Web 3.0: The Intelligent Web

Working in software development has its own pros & cons. Many of my colleagues may differ, but I personally feel, of late cons have outnumbered the pros. May be I am suffering from the grass is greener on the other side syndrome. Though, something which mitigates my pain is the fact that the Search Engines (read Google) are an integral part of any development project. At any given point in time, during different phases of project execution, my myriad searches on Google take me through some unknown territories and more often I stumble up on something fresh and exciting enough to keep me going.

Few months back, in a similar Google expedition I came across the term Web 3.0 (or Semantic Web)! Here, I’ll share my understanding of Web 3.0 in simple sentences sans web jargons. Before we proceed further, let me give you a precursor of Web 3.0:

Web 1.0: Perhaps the term was coined after the term Web 2.0 became a popular buzz in media & public domain. Most of the intellectuals call the hotmail and fully static website era as Web 1.0. You and I and any other commoner for that matter, could only read whatever was presented to us. It was a sort of our school library, one way information flow. For simplicity sake, let me call Web 1.0 as the Read-Only Era.

Web 2.0: The beginning of this, I must say, has empowered the commoner like you and me like never before. The transition from Web1.0 to Web2.0 was so subtle that many of us didn’t notice the undergoing change. Now we can Read, Write, Edit and Publish. The power of sharing with the rest of the world is already shaking the foundations of archaic states who try to impose everything but freedom. It has liberated us in a big way. The simplest example of Web 2.0 is this blog, Pulse of Technology. It hardly took me a hassle-free 10 seconds to publish this. l remember the days, when to make even a simple change on the web it took loads of genuine efforts and co-ordination from the designer, developer and administrator. Other good examples of Web 2.0 are YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr etc. Let me call Web 2.0 as ‘Read-Write-Publish’ era.

So, with Web 2.0 we have achieved almost everything on the web, why on earth do we need something more? Read on…

Web 3.0: A week back or so, while going through my Google Analytics account (A tool to analyze blog or website traffic); I was surprised to find that someone (probably in USA) has Google searched for ‘witricity corporation share price’ and my blog had appeared at #1 position out of 104,000 results. Check the following screen shot for reference:

(Disclaimer: The page listing &position keeps changing, dumb/smart Google Algo!).

I felt immensely delighted that without investing a single penny on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultants, I managed to break into the 1^st position in Google search results with my 1^st blog post! For information to my non-techie readers, Apart from scores of dos & don’ts, Google considers more than a few dozens of criteria while displaying the page results and their respective positions.

Late 90’s Google saw an opportunity in a niche domain called search and it filled the existing gap there, but how much has Google evolved from its early days? Or has it evolved at all? Consequently, I feel Google is the best example of an information overload. Why? Because the above mentioned searcher who’ll most likely click through the 1^st result in the list for his search ‘witricity corporation share price’ will be hugely disappointed as there’s no information at all about his query in the page. The keywords are used in a different context in two different posts. It has nothing to do, not even remotely, with share price of Witricity Corporation. Irrelevant & meaningless result sitting right at the top!

1. Ever wondered why Google or any Search Engine, throws at least a million search results for a simple search though may be more than 95% of the results are irrelevant & meaningless? 2. Who clicks for some result page buried down say in 5th or 6th page? 3. Why can’t we have 100 or may be less precise results?

I shared this story to let you know that Web 3.0 is going to change all that and a lot more. It’ll lead to a gradual transformation of web from a bit dumb to an intelligent medium. May be Search engines will say good bye to keyword search and will embrace the intelligent contextual search. What Web 3.0 attempts to bring:

Tailor made search: Web 3.0 will make our task of searching easier & faster by not drowning us in a zillion of meaningless results. It’ll provide you a direct answer to your queries as if you are asking it to a consultant who is a through professional in his domain. Suppose an Australian tourist landed in Mumbai, India. Something like this is going in her/his mind: “I want to go to the nearest hill station, it must be safe & secure without any bomb blast history, (We all want security, why mock them for their security obsession) stay in a budget hotel, (thanks to recession!) have some Chinese food in a good restaurant just after arrival there, watch a newly released Hollywood block buster in the night. What are my options?”

Almost, a simple daily-life query. Isn’t it? But present days Search Engines may require you to break this query into 6 or 7 sub queries and explore each of them one by one by drowning yourself into their ocean of links. S/he may need to invest more than 2 hours or so to find out her/his options.

Web 3.0 attempts to lessen your woes as you don’t need to type multiple queries. You can type the whole query of the above example. The Web 3.0 Info Agents will ensure that you get your answers in an organized way.

Contextual Search: More or less same as tailor made search with a little difference. In above example of Australian tourist query there are few keywords to note to explain contextual search. These are without any bomb blast history, budget hotel. Current search engines will interpret these words by exactly matching them in their search.

Here’s a gap, you may have noticed! For a human brain, the words without any bomb blast could mean good law and order. Similarly a budget hotel means relatively cheaper hotel. The Web 3.0 Info Agents will feel the gap as it would interpret your query & will answer more like a evolved human brain. The Info Agents will collaborate to deduce best possible answer for your query i.e. deductive reasoning at the machine level.

Personalized Search: The Web 3.0 technologies will be intelligent enough to read & understand your personal preferences. Every web user will have her/his Unique Web Profile based on her/his browsing history. What does this mean? Suppose, you are a vegetarian and you’ve queried for “Which restaurant should I visit for lunch”. Your colleague sitting besides you, who loves mutton biryani, have queried the same.

What will happen? Both of you will get a different answer/search results based on your respective Web Profile (i.e. preferences). This is personalization. Critics may claim it’s an attack on your privacy!

Interoperability: web 3.0 applications attempts to be easy to customize & device independent, i.e. can run on all sort of Computers, Hand-held devices, TVs, automobiles, Microwaves, Cloths or whatever. Pervasive Web is the term used to describe this phenomenon where web is reaches to a wide range of devices.

Transforming the Web into a Big Database: Experts believe Data records can be published in a remotely query able design, which means it will be openly available and linkable as web pages. This may lead to application integration. I am not so sure about its implementation but I assume the implementation will be something like if you’ve an Orkut account you can safely access the Facebook database to find your friend and view his details. Perhaps no need to register with dozens of Social Networking web sites to keep up with your friends. Or is my assumption too optimistic and unattainable?

Evolution of 3D Web

After the massive application of 3D in gaming softwares, the 3D technology will be heavily integrated in future applications to make you experience the virtual world, be it a visit to Agra to virtually experience the world famous Taj-Mahal or be it experiencing the mad rush hour traffic of Mumbai local trains. Welcome to the virtual world, right at your desk!

Web 3.0 will perhaps lead to an explosive growth in number of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) applications. The W3C defines SOA as “A set of components which can be invoked and whose interface descriptions can be discovered and published”. Let me simplify it: Suppose I develop an application to convert meter to centimeter. I’ll call this application conversion-service and host it somewhere on the web. Another programmer sitting in some corner of the world can easily discover and consume my service by just writing a simple client application. No need to write the conversion logic again. A Plug-and-Play environment!

Some Web 3.0 Jargons if you want to dig deeper:

Semantic Web (almost same as Web 3.0), Ontologies, Inference Engines, Info Agents, Artificial Intelligence (AI), RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL.

How much time will take for the proposed marriage of Web 3.0 and Artificial Intelligence?

It has already started, though not so impressive take-off if we compare what was promised and what has been delivered. A website, www.twine.com is built around Web 3.0 technologies. You can give it a try. May be we need to wait & watch for a year or so to experience some truly wow features of Web 3.0 technologies.

Till then, enjoy the fully loaded Web 2.0…

References:

Zimbio - Interactive Magazine