Web 3.0

Web Evolution (by Nova Spivak)

Depending on your viewpoint Web 3.0 is either a marketing term or scientific term associated with the next generation of web technologies. While Web 2.0 was defined by its move towards front-end user interfaces that enable better collaboration on various tasks through the web, Web 3.0 tends to be used in describing better automation of such tasks, and organizing the immense amounts of information that these tasks tend to create.

Semantics .vs. Web 3.0

One significant barrier for finally realizing the "next generation" of web technologies is surely to activate Tim Berners-Lee's imagined Semantic Web for enabling both people and machines to understand content on the web. A major benefit of which has always been promised as good, trustworthy and reliable AI-driven Semantic Agents assisting humans to perform their daily work and entertainment tasks. Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web are not, however, synonymous. Indeed many other technological innovations would need to happen to truly change the entire paradigm for interaction on the web.

Enabling Technologies

Web 3.0: Enabling machines to better serve and assist people in their increasingly complex, data-intensive daily information retrieval/creation tasks by modeling the Semantics of data in a consistent ontology such that personalized data integrations can be built in real-time by agents, and providing complete database dumps as Linked Data for the entire world to use in discovery of new associations and unique data visualizations in 3-Dimensional space and/or the real world

Recommendation Engines
Semantic Search
Semantic Web (browser)
NLP
Machine Learning & Data Mining (classification, clusters, etc)
Linked Data
SPARQL data manipulation language, OWL/RDF, Graph-based Triple-stores & NoSQL
Ontology
Web Applications (HTML5, JavaScript2 & CSS3) & Hybrid/Native Mobile Applications (iOS/Android)
Description Logic & Rules
Cloud Computing, SaaS & IaaS
Voice Recognition, Speech Recognition & Image Recognition
MMORPGs, Virtual Worlds & Virtual Goods
XR (Mixed Reality, Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality)
E-Learning (simulation & scenario-based)

The enabling technologies of Web 3.0 are largely data-centric, meaning we are shifting the pendulum from a front-end upgrade (as in the Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 upgrade shifted the pendulum from back-end/network upgrades to front-end interaction/collaboration upgrades).

Although the primary focus of this phase is data, it is not entirely boring modeling and Semantic associations, but also the creation of unique and previously impossible data visualizations in three dimensional space, as well as bringing more real-world data on to the web and making the integration of data seamless, in order to power incredibly rich user experiences on the front-end.

So in summary, most of the work is on getting data out of data silos and into the public domain (or at least making them publicly accessible), but the result of this work will inevitably be compelling user interfaces and front-end manifestations that would have been thought impossible in previous versions of the web.

Lastly, it is worth mentioning that the track of Web 3.0 focused on getting more and more real-world data onto the web will also result in engaging end-user experiences if successful, transforming the way we interact with the web, data and each other. Some examples of this are the HCI areas of Gesture Recognition, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Speech Recognition and Image Recognition which, when combined with Biometrics may lead into the concept of Web 4.0 (for better or worse).