RDF to
describe the relationships people have to other
people and the "things" around them. FOAF
permits intelligent agents to make sense of the
thousands of connections people have with each
other, their jobs and the items important to their
lives; connections that may or may not be
enumerated in searches using traditional web
search engines. Because the connections are so
vast in number, human interpretation of the
information may not be the best way of
analyzing them.
FOAF is an example of how the Semantic Web
attempts to make use of the relationships within
a social context.
[edit] GoodRelations for e-commerce
A huge potential for Semantic Web technologies
lies in adding data structure and typed links to
the vast amount of offer data, product model
features, and tendering / request for quotation
data.
The GoodRelations ontology is a popular
vocabulary 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, the
Book Mashup, and many others.
[edit] SIOC
The SIOC Project - Semantically-Interlinked
Online Communities provides a vocabulary of
terms and relationships that model web data
spaces. 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 and
Information in unLike Environments
SIMILE is a joint project, conducted by the MIT
Libraries and MIT CSAIL, which seeks to
enhance interoperability among digital assets,
schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, meta data,
and services.
[edit] NextBio
A database consolidating high-throughput life
sciences experimental data tagged and connected
via biomedical ontologies. Nextbio is accessible
via a search engine interface. Researchers can
contribute their findings for incorporation to the
database. The database currently supports gene
or 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 of
Sept 2008

Class linkages within the Linking Open Data
datasets
The Linking Open Data project is a W3C-led
effort to create openly accessible, and
interlinked, RDF Data on the Web. The data in
question takes the form of RDF Data Sets drawn
from a broad collection of data sources. There is
a 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 data
service that supports research. It is a
collaboration between the University of
Southampton and the UK government, lead by
OPSI at the National Archive and is supported
by JISC funding.
[edit] Erfgoedplus.be
Erfgoedplus.be ('heritage-plus') is a project
aimed at disclosing all types of heritage from the
provinces of Limburg and Vlaams-Brabant and
the city of Leuven to the public by applying
semantic web technology. Erfgoedplus.be uses
RDF/XML, OWL and SKOS to describe
relationships to heritage types, concepts, objects,
people, place and time. Data are normalized and
enriched by means of thesauri (AAT) and an
ontology (CIDOC CRM), available for input,
conversion and navigation.
Erfgoedplus.be is a regional aggregator for
EuropeanaLocal (Europeana) and an example of
how 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 interface
for the Internet and a way for people to
share information with one another. Berners-
Lee disputes the existence of Web 2.0,
calling it nothing more than meaningless
jargon [source: Register]. Berners-Lee
maintains that he intended the World Wide
Web to do all the things that Web 2.0 is
supposed to do.
Berners-Lee's vision of the future Web is
similar to the concept of Web 3.0. It's called
the Semantic Web. Right now, the Web's
structure is geared for humans. It's easy for
us to visit a Web page and understand what
it's all about. Computers can't do that. A
search engine might be able to scan for
keywords, but it can't understand how those
keywords are used in the context of the
page.
With the Semantic Web, computers will
scan and interpret information on Web pages
using software agents. These software
agents will be programs that crawl through
the Web, searching for relevant information.
They'll be able to do that because the
Semantic Web will have collections of
information called ontologies. In terms of
the Internet, an ontology is a file that defines
the relationships among a group of terms.
For example, the term "cousin" refers to the
familial relationship between two people
who share one set of grandparents. A
Semantic Web ontology might define each
familial role like this:
 Grandparent: A direct ancestor two
generations removed from the subject
 Parent: A direct ancestor one
generation removed from the subject
  Brother or sister: Someone who shares
the same parent as the subject
 Nephew or niece: Child of the brother
or sister of the subject
 Aunt or uncle: Sister or brother to a
parent of the subject
 Cousin: child of an aunt or uncle of the
subject
For the Semantic Web to be effective,
ontologies have to be detailed and
comprehensive. In Berners-Lee's concept,
they would exist in the form of metadata.
Metadata is information included in the code
for 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 the
Semantic Web faces. Will people be willing
to put in the effort required to make
comprehensive ontologies for their Web
sites? Will they maintain them as the Web
sites change? Critics suggest that the task of
creating and maintaining such complex files
is too much work for most people.
On the other hand, some people really enjoy
labeling or tagging Web objects and
information. Web tags categorize the tagged
object or information. Several blogs include
a tag option, making it easy to classify
journal entries under specific topics. Photo
sharing sites like Flickr allow users to tag
pictures. Google even has turned it into a
game: Google Image Labeler pits two
people against each other in a labeling
contest. Each player tries to create the
largest number of relevant tags for a series
of images. According to some experts, Web
3.0 will be able to search tags and labels and
return the most relevant results back to the
user. Perhaps Web 3.0 will combine
Berners-Lee's concept of the Semantic Web
with Web 2.0's tagging culture.
Even though Web 3.0 is more theory than
reality, that hasn't stopped people from
guessing what will come next. Keep reading
to learn about the far-flung future of the
Web
RESOURCE DESCRIPTION
FRAMEWORK
RDF was originally written by Tim Bray in
1998 and updated by Dan Brickley in 2001.
Recently it seemed like time for another update,
particularly to relate RDF and the Semantic
Web to the cutting edge of web development.
Building the Semantic Web
On the Semantic Web (SemWeb), computers
do the browsing (and searching, and querying,
and...) for us. The SemWeb enables computers
to seek out knowledge distributed throughout the
Web, mesh it, and then take action based on it.
Take an analogy: the current web is a
decentralized platform for distributed
presentations, while the SemWeb is a
decentralized platform for distributed
knowledge. Resource Description Framework
(RDF) is the W3C standard for encoding
knowledge.
There, of course, is knowledge on the current
web, but it's off limits to computers. Consider a
Wikipedia page, which might convey a lot of
information to the human reader, but to the
computer displaying the page all it sees is
presentation markup. To the extent that
computers make sense of HTML, images, Flash,
etc., it's almost always for the purpose of
creating a presentation for the end user. The real
content, the knowledge the files are conveying
to the human, is opaque to the computer.
What is meant by "semantic" in Semantic
Web is not that computers are going to
understand the meaning of anything, but that the
logical pieces of meaning can be mechanically
manipulated by a machine to useful human ends.
 So, now imagine a new web where the real
content can be manipulated by computers. For
now, picture it as a web of databases. One
"semantic" website publishes a database about a
product line, with products and descriptions,
while another publishes a database of product
reviews. A third site for a retailer publishes a
database of products in stock. What standards
would make it easier to write an application to
mesh distributed databases together, so that a
computer could use the three data sources
together to help an end user make better
purchasing decisions?
There's nothing stopping anyone from
writing a program now to do those sorts of
things, in just the same way that nothing
stopped anyone from exchanging data before
we had XML. But standards facilitate building
applications, especially in a decentralized
system.
Here are some of the things we would want a
standard about distributed knowledge to
consider:
1. Files on the Semantic Web need to be able to
express information flexibly. Life can't be neatly
packed into tables, as in relational databases or
hierarchies, as in XML. The information about
movies and TV shows contained in the graph
below is really best expressed as a graph (see
Figure 1):
Figure 1. Knowledge as a graph
Of course, we can't be drawing our way
through the Semantic Web, so instead we will
need a tabular notation for these graphs that
looks a bit like this:
Each row of the table specifies an edge from
one node in the graph to another. More on this
later.
2. Files on the Semantic Web need to be able to
relate to each other. A file about product prices
Start Node Edge Label End Node
vincent_donofrio Starred_in law&order
law_&_order_ci is_a tv_show
the_thirteenth_floor similar_plot_as the_matrix
posted by a vendor and a file with product
reviews posted independently by a consumer
need to have a way of indicating that they are
talking about the same products. Just using
product names isn't enough. Two products might
exist in the world both called "The Super Duper
3000," and we want to eliminate ambiguity from
the SemWeb so that computers can process the
information with certainty. The SemWeb needs
globally unique identifiers that can be assigned
in a decentralized way.
3. We will use vocabularies for making
assertions about things, but these vocabularies
must be able to be mixed together. A vocabulary
about TV shows developed by TV aficionados
and a vocabulary about movies independently
developed by movie connoisseurs must be able
to be used together in the same file, to talk about
the same things (e.g., to assert that an actor has
appeared in both TV shows and movies).
These are the requirements that RDF provides
a standard for, as we'll see in the next section.
Before getting too abstract, here are actual RDF
examples of the information from the graph
above, first in the Notation 3 format, which
closely follows the tabular encoding of the
underlying graph:
@prefix rdf: evolved into something greater. The most
<http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22- exciting uses of RDF aren't in encoding
rdf-syntax-ns#> . information about web resources, but
@prefix ex: information about and relations between things
<http://www.example.org/> . in the real world: people, places, concepts, etc.

ex:vincent_donofrio
ex:starred_in CONCLUSION
ex:law_and_order_ci .
ex:law_and_order_ci rdf:type
ex:tv_show . As more and more of the Web is becoming
ex:the_thirteenth_floor remixable, the entire system is turning into both
ex:similar_plot_as ex:the_matrix a platform and the database. Yet, such
. transformations are never smooth. For one,
scalability is a big issue. And of course legal
aspects are never simple. 
And in the standard RDF/XML format, which
may have a more intuitive feel but tends to
obscure the underlying graph: But it is not a question of if web sites become
web services, but when and how. APIs are a
<rdf:RDF more controlled, cleaner and altogether preferred
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/199 way of becoming a web service. However, when
9/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" APIs are not avaliable or sufficient, scraping is
xmlns:ex="http://www.example bound to continue and expand. As always, time
.org/"> will be best judge; but in the meanwhile we turn
<rdf:Description to you for feedback and stories about how your
rdf:about="http://www.example.or businesses are preparing for 'web 3.0'
g/vincent_donofrio">
<ex:starred_in>
<ex:tv_show
rdf:about="http://www.example.or
g/law_and_order_ci" />
</ex:starred_in>
</rdf:Description>
<rdf:Description
rdf:about="http://www.example.or
g/the_thirteenth_floor">
<ex:similar_plot_as
rdf:resource="http://www.example
.org/the_matrix" />
</rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

RDF was originally created in 1999 as a

standard on top of XML for encoding metadata--
literally, data about data. Metadata is, of course,
things like who authored a web page, what date
a blog entry was published, etc., information that
is in some sense secondary to some other
content already on the regular web. Since then,
and perhaps especially after the updated RDF
spec in 2004, the scope of RDF has really