Web 3.0: Semantic Web, Scraping & Human Intelligence

The semantic web
Many experts think Web 3.0 will center on World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee's notion of the "Semantic Web." This approach promises improved access to data and information on the Internet, especially for machines like those which power the aggregation of data (like search engines). Essentially the web today is geared toward people as users and the vision for the Semantic Web would be to make web-facing information more accessible to machines.

Some point to services like Yahoo! Pipes and Dapper (Web 2-0-ese for "data mapper" - http://www.dapper.net/) as a window into the Web 3.0 future. These services -- often called "scrapers" -- allow users to assemble or "scrape" content from existing sites and manipulate them for custom display.

See an example of a Yahoo! Pipe compiling financial information based on a specific ticker symbol

-- OR --

See a geoanotated map of Reuters news stories

There is naturally some controversy here as to the use of content and preservation of intellectual property rights for content providers and debate on the topic will likely continue and intensify as these tools grow in popularity. Scraping's impact on how organizations think about their information could be significant; many may need to reconsider their approach as to what data is "open" and what is "closed." But that topic is a bit beyond the scope of this post.

Developer & user community/services partnerships bear fruit
Web 3.0 may also be about the partnering of web service companies with pools of developers and users to help solve problems better suited for human brains than digital ones and which ultimately add value to services.

One example of this is Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk (http://www.mturk.com) offering developers (and users) cash to solve problems which would require enormous machine cycles to figure out - like finding an item in a photo and tagging it. Amazon which has dubbed the project "artificial artificial intelligence" calls these tasks 'HITs:"

"...What is a HIT? HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task. These are tasks that people are willing to pay you to complete. For example a HIT might ask: "Is there a pizza parlour in this photograph?" Typically these tasks are extraordinarily difficult for computers, but simple for humans to answer..." (Source: Mechanical Turk)

Since Web 2.0 began essentially as the name for an industry conference, it is unclear exactly who gets to decide whether something is (or is not) Web 3.0. To be sure, there is only so much more innovation that can be cranked out of blog platforms and podcasting. Yet the trend of portable, user-generated content will likely power us into whatever Web 3.0 becomes - the semantic web and beyond.

All of this seems to beg the question, though: how did we ever get through life in the old Web 1.0 days?