Web 3.0

Web 3.0 Since its creation, the internet has been a driving force for constant change in the business world. As newer and better technologies are developed for the way we use the World Wide Web, businesses too are constantly adapting to stay current and gain an edge on their competition. However, one of the most drastic “evolutionary breakthroughs” is coming soon to the internet. It’s called Web 3.0, and it’s all about “making tools available to anyone to report on events, capture life on film, create new applications, and even change the world” according to Social Policy Magazine (Cronk, 2007, p.27 ). As Paige Baltzan and Amy Phillips point out the term has been used loosely and has come to refer to a number of new concepts that are being applied to the ever evolving future of the internet (2009). They suggest that Web 3.0 encompasses one or more of the following innovations: 1. Transforming the web into a database. 2. An evolutionary path to artificial intelligence. 3. The realization of semantic web and service-oriented architecture. 4. Evolution toward 3D. (2009, p. 95) The most important factor in moving towards Web 3.0 is changing the way we perceive data online. Currently words are what drive the internet; whenever you do an online search you use keywords. Even if you are searching for videos or pictures, the only way you arrive at those data objects is because of the words that are tagged around them. In the future you will be able to search data with data (Metz, 2007). If you had a picture of Mt. Rushmore, you could submit that picture online and it would easily recognize it as Mt. Rushmore and be able to retrieve information along with it. There are already a few programs out there that are able to perform this kind of data search. One of which is an application on my Iphone called “Shazam”. With “Shazam” I can identify a songs name, author, genre and other info, simply by holding my phone’s mic in the direction of the music. Often times it only needs two or three seconds of the song to identify it and it will then direct me to websites where I can purchase the song if I so choose. While these programs do exist, it may be a while before the internet functions this way. The problem is that a complete renovation of the Web is a massive undertaking. Web 3.0 "… is a good-news, bad-news thing," an associate professor at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies R. David Lankes is quoted as saying."You get the ability to do all these very complex queries, but it takes a tremendous amount of time and metadata to make that happen.” (Matz, 2007, p. 77) The next natural transition is for the increased efficiency of Artificial Intelligence. Once data is restructured to be connected to each other and all files, whether sound, visual or text are in the same format, artificial intelligence will be increase dramatically. Much like Google’s Goggle application, machines will be able to take a live view of the world and produce data based on what it has “seen”. This new AI will be connected to everything via the internet according to PC Magazine (Matz, 2007). “On your PC, on your cell phone, on your clothes and jewelry. Spread throughout your home and office. Even your bedroom windows are online, checking the weather, so they know when to open and close” (Matz, 2007, p.76). The next function of Web 3.0 is a semantic