Thursday
Feb252010
Web 3.0: Not yet there, but the vibe is
by 
Tristan Teunissen on Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 9:00PM
Tristan Teunissen on Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 9:00PM 
I attended the Web3.0 conference last month in Santa Clara. The conference was truly inspiring, but web 3.0? One of the first questions you have to ask is "Does web 3.0 mean the semantic web?" Should we view the semantic web as a world wide database, as suggested by Dr. Mark Greaves of Vulcan, and what issues will it raise? How cumbersome will working with numerous database administrators be? If it is a database, it will certainly be the largest - and noisiest - database in the world. This so-called noise is a big problem for the semantic web.
Another problem is that for many topics there is a vast surplus of information available - how do you find out the richest links? On the other hand, it is democratic, crowdsourced, scalable knowledge engineering, which makes the semantic web a great knowledge base for humanity.
Freshness has always been important for search and over the last months ‘live-search’ has become very popular. Due to the popularity of social media sites like Twitter, search engines have had to go hyper-fresh. People are creating a constant stream of new input, which can contain very useful and especially up-to-date information. But these hyper-fresh content services are creating new problems for search engines. Tweets aren’t always written in English and there are only 140 characters available to broadcast your message. Because there are only 140 characters, semantic technology can be quite helpful in extracting the true meaning of a message. Through semantic technology it’s possible to detect entities that are referenced and disambiguate them.
Search engines like Bing (Microsoft) are already implementing semantic technology for extracting information. “All search engines are somewhat semantic already” according to Scott Prevost, Principal Development Manager for Bing. Whatever the real definition for semantic search is, “it’s already here but it hasn’t been a 'Voila!' moment. Semantic search won’t be a big revolution from a new startup, but there will be game changers”. Scott has had first hand experience here with Powerset, often called “The New Google” in the media before their acquisition by Microsoft in 2008 as a feature for their search technology.
Semantic technology, like all technology, needs a certain critical mass. The good thing is that the ecosystem is growing at the moment, with more and more publishers helping out. But the main focus of semantic tech companies should be on creating systems which can automatically promote open content, so we won't be dependent on the efforts of publishers. By creating this kind of technology the costs of semantic publishing will shrink to almost zero in several years, just as online publishing did during the web 2.0 era.
The technology is here now - there are already more than 1600 APIs and they are growing at a non-linear accelerated rate. People are starting to work in the cloud as the new data center and it is the illusion of infinite scalability and omniscience that serve as inducements. Tom Gruber, a recognized expert in Artificial Intelligence, intelligent interfaces, semantic technologies, and presenter at Web3.0, strongly believes in the “Gigantic Join” which he thinks web 3.0 will become. The semantic web will include the possibility of numerous "joins" of APIs, and his latest product Siri.com is built on this idea. Siri is a mobile device-based question and answer application using speech as input, and is built on a collection of available APIs.
This application is a good example for the upcoming mobile web, which is creating new rules, and possibilities for the semantic web. Mobile devices create new sources of input - users don't speak in keywords, they ask questions in their native language. These new ways of input have to be interpreted, and that’s where semantic technology kicks in. “Semantic technology is the hottest area of web architecture right now,” according to Dr. Greaves. “It’s a new way of thinking about the web as we know it” says Scott Prevost.
You could indeed feel this vibe at web 3.0. People are eager to learn from each other, sharing thoughts and inspiring each other. In the coming weeks I will dig deeper into some of the Web3.0 topics related to semantic technology like SEO, search and business and opportunities.
