Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is one of the terms used to describe the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0. Given that technical and social possibilities identified in this latter term are yet to be fully realized the nature of defining Web 3.0 is highly speculative. In general it refers to aspects of the Internet which, though potentially possible, are not technically or practically feasible at this time.
Origin of the term
Following the introduction of the phrase "Web 2.0" as a description of the recent evolution of the Web, the term "Web 3.0" has been introduced to hypothesize about a future wave of Internet innovation. Views on the next stage of the World Wide Web's evolution vary greatly, from the concept of emerging technologies such as the Semantic Web transforming the way the Web is used (and leading to new possibilities in artificial intelligence) to the observation that increases in Internet connection speeds, modular web applications, and advances in computer graphics will play the key role in the evolution of the World Wide Web.
Proposed expanded definition
Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called 'the intelligent Web'—such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies—which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.
Nova Spivack defines Web 3.0 as the third decade of the Web (2010-2020) during which he suggests several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously including:
* transformation of the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.
* ubiquitous connectivity, broadband adoption, mobile Internet access and mobile devices;
* network computing, software-as-a-service business models, Web services interoperability, distributed computing, grid computing and cloud computing;
* open technologies, open APIs and protocols, open data formats, open-source software platforms and open data (e.g. Creative Commons, Open Data License);
* open identity, OpenID, open reputation, roaming portable identity and personal data;
* the intelligent web, Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, GRDDL, semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores;
* distributed databases, the "World Wide Database" (enabled by Semantic Web technologies); and
* intelligent applications, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents.
Research
Research under Spivack's definition
Transformation
Web 3.0 has been described as the "executable web". In the analogy to file system permissions, Web 1.0 was "read-only", Web 2.0 is "read-write", and Web 3.0 will be "read-write-execute". With the still exponential growth of computer power, it is not inconceivable that the next generation of sites will be equipped with the resources to run user-contributed code on them. The "executable web" can morph online applications into Omni Functional Platforms that deliver a single interface rather than multiple nodes of functionality.
Network computing
Related to the artificial intelligence direction, Web 3.0 could be the realization and extension of the Semantic web concept. Academic research is being conducted to develop software for reasoning, based on description logic and intelligent agents, for example, the World Wide Mind project. Such applications can perform logical reasoning operations using sets of rules that express logical relationships between concepts and data on the Web. Web 3.0 has also been linked to a possible convergence of Service-oriented architecture and the Semantic web. Web 3.0 is also called the "Internet of Services", i.e. besides the human readable part of the web there will be machine accessible SOA services which can be combined/orchestrated to higher level of services.
Distributed databases
The first step towards a "Web 3.0" is the emergence of "The Data Web" as structured data records are published to the Web in reusable and remotely queryable formats, such as XML, RDF, Website Parse Template and microformats. This is also known as the bottom-up approach. The recent growth of SPARQL technology provides a standardized query language and API for searching across distributed RDF databases on the Web. The Data Web enables a new level of data integration and application interoperability, making data as openly accessible and linkable as Web pages. The Data Web is the first step on the path towards the full Semantic Web. In the Data Web phase, the focus is principally on making structured data available using RDF. The full Semantic Web stage will widen the scope such that both structured data and even what is traditionally thought of as unstructured or semi-structured content (such as Web pages, documents, etc.) will be widely available in RDF and OWL semantic formats.
Website parse templates will be used by Web 3.0 crawlers to get more precise information about web sites' structured content.
Intelligent applications
Web 3.0 has also been used to describe an evolutionary path for the Web that leads to artificial intelligence that can reason about the Web in a quasi-human fashion. Some skeptics regard this as an unobtainable vision. However, companies such as IBM and Google are implementing new technologies that are yielding surprising information such as making predictions of hit songs from mining information on college music Web sites. There is also debate over whether the driving force behind Web 3.0 will be intelligent systems, or whether intelligence will emerge in a more organic fashion, from systems of intelligent people, such as via collaborative filtering services like del.icio.us, Flickr and Digg that extract meaning and order from the existing Web and how people interact with it. This could open up new ways to connect and collaborate using 3D shared spaces.
Socio-technological research
The inclusion of the concept of a "Web 0.0" as the pre-existing real-world "sensual web" has been proposed. In that context Web 3.0 is the development of a series where integration of technologies for digital networking and processing is digested and non dissociable of the new "real-world". In this definition, Web 3.0 is "the biological, digital analog web where information is made of a plethora of digital values coalesced for sense and linked to the real-world by analog interfaces."
Quotations
In May 2006, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web stated:
At the Seoul Digital Forum in May 2007, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was asked to define Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. He responded:
At the Technet Summit in November 2006, Jerry Yang, founder and Chief of Yahoo, stated:
At the same Technet Summit, Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, stated a simpler formula for defining the phases of the Web:

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