Andrew Walmsley on digital: The whys and wherefores of web 3.0

Marketing 07-May-08

For a moment there, you thought you'd just about understood it. You were just getting to grips with podcasts, you'd found a use for RSS feeds, even web 2.0 seemed to be making some sense.

But in the world of digital, we're never satisfied if those green shoots
of comprehension are beginning to germinate in the wider world. Frankly,
everything is so last year, and the more we can have that's new, the

better.

Web 3.0 has been threatening to be that new thing for a couple of years,
and, reassuringly, there is still a lot of debate about what it actually
is.

From the web evolving into a series of 3-D spaces (I don't know what
this means either) to the idea of cloud computing - taking our PCs and
all their word-processing, email and calendar functions, and putting
them on the web so they can be accessed from anywhere - there are plenty
of views as to what web 3.0 could look like.

The most widely accepted version, though, is that promoted by Sir Tim
Berners-Lee, the man who invented the web. The 'semantic web' is a term
he uses to describe a web of data that can be made sense of by machines,
on a global scale.

The web is a huge mishmash of information - pictures, music, text, video
- and while search engines index some of this, really they are simply
reporting back the existence of this information rather than actually
comprehending it. If we could apply standardised structures to the data,
though, machines could mesh it together and create fresh understanding
from it. The question is why this is important.

If machines could understand the information we put on the web, they
could share knowledge with each other, and make conclusions and
recommendations based on the information they find.

Websites would understand that the weather forecast in Barcelona is for
rain on the date on which we have just booked a flight, recommending
clothes we can buy, while events in the city on those dates could be
presented and selections loaded automatically into our calendar and
accounting software.

The idea's a big one - it is joined-up writing, compared with the
laboured reception-class script of the www.

The problem, however, is a human one. When we make data available, say,
an airline schedule, this will need to be created in a machine readable
standardised format as well as a human-readable one.

As the saying goes, the great thing about standards is there are so many
of them. So even if we can succeed in marrying all the standards that
will inevitably flourish, there is still the challenge of getting people
to stick to them.

Here, Cory Doctorow's theory of Metacrap comes in useful. People lie, he
says. People are lazy, they are stupid. We don't know what we don't
know, and any taxonomy for data is inherently skewed by the personality
of the author. Finally, there is always more than one way to describe
something.

Doctorow's thesis is essentially this: since the semantic web relies on
humans structuring data in such a way that it is consistent and
error-free, it is unlikely ever to succeed, since as humans we are
fundamentally flawed.

Web 3.0 could be the basis for artificial intelligence, but would we
want to turn our lives over to machines that, while incredibly bright,
are basing their decisions on unreliable information?

For businesses transacting online, web 3.0 compliance could be a
critical success factor in the future, since consumers will inevitably
gravitate toward services that make their lives easier.

But given that we are still struggling to make the 2-D web a navigable
proposition for everyday folk, I suspect we are still going to have to
plan our own suitcase-packing for the foreseeable future.

- Andrew Walmsley is co-founder of i-Level

30 SECONDS ON ... SIR TIM BERNERS-LEE

- Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, while working
at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He made his idea
freely available, without patent or royalties.

- The Telegraph's list of Top 100 Living Geniuses ranked Berners-Lee
joint first in October 2007. He shared the top spot with Swiss chemist
Albert Hofmann, the first person to synthesize LSD, who died on 29 April
this year.

- As a student, Berners-Lee played for the Oxford University table
tennis team. He was also banned from using the university computer after
being caught hacking.

- Berners-Lee become one of 24 living holders of the Order of Merit on
13 June 2007.

- Since December 2004, he has held a chair in computer science at the
University of Southampton, where he is currently developing the semantic
web.