Web 3.0

Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 are the generations of world wide web, each having its own salient features. Currently we are living in web 2.0 and Web 3.0 is on the cards. There has been a lot of acrimonious criticism regarding giving the numbers to the web, but the ideas has caught on.

Web 1.0 concerns with the first generation of the commercial WWW, dominated by content that was only marginally interactive. Web 2.0, is represented by the features such as tagging, social networks, and user-created classification of content called “folksonomies,” added a new vista of interactivity, represented by sites such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Wikipedia.

Web 3.0 is the semantic web. In a New York Times article, John Markoff defined Web 3.0 as a set of technologies that offer efficient new ways to help computers organize and draw conclusions from online data. Webots are the major corner stone of semantic web, in which the idea is to have data-surfing agents which will surf and reason through mountains of knowledge on your behalf from your perspective with their added intelligent suggestions and analaysis.

The Semantic Web initiative’s basic standards are in place; big companies are involved; startups are merging or being purchased; analysts and national and international newspapers, not just technical publications, are writing about the project. Blogosphere is posting, commenting and re-commenting upon the process. Only a single item remains: taking the technology mainstream.