Friday, September 26, 2008
Inside Web 3.0 : Local companies aim to make Web 3.0 smarter
By Jim Kozubek, Special to Mass High Tech (The Journal of New England Technology)

The next-generation Internet, labeled Web 3.0 by some, remains for now a theoretical state with various prospective capabilities. However, whether or not Web 3.0 – the intelligent web – emerges as experts predict, you can be certain that the Internet will evolve. It must, given its exponential increase in use, and local information technology companies are already working on the Internet infrastructure of the future.

Since broadband and web evolution enabled the Big Bang of the Internet a decade ago, online traffic has grown at a staggering rate, now doubling every two years and set to reach, by 2015, a zettabyte a year – that’s a 1 and 21 zeroes – a Discovery Institute report said. That means one of the defining concepts for Web 3.0 will be constraint, a term that comes with positive implications.

The speed of applications is essential to real-time functions as well as to a next-generation Internet, but, to be even more useful, the Internet needs to enable users to search and find resources that are relevant to them. This depends not on hardware but on middleware products, tools that enable interoperability of applications across a network.

Middleware is integral to “markup languages,” such as XML and HTML, that match language descriptions of websites and enable the linking of information and search engines to evolve, but markups are far from perfect languages. Markups match simple terms such as “morning star” and “evening star” and “Venus,” and are extensible to provide unlimited instances in pictures, definitions and references to the planet, or the goddess, based on search.

But markups do not constitute a grammar to “understand” complex concepts such as “the woman married to the father of Aeneas” because markups are not set up to understand grammatical relationships.

A server may be able to understand the intention of an Internet user and gather layers of information. Enter a phrase such as “I need a driver’s license” and it could pull up the address to the nearest department of motor vehicles, find forms needed to apply for a license, and schedule an appointment because it understands what the “need” of a user is in stated context.

“It’s going to be companies like ours that solve problems for specific needs that enable the creation of the Semantic Web,” Greenblatt said. “This is a point when information is layered and more valuable to users.”

Lee Feigenbaum, cofounder of Cambridge Semantics Inc., expects to go to market at the end of the year with a semantic spreadsheet that combines search functions with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets coded in RDF.

“The whole idea of semantic technology is to make information more useful,” he said. “You start being able to publish data that is reused, linked and create new functions for something like a spreadsheet.”

Read the complete article here>>

User-generated science : web 2.0 tools are beginning to change the shape of scientific debate

Although Web 2.0, with its emphasis on user-generated content, has been derided as a commercial cul-de-sac, it may prove to be a path to speedier scientific advancement. According to Adam Bly, Seed’s founder, internet-aided interdisciplinarity and globalisation, coupled with a generational shift, portend a great revolution. His optimism stems in large part from the fact that the new technologies are no mere newfangled gimmicks, but spring from a desire for timely peer review.

With the technology in place, scientists face a chicken-and-egg conundrum. In order that blogging can become a respected academic medium it needs to be recognised by the upper echelons of the scientific establishment. But leading scientists are unlikely to take it up until it achieves respectability. Efforts are under way to change this. Nature Network, an online science community linked to Nature, a long-established science journal, has announced a competition to encourage blogging among tenured staff. The winner will be whoever gets the most senior faculty member to blog. Their musings will be published in the Open Laboratory, a printed compilation of the best science writing on blogs. As an added incentive, both blogger and persuader will get to visit the Science Foo camp, an annual boffins’ jamboree in Mountain View, California.

By itself this is unlikely to bring an overhaul of scientific publishing. Dr Bly points to a paradox: the internet was created for and by scientists, yet they have been slow to embrace its more useful features. Nevertheless, serious science-blogging is on the rise. The Seed state of science report, to be published later this autumn, found that 35% of researchers surveyed say they use blogs. This figure may seem underwhelming, but it was almost nought just a few years ago. Once the legion of science bloggers reaches a critical threshold, the poultry problem will look paltry.

Read  the article on the Economist site.