Happy New Years. Hope you had fun last night. I was recently asked at one of my web 2.0 sessions about the relationship between the semantic web and web 2.0. It was a good question. I became aware of the semantic web concept long before web 2.0 but had not heard as much about it recently. An article in the New York Times attempted to address this issue, Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense, a few weeks ago. They referred to web 2.0 as primarily characterized by mashups or combinations of applications, a limited view. They then saw the semantic web as web 3.0, a movement beyond web 2.0. In the words of the times, “In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.”
It seems that they defining web 2.0 based on only one dimension of it in order to place it at a more primitive level to the semantic web. Instead it seems to me that these are parallel developments.
I went to the wikipedia to see what they said about the semantic web and found the following. “The Semantic Web is a project to create a universal medium for information exchange by putting documents with computer-processable meaning (semantics) on the World Wide Web… web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of web pages that are understandable by computers, so that they can search websites and perform actions in a standardized way. A computer could, for example, automatically find the nearest manicurist or book an appointment that fits a person's schedule.”
The concept sees clearer, but as many have said, the execution is quite complex, While I think the web 2.0 term is useful, in part, because there is not a better term to capture all its components, except perhaps to the participation web (but not the mashup or composite web. But the semantic web already has a good name so the web 3.0 is not so useful and can be misleading. What do you think?
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