John Markoff has an interesting article in the NY Times entitled Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense.

The bottom line: Web 3.0 = The semantic web.

Dan Fraber points to a great article by Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks: Minding The Planet — The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web

Here’s the description Nova gives:

The Semantic Web is a set of technologies which are designed to enable a particular vision for the future of the Web – a future in which all knowledge exists on the Web in a format that software applications can understand and reason about. By making knowledge more accessible to software, software will essentially become able to understand knowledge, think about knowledge, and create new knowledge. In other words, software will be able to be more intelligent – not as intelligent as humans perhaps, but more intelligent than say, your word processor is today.

Why do we need a semantic web?

Here’s an example: You use your cell phone to ask which chinese restaurants are nearby and are currently open. In addition to a list, you want to get an idea of whether any of them are any good.

The idea behind the semantic web is to get machines to solve the problem. But, to create the ground work for those machines, you have to get massive cooperation. Every restaurant has to run a web site which describes its hours in a specific format, and its location in a similarly specific format. Every person who writes their reviews about that restaurant has to express that review in a specific format. Or at least, behind the scenes, there has to be some web accessible XML file that describes the review in a specific format.

Does Web 3.0 mean the end of Web 2.0?

In typical curmudgeon fashion, Nick Carr recently celebrated Web 3.0, and complained about what he thought was a lack of cool new stuff at the latest Web 20 Summit.

Nick is grumpy about the hype of of Web 2.0. And, as I said in a comment on his site, maybe the third iteration of a conference is like the 3rd generation of a rich family. The first generation has the work ethic and the vision, and therefore makes the money. The second generation lacks the vision, but has the work ethic. The third generation has neither, and only knows how to party.

The recent Office 2.0 conference felt like it had a purpose: to bring the read/write Internet behind the enterprise firewall.

Clearly, with $1.5+ B being spent on sites like YouTube, Web 2.0 isn’t over.

Does Web 3.0 = the semantic web?

I am not 100% convinced that the semantic web is really going to happen. That is not to say that I wouldn’t like to see it happen.

The problem is a philosophical clash, however. Please forgive my rough understanding here, but the way I see it, in the semantic corner, you have Plato, with his assumption of truth, and Aristotle with his related assumption that everything can be categorized into ontologies. On the other end, you have Nitesche and Foucault who claim that “truth” and “fact” are irrelevant, and, instead, what counts is perspective, current belief and the power of attention.

I used to trade financial derivatives. When you are trading $1 Billion in notional, what counts in today’s markets is something called the “risk neutral price”. The risk neutral price is not based on facts, or “actual” probabilities. It is based on the markets perspective on risk and what they collectively believe they should get paid for.

My point here, is that the world can operate without proper ontologies. Just as financial markets use prices to imply volatilities, which in turn imply the prices of derivatives, Google uses links and the concept of a lazy surfer to imply the value of a site.

An Aside

The difference might not matter.

If you watch Scooble’s video on Microsoft’s new photo solution: Photosynth, the computerized space is an implied ontology. This space has X,Y,Z coordinates. There are objects in this space. You can not see through some objects. If you look up, down or sideways, this is what those objects looked like on the day this set of photos were taken.

Maybe the Semantic web will just end up being a bunch of implied ontologies. Maybe that’ll work out just fine.

Answering the Semantic Question

If you can beg borrow or steal an alpha id, check out a restaurant search site called Boorah. They can answer the tough semantic question posed above. They did it with a combination of some brilliant technology and some brilliant data mining. What they didn’t do, was to require that everyone adopt a similar standard for describing their restaurants, or their restaurant reviews.

What is the future of Web 3.0?

Is Web 3.0 the hive mind mechanical Turk built on the human driven read/write Internet, or a spooky web for machines, with everything you do and write being wrapped in a constricting swaddle of meta data?

I’m not sure. It’ll probably be something radically different from both.