Web 3.0 and the Web of Data

Web 3.0 is coming up (a lot) in posts on Read-Write Web and in other places. One Read-Write Web posting (The Web of Data, written by Alexander Korth in April of this year) discussed the 3 aspects of the next web (Web 3.0) ... "In the coming years, we will see a revolution in the ability of machines to access, process, and apply information. This revolution will emerge from three distinct areas of activity connected to the Semantic Web: the Web of Data, the Web of Services, and the Web of Identity providers. These webs aim to make semantic knowledge of data accessible, semantic services available and connectable, and semantic knowledge of individuals processable ...".

Tim Berners-Lee focused on the Web of Data in his TED talk on the next Web (recorded in Feb 2009). The talk is only a little longer than 15 minutes in length, and I highly recommend it. The key points are that we are now moving from a document-centric approach to storing information, to making raw data available and processable. That raw data is "linked data" - data about things (identified by URIs), including other interesting information (as RDF triples) and highlighting the relationships between the things. It is important to note that this is not about making data available through specific APIs or anticipated/pre-programmed queries on a "pretty" web site - but about making the "unadulterated data" available for machine understanding and new uses. It is about sharing and adding to data, making connections and relationships in novel ways, and bridging disciplines.

If you think about business and an enterprise, think about how powerful this would be - to capture knowledge, share it via social networking technologies, allow update and addition to the knowledge within the enterprise (again using the social networking tools of today), and to bridge disciplines and knowledge using the Semantic web mining and matching technologies. Overall, we improve the ability of the enterprise to capture and access its knowledge, and increase the captured knowledge. In the talk, Tim Berners-Lee asks people to imagine the "incredible resource" of "people doing their bit to produce a little bit, and it all connecting."

Just imagine ....