Having read the title, many of you are doubtless scrabbling desperately for your keyboard or mouse, intent on moving rapidly away from this latest vacuous piece of opportunistic marketing fluff, but please stay your hand a moment as there may actually be something to this ‘Web 3.0′ meme despite the unfortunate name.

Only a few short years ago, things were so much simpler. There was The Web. Full stop. There was far too much brochureware. There were a growing number of relatively crude transactional sites such as Amazon. There were a slew of ‘family web sites’, put up by those with only a cursory grasp of FrontPage. The Web was, pretty much, a one way flow of information from ‘out there’ trickling slowly down the 56k modem to our computers, with the occasional squirting of the odd packet the other way when we wanted to buy the first Harry Potter book.

Off to one side, and almost totally invisible unless you went looking, was the notion of something richer, in which the structure, context and meaning behind web resources was put to work in delivering a Semantic Web. The idea seemed good, but few in the mainstream held out much hope of seeing it progress beyond the labs in which its minutiae were endlessly debated.

Finally, though, some of the potential laid out all those years ago is beginning to coalesce into tangible applications sufficiently concrete to attract real money, real investors, and real business cases alongside the denizens of the ivory towers and the serial perambulators of the conference circuit. How well the two groups co-exist in this shared space remains to be seen. I’d suggest, though, that if they’re sufficiently open minded, both have much to learn from the other.

As John Borland reported of Zepheira’s Eric Miller in yesterday’s Technology Review piece;

“Five years before, he’d agreed to lead a diverse group of researchers working on a project called the Semantic Web, which seeks to give computers the ability–the seeming intelligence–to understand content on the World Wide Web. At the time, he’d made a list of goals, a copy of which he now held in his hand. If he’d achieved those goals, his part of the job was done.

Taking stock on the beach, he crossed off items one by one. The Semantic Web initiative’s basic standards were in place; big companies were involved; startups were merging or being purchased; analysts and national and international newspapers, not just technical publications, were writing about the project. Only a single item remained: taking the technology mainstream. Maybe it was time to make this happen himself, he thought. Time to move into the business world at last.”

(my emphasis)

There’s also a lot to learn from the unashamedly flamboyant marketing and technological pragmatism of those lumped under another of those vague, frustrating, but often effective terms; Web 2.0. And, as Tim O’Reilly wrote at the weekend,

“In short, it sounds like the bottom-up approach to Web 2.0 and the current thinking on the Semantic Web are growing closer together every day.”

I couldn’t agree more, and it’s good to see Tim endorsing a belief upon which we are pinning the long-term evolution of our business!

Borland continues;

“The Semantic Web community’s grandest visions, of data-surfing computer servants that automatically reason their way through problems, have yet to be fulfilled. But the basic technologies that Miller shepherded through research labs and standards committees are joining the everyday Web. They can be found everywhere–on entertainment and travel sites, in business and scientific databases–and are forming the core of what some promoters call a nascent ‘Web 3.0.’”

Joost, that attention-grabbing latest venture from the founders of Skype? Stuffed full of RDF. Also, as Borland highlights in his piece,

“An intriguing, if stealthy, company called Metaweb Technologies, spun out of Applied Minds by parallel-computing pioneer Danny Hillis, is promising to ‘extract ordered knowledge out of the information chaos that is the current Internet,’ according to its website. Hillis has previously written about a ‘Knowledge Web’ with data-organization characteristics similar to those that Berners-Lee champions, but he has not yet said whether Metaweb will be based on Semantic Web standards.”

News of Metaweb’s Freebase has been oft-reported over the past few days, including a Markoff piece in the New York Times on 9 March, Dan Farber covering it for ZDNet.com and Mike Arrington for TechCrunch the same day, and Tim O’Reilly getting in early on 8 March and following through on the 10th.

Freebase is an interesting implementation of some of the more useful bits of Semantic Webbiness; and it’s something I really believed Amazon are/were about to do. It’s such an obvious next step from S3, EC2 and SQS. Maybe they still will. Maybe they were never going to and I’m getting ahead of myself.

Markoff’s piece in the New York Times ends;

“All of the information in Freebase will be available under a license that makes it freely shareable, Mr. Hillis said. In the future, he said, the company plans to create a business by organizing proprietary information in a similar fashion.”

That, surely, is the important piece; and not just to generate revenue! So much of the data with which our corporations are awash, whether we subscribe to Open Data principles or not, is not necessarily something we wish to just dump into the pool. Instead, surely we want the ability to place it in some defined - and visible - store of our own, undertake operations on that finite store in ways that merely extend that which we’d traditionally do inside the enterprise, and then make conscious decisions as to the ways in which it is introduced to (and consumes from) the flow?

I don’t (necessarily) want ‘my’ data only to exist in isolation or in the common pot. I need to be able to form and dissolve all sorts of ad hoc groupings at will, and to have the ability to grant various levels of access inside and outside my own organisation. As we move forward, the capabilities of the technologies deployed by ourselves, by Metaweb, or by Radar Networks make those sorts of requirements feasible. The World Wide Database, the Data Web, need not be a one-size-fits-all bucket, but global views across the rich detail of its facets should certainly be offered.

We stand at a point - as mainstream media coverage and running code both demonstrate - beyond which it is finally possible to unlock all of the structured data we do such a good job of hiding away, offering it up to be exploited within a range of applications spread throughout the cloud and often (if we permit it) outside our control.

Watch this space, and related blogs such as Nova Spivack’s Minding the Planet, for more on how data - and the ways in which we store, manipulate, control, own and expose it - is shaping the next leap forwards on the web, atop Tim Berners-Lee’s foundations and the Web 2.0 shift from passive consumption to active participation. It’ll be fun…

As to whether ‘Web 3.0′ is the best name for this evolution? I’ll reserve judgement, for now, and direct you to John Markoff’s much-cited piece in the New York Times last November. What do you think?

‘How the WebOS Evolves?‘ image by Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, described in more detail here.

Technorati Tags: AWS, EC2, eric miller, Nova Spivack, open data, SQS, Radar Networks, RDF, S3, Semantic Web, Talis, Talis Community Licence, Talis Community License, Talis Platform, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, web services

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