Gosdot

We haven’t even gotten past the wave of 2.0 applications but someone is already predicting what Web4.0 will be like:

Nova’s stealth-mode company is working on what he describes as a “Java-based framework for semantic web applications and services that has some similarities to Ruby on Rails, and also includes a lot of other technology such as our extremely fast and scaleable storage layer for semantic data tuples, powerful semantic query capabilities, and a range of algorithms for analyzing data and doing intelligent things for users.” The service that Radar Networks plans to introduce later this year “will enrich and facilitate more intelligent online relationships, community, content, collaboration and even commerce,” he said in a recent blog post. In addition, another stealth startup, MetaWeb, is building something to do with the semantic Web.

Given that few predicted how Web 2.0 would come to be defined during the early stages of Web 1.0, the concept of Web 3.0 is still a bit fuzzy, and Web 4.0, the WebOS on Nova’s map, is really hazy. The WebOS implies that machine intelligence has reached a point that the Internet becomes the planetary computer, a massive web of highly intelligent interactions.

That person is Nova Spivack and his company Radar Networks isn’t just talking about it, they’re working on it.

But what exactly is the Semantic Web (a.k.a Web 3.0)?

In the Semantic Web approach, the meaning of the information is encoded using markup languages such as RDF and OWL…Words and concepts in the content of documents and data records can be marked up with RDF/OWL expressions to indicate what they mean — does a certain word or phrase such as “Lotus” for example, mean a software company, a software product, an exotic sportscar brand, or some other kind of concept? Without sophisticated natural language processing it is often difficult for software to determine this on its own. The Semantic Web provides markup codes that explicitly indicate the intended meaning of information in an unambiguous, machine-readable format…

…But this is really an oversimplification — OWL and ontologies can actually go a lot further than just defining the meaning of concepts — they can also define their logical relations as well. For example, how exactly are two things connected and are there any special restrictions on that connection? For instance, an ontology can define that a person’s sister must be female, or that a person can only have 1 biological mother, etc….

…The main point here is that adding the semantic metadata does not require the apps that create or consume consume the content to understand natural language, nor does it require people to be XML coders — even regular end-users can help to define the semantics of content by simply tagging it. The Semantic Web provides a much richer and more expressive framework for doing this than is currently available in Web 2.0 “tags,” but it’s not that far off either.

What Nova is saying is that the Semantic Web-experience will be one wherein machines can infer the ‘meaning of’ and ‘relationships between’ various types of data. For instance say you are looking for information on laptops (an example that Nova Spivak cites…is this guy’s name for reals?) across different webstore fronts now. You’ll find that many of them will use different terms in place of ‘laptop’. Some stores will call them ‘portable computers’, some ‘portable pcs’ and some ‘notebook computers’…which in this case really all refer to the same thing. A semantic search engine would be able to sense this relationship, either through embedded metadata or tags that users could select, and would turn up all relevant items from across the web.

Big deal right? Google does this now. Not really. Not yet, anyways. Spivack explains…

Another key benefit of using RDF/OWL is that these languages are designed to support formal logical reasoning. By marking up information with RDF/OWL sophisticated search and inferencing can then take place around it. For example, by marking up various people and their social connections it is then possible to infer for example, that Sue is Jane’s cousin, that Bob and Dave are colleagues, and that product A is incompatible with product B, etc.

This kind of logical reasoning and inference is essential to enable the next-generation of the Web — an Intelligent Web — where software and online services start to help people work, communicate, socialize and shop more productively. For example it will enable something beyond search — it will enable services that provide answers or suggestions. This is not necessarily important for all applications today, but it will become increasingly important in the future. Content that exists in RDF/OWL essentially has a longer shelf-life and will be easier to reuse, integrate and reason across in the future.

Thus, the search engine…or whatever semantic aware application you’re using would ‘learn’ and continue to learn through trial and error, increasing it’s overall accuracy throgh use. Semantics can be thought of as laying the groundwork for the future use of artificial intelligence on the world wide web.

For more ask him not me.