The Web 3.0 - The Future Web which will change our lives

I still can remember the moment I heard the word Web 3.0 few years back. The first question which bombarded  by mind was "Are there versions of the current www we are using? Oh! I have only known a single form of WWW." To ease the understanding of the viewer who are of the same mind set that I was in, let me announce you that there have been different stages of internet starting from the very old 1.0 and now we are trying to transform from Web 2.0 to 3.0.

During the very early days the World Wide Web was more static and it was used as a tool to browser information. But with the advents of Web 2.0 the people who used to browse through internet for different information became the content providers. Indeed I am also one of them and you are now reading my blog posts which is a fine example that I have provided content to the internet.

Before knowing what the web 3.0 is you must have a good idea on what the Semantic Web is all about. So I recommend you to go through the article on Semantic Web in the same blog before you move into knowing what the Web 3.0 is all about. The Semantic Web promises us huge structured set of data which is primarily be based upon the meanings and the contexts of the information that it carries. This is the solid starting point for the Web 3.0.

Imagine that the whole set of information that you have in your PC is totally semantically structured and thereby your PC is capable of understanding what this information is all about. If all the PCs that we have act in the same way that your PC acts then we have a huge pile of machines which are just capable of understanding the contexts. Extend this capability to the mobiles devices that we have. Extend this capability to all other electronic devices we have. Imagine a world where all these devices that we use in our day to day life have the capability of understanding different information that flows through them. Then a device that I might have in my hand will be able to communicate based on its information with your one. Both our devices will then be able to communicate with a huge grid of devices which are meant to be serving a specific purpose. This device to device communication and understanding era is the root of the Web 3.0. If all these devices are well structured with the information then it will not be a very difficult task to make them act on their intuition.

What if the refrigerator that you use at your home understands what exactly you should eat based on the information on your preferences of food which are captured on your visits to the refrigerator, and couple them with the records of your health reports captured over the internet while taking into consideration what different outlets have to offer for your tastes etc etc and at the end order the required amounts automatically. All these would sound to be so alien. But yet they are not so far from the reality.

In Web 3.0 we will be able to have cars driving by themselves, mobile phones accurately tells you the information on the items you pick at a supermarket, TVs and radios which will play the exact programs that you love to listen and all other set of promises you would have only seen in fiction.

So be alert and await to witness the future web which will connect not only the humans as it has been doing so far but will connect all the devices and gadgets that we use and make all our lives much easier.

Semantic Web - Often Associated with Semantics

For many of us the World Wide Web is not an alien concept today. The WWW we have today is a result of the efforts of the thousands of different people working continuously in providing content. Among the billions of web sites we have online today we crawl through billions of different elements of information. But have you ever thought whether you know the actual pieces of information out there in what you browse before you actually read through?

I know the last sentence would have made you a bit more confusing. Indeed we are caught up today in a keyword based paradigm where we do not heed the actual meanings of different content that we browse. The search engines and all the other different systems working on internet mostly look for keywords and act rather than trying to understand what they really mean. I will tell you an incident that happened to me few days ago. One of my friends wanted to know some details on Alaska as he wanted to travel there and he asked me if I know something about that place. Until then I had never encountered a situation where I wanted to search where Alaska is or any other details. So I started searching for some information on Alaska. My first search parameter on google was "Pictures of Alaska" and then I was not happy with the set of photos I received and then accidentally I tried the "Photos of Alaska" as my next search parameter. I had believed the words "Photo" and "Pictures' would have implied the same meaning but these two searches yielded a complete two different results sets.

Indeed the internet we have today knows nothing about what information it contains. It just manipulates the information which flows from different sources varying from different databases, file systems services and so on. But the actual information or simple its semantics is not known to any of these machines involved in bringing internet to us.

As the word implies the Semantic Web is the paradigm where we know the actual pieces of information that are contained in these information sources. For an example just suppose that we are browsing a certain web page on our favourite web browser. The bowser has no idea as to what information it has. In the semantic web every bit of information is connected with each other. You have the relationships of each information that you have in a single document. These relationships help us to work with the information quite intelligently and perform very effective searches and other functions on them. For an example we have known that the Cancer is a diseases that is associated with a huge number of different topics ranging from diseases due to abnormal cell growth to radioactivity. It is hard to find a solution for cancer for a single team because the knowledge of all these areas is so huge that you can not pile them up together and learn them all during your life time. But if we could analyze all this knowledge and then find out the relationships among bits and pieces then we could have used machines to go for ultimate solution for cancer. Since in Semantic Web all information from different articles on cancer will be mapped with their relationships, the moment you search under the word cancer you will get each bits and pieces of information mapped with respect their relationship and even the machines can then understand what cancer is all about.

The two following diagrams will ease you understand how these related information will look like.

Semantic Web can be formed if we can extract the semantic metadata present in each of these documents and then find out the relationships among them. The above diagrams are built in that way.

People are confused as to whether the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 both are the same. Indeed the Web of Data or the Semantic Web is just a part of Web 3.0. The web 3.0 is a far from reality more sophisticated but cooler concept. We will take the Web 3.0 into discussion during the later posts.

What is this peculiar term called Semantics?

If you heard the word semantics for the first time in your life and puzzled as to what this supernatural awkward word is all about, I must confess that you are no different from me. The first time when I came across this word I wondered what the exact meaning of this would be. So I used my favorite google define option. There we go with the meaning of the word semantics as "the study of language meaning". Then came up the real puzzle. What is the damn use of this in the context of computing?

We have been using computers for decades. Everything that we have been doing with computers were mostly based upon keywords (sets of characters). The searches, data entry, processing and all these are just merely been done based upon just sets of characters. Let's take a simple example where you search for something on web. Suppose you type the word "Kennedy" in your favourite search engine and hit enter. You will be able to get results starting from John F Kennedy, Kennedy Space Center, the assassination of president Kennedy and so on. All these results are based upon the instances where you have the word 'Kennedy' present. But what if you were to get information on a particular singer in South Africa whose name is Kennedy? The search engines that you have today are not capable of identifying the meanings of the words that they are dealing with and these algorithms used today are merely based upon just keywords, character sets and pattern matching etc.

The Semantics in computing proposes an era where where we use the meanings of the words instead of the just sets of characters when processing. If we take the typical example of searching, you will no longer be going after the instances where your search keywords are present but analyze the meaning of the terms and then go on searching where you find similar contexts. In case of the above example your search engine do not go on searching the words 'Kennedy' and list down all instances but it will show you several contexts of 'Kennedy' where it stands as a name of a former president of United States, Space Center, Singers and so on.

In semantics we have value added data in which we actually know what they really imply. We have relationships with different word entities and we know what they really mean. This helps us to be more accurate and intelligent in our day to day processing using computers. For an example the web browsers that you use today are actually do know nothing about what they render and show you. But if they are semantically enabled, they will know what is really out there in those pages and may be they would arrange the web page intelligently according to your tastes.

The knowing the actually meaning and the context of information which is circulating inside a computer system will enable many functions that are really astonishing. This can affect almost every field of computing and take a tremendous turn. Semantics itself will be able to create a new era of computing.

But there are many obstacles in bringing these promises down to your finger steps. The next few posts will be on these issues, new trends and concepts which are emerging with Semantics. One of the most astonishing concepts of this era is Semantic Web or the future WWW. We will discuss these in detail in the next few posts.