Web 2.0 Vs. Web 3.0
For AYLIEN, the web still has not changed so much. Although the emerge of new interactive web applications and social networks which in general, associated with the term “web 2.0” has remarkably changed the way that we communicate and interact with the web, but it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. DiNucci, a consultant on electronic information design who coined the term “web 2.0” in 1999 writes in her article “Fragmented Future”:
The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop. The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will appear on your computer screen, on your TV set, your car dashboard, your cell phone hand-held game machines and maybe even your microwave oven.
Her use of the term deals mainly with Web design, aesthetics, and the interconnection of everyday objects with the Internet; she argues that the Web is “fragmenting” due to the widespread use of portable Web-ready devices. Her article is aimed at designers, reminding them to code for an ever-increasing variety of hardware. As such, her use of the term hints at, but does not directly relate to, the current uses of the term.
Tim Berners-Lee, The Inventor of World Wide Web described the term “Web 2.0″ as a “piece of jargon”:
“Nobody really knows what it means…If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”
So the term web 2.0 in general refers to trends rather than the technology. It’s a fashion. The structure of the web (hypertext) is still what it was back in 1990. Techniques such as AJAX do not replace underlying protocols like HTTP, but add an additional layer of abstraction on top of them. What has changed is the ability to support and present more different type of information on the web such as video & sound, which is the result of better-evolved web browsers but not the web itself.
Developers are still using the same old method to create websites and machines are still using the same algorithm to translate those codes and give the output to the end-user. Machines are unable to understand if the article is about sport or it’s a food recipe. Machines cannot differentiate if what you are listening to is music or it’s news. Having said that, machines are unable to communicate with each other unless a human interfere. The look of the web has changed but it’s the same old crap.
In this collaborative medium known as web – where we all meet, read and write – all opinions and user-generated content are equally valuable and relevant. Everything looks the same to machines. As Andrew Keen argue that Web 2.0 has created a cult of digital narcissism and amateurism, which undermines the notion of expertise by allowing anybody, anywhere to share and place undue value upon their own opinions about any subject and post any kind of content, regardless of their particular talents, knowledge, credentials, biases or possible hidden agendas. Additionally, Sunday Times reviewer John Flintoff has characterized Web 2.0 as “creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels”, and also asserted that Wikipedia is full of “mistakes, half truths and misunderstandings”.
Now it seems that Internet is like a public storage that anyone can store whatever they want and companies like Google should come up with very complex algorithm in order to be able to make sense of all those data, categorize and rank them by leveraging the only peace of information that is readable by machines which are texts.
Semantic Web which is considered as the future of the World Wide Web or “web 3.0” is a group of methods and technologies to allow machines to understand the meaning – or “semantics” – of information. Web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so computers can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.
Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the vision of the semantic web as follows:
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.
In “Web 3.0” publishers and developers will go beyond the limitation of HTML and metadata tags and will literally talk to machines in order to describe each peace of content. It’s a new language and solution specifically designed for data. In a semantic environment finding a relevant information will become an easy task and machines will be capable of understanding more on what you are looking not only based on “keywords” but also the concepts.
At the time of writing this article, many content providers are organizing their information semantically such as New York Times or IMDB. ‘Semantic’izing contents helps to access information more conveniently and faster and help other machines to communicate in a proper form with each other which will results in accessing to an unbelievable data resource.