Where next with the web?

Rest in peace Web 2.0 (2006-9) because we're well into the era of Web 3.0, even if you hadn't noticed. It's remarkable that we're even talking about a third version of the web. After all, it's only been around some 5,000 days for most of us.

When it first arrived, the web was predicted to be "like TV, only better", according to Kevin Kelly, a founder and now editor-at-large of Wired magazine. But, Kelly says, just as people had to believe the impossible of the web back then, so too will they now as its morphs again.

As the web has developed, we've seen it evolve from the storage of data to the creation of information. Now, what's predicted is a web with the power to sift data to provide us with knowledge that's relevant, personalised and verified by peers, experts and fellow users as being valuable and valid to our searches.

The laymen among us might think the web already does this. But if you drill into how our searches work - Google et al - the web doesn't really have the intelligence to provide truly filtered, targeted information. Web search today can't differentiate easily, for example, between Java coffee beans, Java the programming language or Java in Indonesia. It can't make the strict contextual links our brains can when we sift information. That's what web 3.0 is trying to tackle.

To see where Web 3.0 comes in, let's take a step back to review what 1.0 and 2.0 were all about. Web 1.0 has been called the "read-only" web, in which users inter-acted using web applications such as Yahoo or Lycos, for instance. We could contribute only in a limited way, on forums and guest books for example. We focused on our homepages, on using portals and on owning our content.

Web 2.0 got us more involved. It is called the social web or "read-write" era. We shared, opened up our content, engaged in user-generated sites and communities. The social web is defined by blogs, wikis, social networking sites, podcasts and software as a service (SAAS). While Web 2.0 was more a social change leaving the web's underlying technology largely unaltered, Web 3.0 sees a technological shift; and an important one too.

To get databases to speak to databases, not just web pages to speak to web pages via those keywords and hyperlink, we're going to need new languages to make intelligent, semantic synapses to provide the knowledge that we are seeking rather than just information, often out of context. While computer scientists work away, the man in the street just needs to know that the new languages are being standardised by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), the body that oversees the creation of interoperable web technologies.

Web 3.0 will be the most personal web yet. It will be verging on artificial intelligence (AI); in fact, Google has said that AI is its next goal. It will become capable of understanding the content in context and its intelligent capabilities should remove the burden of information overload that we encounter in the myriad redundant choices that come up in our searches today. Web 3.0 should give us knowledge provided by credible sources, that is recent, relevant and also community endorsed.

There are some examples of Web 3.0 attempts already, such as Freebase, which creates "a wealth of free data" - "the definitive open database of people, places and things" created by a global community. It's a kind of giant mind map with information linked by real people.

Web 3.0 places demands on us though. For the intelligent and highly personalised web to survive, those holding information in data silos will have to share as never before. Web 3.0 requires us to let content flow to and from our sites, blogs or whatever else we reside in on the web. For that reason alone, we need to care about Web 3.0.

Dr Gatt is a founder and director of ICON Studios, a local software applications product company specialising in the development of web solutions and electronic marketing materials.