Threepointouch
Techmeme is full to bursting with posts announcing/decrying the announcement of something called Web 3.0. The kerfuffle follows an article in the New York Times yesterday, which is actually about semantic technologies - I gave a little overview in August and there’s more here. The ideas have been around since at least 1999, and are part of Berners-Lee’s vision for Web 1.0. My friend Marc Fawzi gave a good introduction to the idea in June:
…in the Semantic Web individual machine-based agents (or a collaborating group of agents) will be able to understand and use information by translating concepts and deducing new information rather than just matching keywords.
Once machines can understand and use information, using a standard ontology language, the world will never be the same. It will be possible to have an info agent (or many info agents) among your virtual AI-enhanced workforce each having access to different domain specific comprehension space and all communicating with each other to build a collective consciousness.
You’ll be able to ask your info agent or agents to find you the nearest restaurant that serves Italian cuisine, even if the restaurant nearest you advertises itself as a Pizza joint as opposed to an Italian restaurant. But that is just a very simple example of the deductive reasoning machines will be able to perform on information they have.
Far more awesome implications can be seen when you consider that every area of human knowledge will be automatically within the comprehension space of your info agents. That is because each info agent can communicate with other info agents who are specialized in different domains of knowledge to produce a collective consciousness (using the Borg metaphor) that encompasses all human knowledge. The collective “mind†of those agents-as-the-Borg will be the Ultimate Answer Machine, easily displacing Google from this position, which it does not truly fulfil.
There’s little to dislike about a better web usage model which will find answers rather than match search terms. The name Web 3.0 is as misleading as Web 2.0, though. Arguably, more so. We’re not talking about a new internet, or even, really, a better internet. For one thing, for the most part, it will be the same old web - you can’t retrofit a gazillion billion pages with a semantic markup that there’s still considerable debate about. What we’re actually talking about is improved ways into that information base.
And yes… I have still got a year and a half left on the domain name.