After our interesting discussion yesterday about protecting the future of the Web, it’s kismet that I would run into this article from the MIT Technology Review that speculates the future of the web, aka Web 3.0, and the groundwork being done now by the transition to the Semantic Web.

The article posits that the Semantic Web is giving us the tools to look at the data in all the millions of databases out there in very different ways, and to aggregate and draw conclusions from that data in ways we haven’t yet dreamed about. Much of this data gathering will be automated, and the standards that the Semantic Web is promoting allows that automation.

The Semantic Web community’s grandest visions, of data-surfing computer servants that automatically reason their way through problems, have yet to be fulfilled. But the basic technologies that Miller shepherded through research labs and standards committees are joining the everyday Web. They can be found everywhere–on entertainment and travel sites, in business and scientific databases–and are forming the core of what some promoters call a nascent “Web 3.0.”

Already, these techniques are helping developers stitch together complex applications or bring once-­inaccessible data sources online. Semantic Web tools now in use improve and automate database searches, helping people choose vacation destinations or sort through complicated financial data more efficiently. It may be years before the Web is populated by truly intelligent software agents automatically doing our bidding, but their precursors are helping people find better answers to questions today . . . John Markoff defined Web 3.0 as a set of technologies that offer efficient new ways to help computers organize and draw conclusions from online data, and that definition has since dominated discussions at conferences, on blogs, and among entrepreneurs . . . Early versions of technologies that meet Markoff’s definition are being built into the new online TV service Joost. They’ve been used to organize Yahoo’s food section and make it more searchable. They’re part of Oracle’s latest, most powerful database suite, and Hewlett-Packard has produced open-source tools for creating Semantic Web applications. Massive scientific databases, such as the Creative Commons-affiliated Neurocommons, are being constructed around the new ideas, while entrepreneurs are readying a variety of tools for release this year.

What might that future web do? In one example that the article gives, “Say you’d had some lingering back pain: a program might determine a specialist’s availability, check an insurance site’s database for in-plan status, consult your calendar, and schedule an appointment.”

So, how are we laying the groundwork for this now? We are writing to standards that have been set that will allow for future programs not yet dreamed up, and devices not yet invented, to access the information we’re now putting online. I’ve been a Web Standards Evangelist for quite some time. It can be hard for people who have no clue where this is all going to understand the vision, but I assure you that we’re just now seeing the tip of the iceberg. Writing the code for the frontend of sites with a good separation of the different types of logic, data separated from appearance separated from front end html code, will allow us to write the programs of tomorrow and tie the disparate parts of the web together in ways that will be truly exciting, as long as we don’t allow those tunnel visioned corporations to hang onto the old business model and kill the future of the internet.

It’s also important on a more personal web level for current websites to bring their sites up to the current standard. I’d also suggest that static html sites for all but the simplest brochure sites are a thing of the past, so anyone who has a static table based site written in tag soup code will be left far behind in this vision of the new web. It’s important to update older sites to accomodate the future of the web. Feel free to ask me how.

Early forays into this mashup of aps and databases have been accomplished, most notably in travel planning, though there are others. My favorite is the work being done by the Sunlight Foundation, which is seeking to build tools to access various Government Databases and aggregate the information in new ways in order to make the workings of the US Government more transparent to US Citizens.

And, as the discussion yesterday pointed up, it’s no wonder that those corporations who depend on the old model of telling “consumers” what they should want, instead of taking their orders from the bottom up (as the web works) would be threatened by this. We all need to protect the web’s future, and make sure that the entrenched Telecommunications and Media companies don’t kill the toddler Internet.

Technorati Tags: Web 3.0, Semantic Web, Net Neutrality, Web Standards, Database, Telecommunications, mashups

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 10:55 amunder Web News, Web Standards, the Semantic Web and . Comment RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.