Will Web 3.0 work like your brain?
In the course textbook there is a section about the transition of the web from a library-type reference system with static pages to a web more focused on collaborative and social possibilities (as exemplified by sites like Wikipedia and Facebook) with dynamic pages that are updated frequently. This transition has been described as the move from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, although the terms are not clearly defined and are still subject to debate.
This comparison led me to consider what Web 3.0 might look like, and how the concepts we are learning about in class might map to a new style of internet. The article I found features a brief history of the web, and goes on to prognosticate about the potential future state of the world’s information network. Some of the predictions from the article include the notion that search in Web 3.0 will have a much higher ability to consider the contextual clues of a person’s search. If Web 1.0 is like a library and Web 2.0 is like a collaborative group that leverages the “wisdom of crowds” phenomena, Web 3.0 might be like having a personal assistant that knows you personally and grows more accurate with every search. An example used was the idea of booking an online vacation. On today’s internet, you would need to book airline tickets, a place to stay, and activities to do separately and according to a pre-determined budget. With more advanced searching ability, we may be able to enter a phrase like: I want to go somewhere warm where I can surf and drink good beer for a week on a budget of $2000. The search engine might then return 5 pre-built packages, incorporating every logistical part of the vacation, to be compared and eventually selected by the user. If this vision becomes true, the edges that connect links on the internet may become less one-directional – it may be that upon clicking a link, the website will consider extremely specific information about you to determine how it will load the page. As the problem of abundance grows more significant, users will demand ever more efficient ways to sift through mountains of data. The issues of synonymy and polysemy discussed in class will be particularly well-targeted by search tools more attuned to context.
Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the internet, believes that a major part of the next-generation web will be something called the “Semantic Web”, which would use natural-language analysis to map “ontologies” much like our brain does with concepts and the links between them. In information science, an ontology (image below) is “a formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that really or fundamentally exist for a particular domain of discourse.” The construction of such ontologies is an open problem in artificial intelligence research right now, and something related to the concepts we have studied in graph theory, specifically the relationships between particular nodes in a system (in this example, concepts themselves could be the nodes and the edges could denote how the concepts relate to one another).
As for Web 4.0, the future is yet more distant but could end up being significantly stranger. Some believe that the internet could eventually experience a type of emergence and become sentient itself. This sounds ridiculous now, but the notion of a global store of information that can be accessed by almost anyone at any time would have sounded equally crazy 100 years ago. Just as Vannevar Bush’s ideas played a role in the development of the original internet, someone dreaming of Web 4.0 today might end up influencing how it will be built tomorrow.
-SOURCES-
Article: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/web-30.htm
Quote on ontologies and image:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_engineering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)