Web 3G: The Third Generation of the Web
I’m at the BlogTalk conference in Cork where I’m meeting an eclectic mix of bloggers, technologists and “Interesting People” gathering to share a common interest in the social web. There’s also a good representation from the Semantic Web folks including a group from DERI Galway.
Paul gave a talk on the potential of the web of relationships, alluding to the possibilities we’re seeing the more things become connected. It’s not just about connecting pages together with hyperlinks but using Semantic Web technologies we can also connect people with the things they produce, need and use. Tomorrow Nova Spivack is giving a talk on semantic social software, hopefully giving us a new view of his company’s application Twine.
Twine, and our own Talis Engage are the first in a new breed of applications founded on Semantic Web technologies that expose large parts of their data for reuse by other similar applications. We were discussing all this over dinner tonight and I suggested that a good label for this would be Web 3G since these applications were part of what we were calling the third generation of the Web.
Web 3G is what happens when you fuse the social participation of Web 2.0 with the decentralized structured information of the Semantic Web. The result is a smarter way of organising information in a network of interwoven semantic links and content, enhanced with feedback from usage and participation. We’re coming up to the end of two decades of the Web, the first of which was spent seeding the bare essentials of the web of documents. The second decade saw widespread broadband adoption enable mass participation and creation of content by millions. The next decade is going to radically change how we find, create, use and relate to that information.
The Web right now is built from the generic hyperlink, which says nothing more than “look over here”. But even this weak semantic was enough to enable Google’s Pagerank to organise and score the Web. Imagine how much more powerful the hyperlink could be if it were possible to express sentiment or meaning in the link. Even if that were limited to positive or negative endorsement of the target of the link, the value to the relevance ranking of search engines and applications would be huge. However, the possibilities for expressing the intention of a link between two pages are endless. For example, it could be possible for writers to say whether they support or reject the views expressed in the target of the link, or whether they are linking to conflicting evidence or alternative versions of the same information. These simple expressions of intention could provide an entirely new dimension of metadata. The links between things are fundamental to the existence of the Web and the value of understanding why things are related is huge.
Web 3G is an evolution of Web 2.0 enhancing it through the appropriate use of light semantics. Links between things become more clearly typed, embedded data on pages becomes more easily understood by machines, all the while retaining the ability for people to connect and link and critique the quality and relevance of the data. It becomes the semantic graph, open to participation by everyone without having to ask anyone’s permission. It is not Artificial Intelligence, there are no formal ontologies or logic reasoning, but some of the tools and techniques of AI are needed: neural networks, classifiers, heuristics, Bayesian networks and statistical analysis.
A whole new generation of applications are emerging that feature huge levels of interconnections and we hope to enable many of those to be built using the Talis Platform. Many of these connections will be internal to the application but by exposing raw data, in the ways suggested by the Linking Open Data project, every application can link to and reuse information managed by every other application. This is a step beyond data portability: rather than copying data from one application to another the norm will be to reuse data in situ. That way the data never gets out of date because it’s shared and we can use the best application to manage each piece of our data, depending on our situation. This is what Tim Berners-Lee meant by the Giant Global Graph: a world-wide network of links with meaning.
I like this generational view of the evolution of the Web. It makes it clear that there is no big bang switchover from one type of application to another. Even now we can see many Web applications being created and used that aren’t socially enabled, but they look hollow when compared to their Web 2.0 peers. The is likely to be true of the third decade, where we’ll see new applications being created that can’t talk to their peers and they too will feel shallow and unexciting when compared to their Web 3G counterparts. This isn’t an increment to Web 2.0, it’s a radical step forward!
March 4th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Ian you posted at 2:19am. Now that its daytime and you can think about this clearly/properly:
“Web 3G” isn’t an evolution of “Web 2.0″, surely there is some kind of bang into “Web 3G” existence when an app fulfills all of the requirements that make it a “Web 3G” app? (meaning that its not an evolution at all)
The paragraph that goes (I will call this paragraph X):
). See here for one such example: http://vanirsystems.com/danielsblog/2008/02/14/my-view-of-dataportability/
“A whole new generation……world-wide network of links with meaning”
This is partly really obvious, and partly something that I have been reiterating over and over in my blogs and talks (shame on you for not referencing me
Paragraph X is actually the most important paragraph in the whole of your post, because this is actually the original Semantic Web Vision, plain and simple! And Tim Berners-Lee reiterated that in his GGG blog post. We just call it “Linked Data” or “Linking Open Data”, because with RDF – people haven’t crossed knowledge domains with good Semantic URI linking and the “Linking Open Data” project promotes that.
You also forgot to mention that OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS) is also similar to Twine and Talis Engage. I can only speak for ODS but I imagine that Twine and Engage are similar. They are Semantic Web enhanced Social Networking Tools where the user has their own space where they own their data, and all the data in these systems is available through true data portability using Linked Data.
Twine, Engage and ODS enhance the Giant Global Graph or Web of Linked Data… they aren’t the be-all and end-all. Its important to remember that.
Oh, also this statement:
“It is not Artificial Intelligence”
Erm… Knowledge Bases are generally considered a subdivision of Artificial Intelligence.
and this:
“but some of the tools and techniques of AI are needed: neural networks, classifiers, heuristics, Bayesian networks and statistical analysis”
These things have existed on the web for years either as part of search engines or product recommendations. e.g. Latent Semantic Indexing and Self Organising Maps are considered Artificial Intelligence on the Web.
[note]I speak for myself, Daniel Lewis, and not for my employer[/note]
March 4th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Hi Daniel,
I don’t believe there will be a big bang. Can you point to the big bang that was the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0? I think it was an evolution and by the time everyone had stopped arguing about what it was it was here. The same is happening right now but people aren’t suddenly going to stop using their existing apps and services. They’ll adopt new ones and cajole their existing ones to catch up once they see the benefits (and those benefits must be tangible).
Also remember that linked data and the web of data are a means to an end, not the ultimate goal. The WWW wasn’t created to have a web of documents, it was created to enable people to access information more easily. The web of data enables the next generation of information rich applications.
For your last point, there’s a distinction between AI and the tools produced by AI research. I don’t think a knowledge base is AI, not is LSI – they’re just techniques for organising information. We need those but they’re not artificial intelligence.
March 4th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Hi Ian,
I agree that there wasn’t a transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, but there were requirements/suggestions which made a site a Web 2.0 site. But this is all site level, on a more global scale we aren’t, and will never be, entirely Web 2.0 it just doesn’t fit some sites… and nor does DataPortability. e.g. a Bank web application would be silly if it was “Web 2.0″ or “DataPortable”. Web 2.0 on a Global Level is just a fuzzy buzzword.
I think the same will be for “Web 3G” or “Web 3.0“, there will be some fuzzy requirements/suggestions to make a site “Web 3G”. But on a Global Level we will never reach a “Web 3G” or “Web 3.0″ as it is just a fuzzy buzzword.
If we split what you propose for “Web 3G” into smaller chunks, for example:
MicroWeb of Objects (i.e. internal links)
Linked Open Data (i.e. external links)
The portability of data, and the importance of the identity of data
Agents capable of answering Semantic Queries
Automatic Organisation/Classification of Data
These things will be done separately for different use cases, they are achievable. I don’t think there is an explicit need for a “Web 3G” or “Web 3.0″ classification… because the further we advance technology the broader its going to become, and it becomes hard to encapsulate all these things into one. However, there is no avoiding it, there will be a “Web 3.0″ buzzword, which will try to encapsulate these things.
You are indeed correct that the World-Wide-Web was not created to have a Web of Documents. BUT, the documents will never go away as humans will always prefer to read things in a document style. It’s now about exposing the data behind the documents in order to make things easier for machines to produce good results for humans to read (once again in document form).
You are right, there is a distinction between AI and the tools produced by AI research. For instance, inference is distinct from Prolog… but both are used together.
I think you find that Knowledge Bases are taught and historically developed in the Artificial Intelligence / Intelligent Systems field. In my undergraduate degree the Knowledge Based Systems and Knowledge Engineering modules were only taught to the Intelligent Systems field and no other, I think this is the same elsewhere. Also you’ll find that Knowledge Bases are typically a topic at Artificial Intelligence academic conferences. So thats my argument for Knowledge Bases as an A.I. topic
I’ll also argue that Latent Semantic Indexing is an Artificial Intelligence subject as it involves natural language processing (which is entirely an A.I. subject), clustering and in some cases Bayesian logic.
Here lies Web Science.
(p.s. you’ll notice that I have extended this comment into the Linked Data Graph by linking various keywords into DBpedia. This is something which I have got into a routine of doing on my blog. Making this comment queryable)
March 6th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
I’m fully on the side of coming up with something short, easily grasped, that conveys a sense that we’re moving into a next stage of web evolution. I don’t have a problem with the term web 3.0. The notion of web 3G is provocative, but it seems primarily to convey an idea of increased bandwidth for mobility, and not new kinds of user experience, and the engines and drive chains that will power these. My thoughts about next stage are written up in the Semantic Wave 2008 Report, for which there is a free summary report available here
http://project10x.com/dispatch.php?task=exsum&promo=sw20081000