The story of the World Wide Web is fascinating, from the early nineties when a group led by the British scientist TBL built the first HTTP client for transmitting and sharing data among researchers to the global information network of today that more than a billion humans use, the WWW has changed the way IT and technology in general is used by society. Generally speaking, the WWW has gone through two universally agreed phases: Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, and an increasing number of advocates are anticipating a third wave of innovation coming in the near future: Web 3.0 

Web 1.0

These where the early days of WWW. Web browsers were rather rudimentary and acted as information relay and presentation mediums. There was not much interaction with the Web, and the end user (“web surfer”) was mostly a consumer of information, not a contributor. But, as technological innovations matured, and rich media interactions became a reality, the WWW started its impressive ascendancy. In a relatively short period of time, the WWW became the world’s first and foremost medium for information distribution, collaboration, enabled new business models, offered unparallel networking capabilities and is a key enabler for the era of web services and cloud computing that is emerging. 

Web 2.0

Technologies such as RSS feeds,  AJAX scripts, dynamic languages, JSON scripting, etc., transform the typically perceived “information display” web browser, to a fully dynamic and interactive medium that allows tailoring of browsed information, collaboration through social networking, information push and pull among geographically distributed subscribers and gave rise to applications such as data mashups,  collective bookmarking, community portals, blogging, sharing of all kinds of digital media, wikis, etc. But, as the technology endeavours continuously push the limits of intelligent information management, we anticipate another wave of changes that will enable new and unforeseen applications which will make the Web even more ubiquitous and indispensible tool for everyday life enhancement. We still have problems with loose coupling of information on the Web, the socially networked globe is still fragmented and thrives in silos with little cross fertilisation, aggregation of data is based on static information and personalisation is still not as dynamic as the lives we live.  

Web 3.0

Although in its infancy, many prefer to use the “safe” term Web 3.0 to refer to a Web 2.0 version of the future that incorporates a great deal of semantic technologies, of simply putting it, Semantic Web technologies. The capabilities of automated reasoning using technologies such as OWL, RDF and SPARQL, combined with enablers such as RDFa, GRDDL, WSDL, SWS, etc., promises to bring dynamic matching of data repositories, agent based computing, personalised Web available on a multitude of devices, awareness and automatically re-configurable services for the mobile office worker of the future. However, there are still lots of hurdles to cross before we can even imagine a  commercial version of Web 3.0 technology: trust and data provenance management, semantic heterogeneity, dynamic automated reasoning able to cope with incomplete and inconsistent information and autonomous software agents models that adapt to our ever changing environments…..sounds hard work, but eventually we will get there ;-)