In 2003, the Vice President at O’Reilly Media, Dale Dougherty, coined the phrase “Web 2.0.” This was used to describe the great changes that had taken place in the Internet over the ten years since it came into being. This has led many of us to wonder, “When will we see Web 3.0 and what can we expect from it?”
If the changes occur at the same pace for Web 3.0 as they did with Web 2.0, then we may start to see a shift in the Internet we know today in the next three years.
When the Internet first emerged, it was akin to a vast library. It contained a wealth of knowledge just waiting to be discovered. This is what is now referred to as Web 1.0. Currently, the web has evolved into a social hub. The information is still out there, and there is even more of it than before. But today, users can contribute and share information with each other. Web 2.0 brought the rise of social media and has linked us from one side of the globe to the other.
So what will this next generation of the World Wide Web have in store for us? Many Internet experts believe that it will become something like a virtual personal assistant. It will know all there is to know about you and use the Web as an endless resource. Where the current Internet brings people together, Web 3.0 is going to bring people and information together.
Let’s look at an example:
If you were to plan a big night out on the town, with today’s Internet you will have
to enter in keywords, sift through page after page of search engine results. You will have to compare restaurants, look at menus and prices, pick out a movie and find a nearby theater. It can take hours to plan an exciting evening out.
With the new Web 3.0, experts think that all of that hard work will be handled for you. You will only have to enter in what you are looking for and the program will collect, analyze and offer you the information you are looking for. Web 3.0 will not just be able to pick out your keywords, but it will actually tell you if the website is relevant to your search. Web 3.0 will be an Internet that thinks.
The next shift in the Web will create a more relevant, efficient and enjoyable experience for users. Some think that the next generation of the Internet will create a personal profile for each user based on his or her browsing history. This will help to shape each person’s Web experience. Two individuals could perform the same keyword search and receive different results, based on the profile.
Many Web experts think that the basis for Web 3.0 is going to be application programming interfaces (APIs), designed to let developers build applications that can make the most of various resources.
Others think that the new Web could see a new coding language. HTML may give way to a whole different language than the one so many have depended on and used over the years. This is because, they believe, it will be simpler to start with a new language from scratch for Web 3.0 than to build off of the existing language.
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, calls his own concept of the future Internet the “Semantic Web.” The phrase Web 2.0, he says, is “meaningless jargon,” and that the Internet, as it is today, is how he had intended it to develop.
The Semantic Web will enable computers to interpret information that they scan in order to determine what is relevant and what is not through the use of software agents. These programs will do the work of searching for relevant information on the Web thanks to ontologies (collections of information).
These ontologies will be comprehensive and detailed. These ontologies will be in the form of metadata, which is coded information that only computers can read. Since it takes a great deal of time to build ontologies, this is one of the biggest obstacles to the Semantic Web. Many feel that this is too much work to be feasible.
There is much speculation about what the future holds for the Internet. Some of us cannot even fathom the extreme changes that experts have theorized. However, there was once a time when the Internet itself was only a plan in someone’s head, and today we cannot remember how we ever got along without it.
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