The invention of the Web could more or less be traced back to a December night in 1968, when Douglas Engelbart for the very first time demonstrated the hyperlink and the GUI. From that Mother of all demos (as that demonstration was referred as), to the phenomenon of YouTube and Amazon today, the World Wide Web has come a pretty long way. Today, from finding information to making purchases, almost every human activity is possible on the Web.

Web 3.0 is an idea where data ceases to be data and becomes information, where computers and machines are able to understand and link pieces of data automatically. This journey from interactive to intuitive is what could be defined as Web 3.0 or Semantic Web.

Thus, complex HTML websites that came up in the 90s, like Yahoo! and Rediff were Web 1.0; interactive websites like YouTube, Wikipedia are Web 2.0; and now Web 3.0 is all set to explode in our lives. Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, gives another simpler way of differentiating the stages of the Web. Web 1.0 was dial-up, 50k average bandwidth; Web 2.0 is an average 1 megabit of bandwidth; thenWeb 3.0 will be 10 megabits of bandwidth all the time, which will be the full video Web, he said.

According to one of the biggest proponents of Semantic Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, The Web is evolving at the moment. The data Web is in small stages, but it is a reality. For instance, there is a Web of data about all kinds of things, such as the one about proteins, which is in its early stages. When it comes to publicly accessible data, there is an explosion of data Web in the life sciences community. When you look up data for proteins and genes, cell biology, and biological pathways, lots of companies are very excited. We have a healthcare and life sciences interest group at the Consortium, which is generating a lot of interest out there, he states.

In essence, the Semantic Web is a place where machines can read Web pages much as we humans read them. Its a set of standards that turns the Web into one big database, says Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks

Projects in Focus

• Neurocommons is an open RDF database developed by Science Commons. It was compiled from major life sciences databases with a focus on neuroscience. It is accessible via a web-based front-end using the SPARQL query language.
• FOAF is a popular application of the Semantic Web, it is friend of a friend (or FoaF) which describes relationships among people and other agents in terms of RDF.
• The SIOC ProjectSemantically-Interlinked Online Communitiesprovides a vocabulary of terms and relationships that model Web data spaces. Examples include, discussion forums, weblogs, blogrolls/feed subscriptions, mailing lists, shared bookmarks, and image galleries.
• SIMILE or Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a joint project, conducted by the MIT Libraries and MIT CSAIL, which seeks to enhance interoperability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, meta data, and services.
• The Linking Open Data project is a community lead effort to create openly accessible and interlinked RDF data on the Web. The data in question takes the form of RDF data sets drawn from a broad collection of sources. There is a focus on the linked data style of publishing RDF on the Web.

While there is much optimism about Web3.0 there are a few sceptics as well, who doubt if the Semantic Web will actually take hold. But going by the kind of evolution that has been seen over the years, there is little place for scepticism. Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web is bound to be a reality; the big question is: When?

Shashwat DC
shashwatc@cybermedia.co.in

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