Investor's Business Daily, June 1st, 2007
Worldwide users are just getting familiar with the concept of Web 2.0, through which they can collaborate and share Internet content.
Yet some technologists already are discussing the dawn of an era known as Web 3.0.
Some experts think Web 3.0 may be the best way to access and use vast stores of online data.
Others contend Web 3.0 is merely the next wave of high-tech hype.
Most likely, it's a bit of both.
As envisioned, this next generation of the Web will be based on new computer markup languages. Such standards can expose metadata, or data about all the data locked up in Web sites, software programs and computer desktops.
That is why Web 3.0 is often called the Semantic Web or the Data Web.
"The Semantic Web is the idea of marking up computer information in such a way that computers can infer meaning from it," said Tim O'Reilly, the publisher and founder of O'Reilly Media who's known for popularizing the term Web 2.0.
Internet protocols make it hard to search for many basic items on a Web site, such as a simple address or phone number.
A resource description framework (RDF) and Web ontology language (OWL) are new technologies that can solve that problem. They serve as a kind of wrapper or tag to describe the data inside.
This new vocabulary lets computers find and access data on their own. The goal is letting the machines perform rote tasks to gather information and merge the results.
Software giants Oracle and Adobe Systems already support or plan to back the RDF and OWL standards to represent data in some of their products.
These Web standards should help companies spot new relationships among huge sets of data and use the findings for better conclusions about their business, says Eric Miller, president of Web startup Zepheira.
"We want the ability to free data from applications and use the data in other applications for which it was not originally intended," said Miller.
Current Web 2.0 firms could apply the future benefits of metadata in Web 3.0.
For instance, MySpace might let personal pages share information with the pages of relevant friends or colleagues in the social network.
Take someone whose MySpace page describes a fondness for vintage jazz. By entering that information once, that person could automatically be linked to others who share the same interest.
Furthermore, that information could be applied to future Web searches for new music releases. In effect, using metadata could become a way to make MySpace "truly mine," said Miller.
"This means there is a much more flexible, personalized integration point 15 really connect people," he said. "The notion here is to enter data just once, but to use it often."
In recent years, Miller led the Semantic Web program at the World Wide Web Consortium.
The W3C is headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the famed inventor of the Internet who coined the Semantic Web term.
Web 3.0 involves building a Web of interconnected data, Miller says. This approach will let companies quickly change computer processes as their business needs evolve.
"What we've got here is a set of useful technologies that when combined become very powerful," he said. "This makes it easier to free the data from the application that created it and make it more useful and easier to combine with other little bits of information."
Such a breakthrough will be valuable as companies come to rely on more data from outside partners and other wells of information, says Phil Wainewright, a software consultant and analyst.
The idea behind Web 3.0 is to extract meanings, rather than just raw data, by putting the data into some context, says Wainewright.
For instance, a Chinese supplier who starts the workweek on Sunday might confuse Western buyers who start their weeks on Monday. Computers will have to make that distinction clear.
"The most important thing that the Web has done is bring us into a connected world in which global businesses run multiple projects with internal and external sources," Wainewright said. "So we need a lot more of these shared meanings."
In essence, the Semantic Web will turn the Internet into a kind of massive database, says Brad Allen, the founder and chief technology officer of Siderean Software.
His firm makes software to navigate and link corporate data.
"There is so much information lurking out there in databases and Web content," Allen said. "It's impossible to get a handle on it all unless we get to the next level with the use of metadata."
Metadata let computers quickly parse whether the word "mouse" refers to a rodent, a cartoon character or a computer device.
Despite such strides, the promoters of Web 3.0 must be wary of overhyping the trend, warns Marc Hedlund.
Hedlund is a tech blogger and co-founder of a Web community called Wesabe.com.
Hedlund points out that proponents of artificial intelligence and machine learning have been let down by a record of spotty success in their field for decades.
"Those failures raise a note of skepticism in me about labeling data for Web 3.0," he said. "The idea holds some alluring promise, but it may not work out so well."
