Web, the next generation

We are now in the Web 2.0 era. Years ago Internet was the most popular and efficient way of finding contents and data, whereas recently it has taken on a “social” connotation. The world wide web focuses on people’s ability to relate and share information on-line. This interactive approach could not work without the support of human intelligence as a tool to look for, distinguish and edit the various contents received within the same research field in order to get to the information desired. Currently the main search engines give back the results by comparing words and sentences syntactically identical but with no semantic analysis of the contents.

For instance, the word “right” has different meanings according to the function that it has in the sentence; it can be used as adjective (opposite of left or “correct”), as verb (“put or restore in an upright position”), as noun (“an abstract idea of that which is due to a person or governmental body by law or tradition or nature”) or even as adjective (immediately, exactly, completely). From Google’s point of view all these different expressions are just one meaningless word. This is a limit that needs to be overcome, therefore researchers are moving towards Web 3.0 or Semantic Web.
Web 2.0 was focused on people, Semantic Web focuses on machines’ calculating power.

What is the Semantic Web?
Web 3.0 is aimed to represent information by associating meaning that can be understood by machines. Currently W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), an association that for more than 10 years has been committed to the improvement of protocols and languages that regulate the WWW, is focusing on the formalization of the standards necessary for the semantic web and defined a role model for the data’s structuring which is the starting point of what will be the web of the future: RDF (Resource Description Framework). This language allows to add further information, the ontology, to the existing sources, in order to extend their “meaning” and have a Web that can connect data in a more expressive way.
The “futuristic” concept is to have a Web provided with intelligent agents, to be a more precise software that through data analysis is able to take over the human role in the search of the services they need.

How is our way of using internet going to change?
According to informatics’ “guru” Berners-Lee, who invented the term World Wide Web, internet’s future is the Semantic Web and it is portable, since an increasing number of user is surfing the net through their mobile phone.
By using ontology and metadata the way we look for information on-line is going to change.
Starting from simple concepts, the research can be accurate to the point that we will be able to “ask” the searching engine complete questions, made of a subject, a verb and object, and receive one single answer, the right one. Practically we will be able to request something like: houses (subject) which have (verb) a large garage (object). Of course the accuracy level will be by far higher than the one we get with the current available search engines, which only accept as input the two concepts of “house” and “garage” with no relationship between them.
Moreover, Berners-Lee himself thinks that Semantic Web is going to cool down the general enthusiasm that currently surrounds the social network sites, such as Facebook and Myspace, by giving birth to networks that not only connect people but also all sorts of content…we shall see!

Listed below there are some links for those who are interested in deepening the topic and get in touch with Web 3.0: