Web 3.0 is the new generation of the World Wide Web, through which Web 2.0 technology joins hands with the Semantic Web, making it possible for humans as well as machines to access and use the information stored in the Web. With Web 3.0, machines will be able to perform tasks requiring human intelligence, reducing our time and effort on the Internet dramatically.
Web 3.0, aiming at making the Internet a better, smarter network, is a precursor to the fully semantic Web, and successor to the Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 specialized in making the net usage collaborative by allowing the people to interact with the data and contribute their views through such things as wiki, blogs, social networking sites, etc. Examples: Wikipedia, Blogger, Digg, Technorati, http://Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, and many more.
But Web 3.0 will give Internet itself intelligence by making the machines-programs that access data (search engine bots, etc.,) -understand what the data itself is. This will make them dig up the best information from the Web for our needs and be able to contribute a lot better than they do now.
Need for Web 3.0
When we search in Google for particular information, most of what we get on the first page are the links to websites without any information useful to us. To obtain the Website that we need, we might have to use different keywords or go to the second or third SERP. Without using our intelligence, we can’t get the required result. Programs cannot see what people can.
Google is a dumb machine discharging its bots throughout the Web, scanning for keywords. When it finds a keyword in any site already indexed by it, it will present the link to you. It is up to you to decide if the site is actually useful or not. Hence, most of the time, the first search results of Google are not what you want; they either contain technical jargon allover or advertisements, not the specific thing you want.
With the advent of Web 3.0, this is all going to change. Web 3.0 aims to make the Internet itself a huge database of information, accessible to machines as well as humans. When Web 3.0 becomes popular, we will have a data-driven web, enabling us unearth information faster from the net.
You can get the machines to contribute to your needs, by searching for, organizing, and presenting information from the Web. That means, with Web 3.0 you can be fully automated on the Internet. Besides this, with machine intelligence, you can achieve tasks like the following very easily: automating share transactions; checking and deleting unwanted emails; creating and updating websites; and booking your movie tickets, airplane tickets, etc.
Web 3.0 is going to be actually the era of artificial intelligence enabled programs sprawling the Web.
Semantic Web Enabling Technologies
Web 3.0 technologies help create the Semantic Web by generating a worldwide database from the data currently scattered across the Internet. We have a million data formats for even a single simple task. This is because there are too many applications on every genre, and each of them creates its own data format, which is hidden from the other applications. The major task of Web 3.0 technologies is to unify all these formats, and create a common, extensible format that can understand any application data. Only when the data is not hidden from the machines, can the machines do anything productive.
The web technologies that will realize Web 3.0 are these.
1. RDF: Resource Description Framework or RDF, created by the W3C Consortium, the creators of markup languages like HTML, DHTML, SGML, etc., is a scheme that can be used to describe the resources on the Web. The model, which is based on XML syntax, is mainly used to describe metadata information on the Internet, such as title, author, date of modification of web page, etc. For instance, the Creative Commons license widget uses the RDF/XML scheme for describing the license details.
2. XML: The Extensible Markup Language is a general-purpose markup scheme that can be used to generate custom markups. XML is such a highly versatile markup scheme that it lets the users define their own elements, enabling seamless compatibility.
3. OWL (Web Ontology Language): OWL is another creation of W3C. It’s a knowledge representation scheme, used to script ontologies (the interrelationships between terms in any application document).
Mainly these three technologies, which enable the markup of custom data, are used to author information in machine-accessible form in the Web 3.0. In addition, the derivatives of these technologies and some other extensible markup schemes like XHTML, contribute to it.
Uses of Web 3.0
Web 3.0 contributes extremely to the development of the current Internet. Companies like ZCubes, ZOHO, Google, etc., which specialize in Web 3.0, have built applications to incorporate the semantic revolution of the Web.
The Web 3.0 enabled technologies include the online applications (or web services), which can do virtually anything. For instance, if you go to the ZCubes website, you can create custom web pages that can contain text, spreadsheets, live calculation scripts, music, pictures, live videos, live websites, and much more. You can even handwrite on the page, and create your own high quality vector drawings. All these features can be embedded on a single page by drag and drop, and the product (a normal HTML file) can be saved on your computer or published on the Web.
Conclusion
Web 3.0 is all about the backend of the Web, about creating extreme machine interfacing. When the Web 3.0 interface becomes more popular, it will entirely change the way we access the Internet. We humans will no longer have to do the difficult tasks of researching on the Internet and finding the exact information. Machines will better do all these tasks. We only will need to view the data, modify it in the way we want, and create whatever new thing we wish to create.
