So Read/Write Web wrote a piece about the inevitable term 'Web 3.0' being:
- Web 2.0 (Content, Commerce, Community), +
- Personalization and Vertical Search.
Well, I'm not so sure about that. Personalisation has been around a long time; I'm an ATG Dynamo Java programmer by background and its Personalization Server has been very popular for oh I dunno, the last 7 years?
What's more interesting is the Vertical Search business. I've not been super convinced of this, which is where I stand when I don't really understand it.
But BarCamp London 2007 and other work recently has connected some dots. One is actually, brushing the dust off my Computer Science course on Artificial Intelligence -- the basic tenet was, constrain the context of use, and you can build in more assumptions about what might be interesting. So, I'm not going to call this Web 3.0 but the concept is interesting anyway so let's explore it further.
To start, let's look at what RDF is, and what an ontology is.
RDF
RDF stands for 'Resource Description Framework' and is used in the world of the Semantic Web. One of the most useful things to consider about RDF in its various formats is that it's very good for this kind of thing:
[thing] [relates to in some way] [some other thing]
Building up semantic relationships is called building an 'ontology'. There are 2 primary ways of doing this in the world of the Semantic Web -- there's 'Notation3' which is Very Human Readable and then there's the XML version which is just Human Readable. Here's an example Notation3 in action:
:Spot is-a :MoneyTransfer.
Not so bad? Clearly there this example brings up more questions than answers; for those who want to open the bonnet on N3, check out this useful primer on Notation3 and RDF. Suffice to say, the point is you could build up a semantic vocabulary in your industry of focus, and then trawl the web / blogosphere etc. Your semantic view would be able to do much more clever things by having this insight. The system could infer relationships. In the example above, it means that if you did a search for 'Money Transfer' and you found an article talking about Spots, and your search engine focused on resources primarily focusing on financial services resources, you could show articles with the word 'spot' as well. Clearly this would be naive to do this one thing but hopefully you get the idea.
If you want to learn more about ontologies, or even explore building your own (imagine a company-specific ontology?), then check out Protege, a free open source ontology builder that is pretty wizzy and allows you to build ontologies in an ontology building language called OWL which extends RDF to do More Clever Things.
So I'll finish with a glib catchphrase: Web 3.0. It's all in the context.