Web 3.0 will be a catalyst for a paradigm shift that’s at least a few more years away. But it won’t result in a sudden brave new world of information management, regardless of what marketing materials and industry thought leaders would have you believe

Where We re Headed with Web 3.0.

Not a gilded age or paradigm shift, but social interaction will increasingly drive business

Information Management Magazine, July/Aug 2010

William Laurent

The ubiquitous buzz aboutWeb 3.0 continues unabated; nevertheless, a clear consensus or definition has not emerged of what Web 3.0 really is, or how the e-enabled world will move from Web 2.0 into a sensational era of super intelligent content and knowledge management services. However, one thing has become clear to me: Web 3.0 will not result in a huge paradigm shift or a gilded age of computing; more likely, it will be a subdued convergence of existing technologies and methodologies with new ones that borrow heavily from the past. Web 3.0 will be a catalyst for a paradigm shift that’s at least a few more years away. But it won’t result in a sudden brave new world of information management, regardless of what marketing materials and industry thought leaders would have you believe.

Let it be noted that I agree with the majority of industry pundits about the promise and potential of the semantic Web and its importance to the evolution and emergence of Web 3.0. In the semantic Web, all information is categorized and stored in such a way that both a computer and human being can fathom what it empirically represents. Unlike Web 2.0 – where keywords are used to organize data into digestible nuggets for search engines – Web 3.0 will effectively categorize and present digital information to users in a visually improved manner that enhances interaction, analysis, intuition and search functions. The key driver in this scenario is the concept of taxonomies – standardized and self-describing classifications with codified semantics that are related to one another via highly normalized and descriptive metadata, not by a pastiche of static hyperlinks. For information on the World Wide Web to have a solid degree of relevance to users and live up to the 3.0 hype, it must contain a new magnitude of (artificial) intelligence.

With Web 3.0, the Internet can finally realize elaborate and complex virtual worlds, where social interaction drives business operations. These worlds have been anticipated and talked about for years, but they have so far failed to materialize.

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