Minding the Planet

Great Collective Intelligence Book; Includes a Chapter I Wrote

I highly recommend this new book on Collective Intelligence. It features chapters by a Who's Who of thinkers on Collective Intelligence, including a chapter by me about "Harnessing the Collective Intelligence of the World Wide Web."

Here is the full-text of my chapter, minus illustrations (the rest of the book is great and I suggest you buy it to have on your shelf. It's a big volume and worth the read):

 

Harnessing the collective intelligence

of the World-Wide Web

 

Nova Spivack[1]

 

Introduction

We are about to enter the third decade of the Web, sometimes referred to as “Web 3.0.” During this decade, the Web will evolve from a globally distributed fileserver into a globally distributed database. This shift will be enabled by a set of emerging technologies called The Semantic Web, which add a new layer of machine-understandable metadata about the meaning of information to the content of the Web.

The Semantic Web will catalyze a new era in collective intelligence. Individuals, groups, organizations and communities will be able to create, connect, find and share knowledge more intelligently and productively than ever before. Ultimately it will enable the Web itself, and all the people and applications that participate in it, to become more collectively intelligent.

Web 3.0—The Third Decade of the Web

The third-decade of the Web, “Web 3.0,” begins officially in 2010, but we are already entering the early stages of this transition today. To understand where the Web is headed it helps to zoom out to a larger historical context.

 The final decade of the PC-era (1980—1990) was largely concerned with innovation on the front-end of the personal computer: the desktop and user interface layer of the PC. The focus of this period was in making PC’s easier to use with innovations such as Microsoft Windows, the Macintosh user-interface, and more consistent user-interfaces and integration across applications.

 The first decade of the Web-era (“Web 1.0” from 1990 - 2000), was focused on the back-end of the Web: the core technologies and platforms of the Web such as HTML, HTTP, Web servers, search engines, commerce technologies, advertising technologies, and the basic architectures and business model of Web applications. This decade was mainly focused on the technology and infrastructure of the Web and most of the actual innovation dollars were spent on making things that only software developers could see.

 In contrast, the second decade of the Web (“Web 2.0” from 2000—2010) has been largely focused on the front-end of the Web. Much of the innovation has not been on actual technology but rather on design patterns and user-interfaces for improving the end-user experience of the Web. During this decade we have focused on paradigms such as

AJAX

, which is a set of technologies and design methodologies for making Web sites more visually appealing and interactive.

 Another big focus of Web 2.0 has been user-generated content, and in particular the practice of “tagging” content with subject tags. Tagging has in turn led to the concept of “folksonomies” in which taxonomies that organize data are evolved in a bottom-up fashion by a decentralized community of users.

 The coming third-decade of the Web (“Web 3.0” from 2010—2020) will shift the emphasis back to the back-end of the Web. This decade will be largely focused on upgrading the technical infrastructure and content of the Web, based on emerging technologies such as the Semantic Web. During this decade the primary push will be enriching the Web so that it can function more like a database.

 Today the Web is composed mainly of unstructured and semistructured data such as text files and Web pages. Keyword search engines are able to provide rudimentary search capabilities over this information, but only for the most simplistic queries. Compare current Web search to the more precise capabilities of queries against a database and the difference is immediately clear. The Web does not provide anything close to the search capabilities or precision of a database today. But that is about to change.

 The Semantic Web provides a way to enrich both unstructured and structured data so that it can be queried with the precision of a database. Essentially, it provides a way to tag any information with metadata that explains what it means—and this metadata can be understood by software applications, such as search engines or knowledge management applications. It’s important to note that The Semantic Web is not a new Web, it’s just a new layer of the Web we already have. The semantic metadata that comprises the knowledge of the Semantic Web won’t live in some new place—it lives right in the existing documents and data on the Web. The knowledge of the Semantic Web is encoded using special new markup languages such as RDF and OWL.

 This metadata is invisible to users (it doesn’t appear in Web browsers) but behind the scenes it can be read by any application that is compatible with these markup languages. So when any application, such as a next-generation search engine, sees a Web page or data record that contains RDF or OWL metadata, it can then use that metadata to understand what that page or data record means, is about, what it is related to, and how to interpret it. With Semantic Web metadata in place, searches on the Web will be as, or even more, precise as those in any database. But that is just the beginning of what the Semantic Web enables. Beyond merely improving search, the Semantic Web actually transforms the Web into a database—a worldwide database in which data records can be moved around, shared, and linked together in new ways.

 On the basis of the technologies of The Semantic Web and the Web 3.0 era, we will then be able to enter the fourth decade of the Web (“Web 4.0”—2020—2030) in which the shift will turn back to the front-end of the Web. The Semantic Web doesn’t just add metadata about the meaning of information to the Web, it also enables metadata to be added about relationships, conceptual linkages, logical connections, and even logical rules. On the basis of this additional metadata, Web users and other applications will be able to harness the power of intelligent agents that will search the Web for things that interest them, make suggestions and recommendations, and even potentially transact on their behalf. This will open the door to a new kind of user-interface to the Web that is smarter and more conversational in nature, in which users will enter into dialogues with agents and interact with them search the Web and make decisions. A conversational interface to the Web will be more appropriate in the increasingly mobile world, when users will mostly interact with the Web from small portable mobile or embedded devices.

 Users on mobile devices that have little to no screen real-estate will need a more productive way to interact with the Web than through a miniature browser; nobody likes sorting through pages of Google results on a cell phone. Instead, they will want to simply ask a question (perhaps through a voice interface, rather than typing with their thumbs) and have a virtual intelligent assistant dispatch agents to find the best answers and then report back to them with results or to ask further questions or for a decision.

 Smart, interactive conversational interfaces and intelligent agent-based virtual assistants are possible today, but only in narrow domains. In the Web 4.0 era they may in fact be our primary way of interacting with the whole Web and may be built into the user interface of most search engines, personal email providers, and leading Websites.

The Virtualization of Knowledge and Intelligence

In the long-term, the Semantic Web provides a way to move much of the “intelligence” that currently resides in the minds of individuals, groups and organizations, and/or that is hard-coded into various software and Web applications, out onto the Web itself. It provides a way to virtualize knowledge and intelligence in an explicitly machine-readable, universally accessible form. In other words, it provides a way to start making the Web “smarter.”

 Knowledge and expertise that previously only existed in people’s heads, or had to be painstakingly coded into each particular vertical software application, will be represented in a form of universally readable metadata on the Web—just like HTML documents today. In other words, using the Semantic Web you can publish knowledge and even the underlying conceptual frameworks, rules and heuristics that embody domain expertise, on the Web in an abstract, machine-readable form.

 There are many benefits that stem from this. For one thing, it will make it much easier to write smart software applications because much of the necessary “smarts” will not reside in the applications at all, but will rather live out there on the Web.

 For example, to write an application that can intelligently assist with travel logistics, a developer will simply be able to point it at existing sets of knowledge and rules that exist for the travel domain on the Web already. The application will be able to draw on those pools of existing domain-knowledge without having to be specifically programmed to do so, because it understands the underlying standards of the Semantic Web. Similarly, the same application could just as easily help someone trade on the stock market, by simply pointing to domain knowledge on Semantic Web about finance and investment.

 As more pools of domain knowledge are added to the Web around various verticals, all applications will potentially benefit. This sets up a kind of network effect in which a global knowledge commons begins to form and self-amplify over time. For example, first the travel domain is added to the Semantic Web. Then someone else adds domain knowledge about geography and links them together. Another group then adds domain knowledge about hotels, and another one adds domain knowledge about weather—and these all connect to each other in various ways.

 With all of this interconnected knowledge on the Web in machine-readable form, application developers can then more easily and quickly write applications that understand concepts and rules related to booking travel reservations, and that can cross-reference reservation information with knowledge about geographic places, relevant weather, and hotels in those locations. And in the other direction, someone booking a hotel can then find information about relevant weather and book travel to get to that hotel. This is just one example. There are an infinite range of other possibilities for these technologies across all domains.

 The key point of all this is that The Semantic Web enables applications to become thinner, yet at the same time smarter, by drawing on the collective intelligence embodied by the Web itself. It will become possible to write applications that understand one or more specialized vertical domains faster, and ultimately applications will become more general—they will be able to dynamically load in specialized domain knowledge for whatever domain is needed, without having to be specifically programmed or limited to just those domains.

 Application developers will be able to draw on the knowledge added to the Web by others, instead of having to reinvent the wheel by programming all that knowledge directly into their applications every time. And in turn, the knowledge that their applications create can, if they want to allow it, be published back onto the Web for other applications to draw on as well.

Semantic Web as The Next Leap in Human Collective Intelligence

Looking at the evolution of the Semantic Web in historical context, we can view it as the next big step in a longer process of the evolution of human collective intelligence.

 Before the invention of written language, knowledge could only be communicated verbally and was handed down through oral traditions. During this period, one had to be in immediate physical proximity of someone who had certain knowledge in order to receive it from them. This meant that the maximum effective range of human collective intelligence was quite short in space and time.

 With the invention of writing, and eventually printing, humanity was able to process knowledge over longer distances in space and time, and with less reliance on particular individuals. People could now engage in dialogues and dialectics with larger groups of people in more places, across larger distances in space, and with more precision over larger ranges of time.

 The printing press took this to a new level by starting the process of mass-distribution of knowledge, but it still relied on an expensive physical manufacturing process and a paper medium that was perishable and costly to store and move around.

 With advent of electronic communications of various forms, humanity achieved many milestones—the transmission of knowledge could take place at the speed of light, and using digital storage media we were freed from the limitations of the paper medium.

 The Internet and the Web transformed the process of distributing knowledge even further—enabling a global knowledge commons to emerge. The Internet and Web enable anyone and everyone to become providers of knowledge, not just consumers—a fundamental shift in the way that knowledge transmission and media function. They are not just about the mass-distribution and mass-consumption of knowledge; they enable the mass-creation of knowledge. In some respects these technologies are analogues of the printing press in that they have democratized the process of creating, sharing and accessing knowledge by fundamentally changing the economics of the entire process—making it affordable and accessible to all.

 But even on the Web, for all its many benefits, knowledge is still not free from the limitations of the human brain. Only humans can really understand the knowledge that is represented in Web sites and databases, for example. While all other processes related to the distribution, storage and access to knowledge can now be done digitally, using software and the Web, the processes of creating, consuming and actually understanding knowledge are still limited only to living humans. That’s where the Semantic Web comes in.

Liberating Knowledge and Intelligence from Human Brains

The Semantic Web virtualizes human knowledge and expertise outside of human brains, and even outside of any particular software application—knowledge becomes essentially just more data on the Web. When we speak of knowledge here we don’t just mean information—the first-order raw data that is currently on the Web—we mean the actual meaning and interpretation of the information that is not on the Web but rather exists only in human brains.

 The Semantic Web provides a way to make the meaning and interpretation of information explicit in a form that is unambiguous and publishable, and shareable, on the Web. This will make all this knowledge understandable by software. It’s almost like the invention of a new language—a sort of meta-language for formally expressing what exactly you mean when you say something. The impact of this could be enormous.

 For the first time in human history, we won’t have to rely only on humans to create, understand and consume knowledge—our machines will be able to help us do this. They will help us work, collaborate, create, explore, monitor, discover, search, innovate, connect, and synthesize. This will open the door to an almost unimaginable amplification of the human mind, and human collective intelligence on this planet. At first the impact of this will largely be focused around assisting humans with simple clerical and research tasks, but the process will inevitably continue to evolve to a point where software will begin to originate new knowledge for us, advise us, and eventually to even start making certain types of decisions on our behalf.

 Although the Semantic Web has barely moved from the lab to the mainstream Internet, it is in fact much farther along than most people realize. Today there are already semantic applications under development that can organize all your information automatically, make recommendations based on your dynamically changing interests, identify new connections between ideas or documents in different places, make logical inferences or discover contradictions, and even make discoveries by doing proofs and explorations based on available data.

 Within a few years these capabilities will begin to filter out to the mainstream users of the Internet, and with a decade or two at most, they will become commonplace. There are only a few billion humans today, and each of us can only cope with a small amount of information and relationships before we become overloaded. But in an era of machine understanding of human knowledge we may potentially be able to leverage thousands to millions of software agents to help us. This will vastly increase our ability to cope with masses of information and relationships productively. In an increasingly complex, distributed, and rapidly changing world, we simply will not be able to cope in the future without help. The Semantic Web provides one path to solving these problems, enabling us to remain productive in the future.

Amplifying Human Collective Intelligence

The Semantic Web does not replace humans or take them out of the equation. It simply reduces the load on humans, freeing them from some of the pain of information overload, and providing a new path for software to begin to augment and even amplify human collective intelligence.

 Today there are several barriers to human collective intelligence that arise from basic limitations of the human brain. Human individuals, and groups of humans, simply cannot process or share knowledge effectively beyond a certain level of information or relationship complexity and change. For this reason, collaboration and collective intelligence are often easier to achieve and yield better results in small groups than large groups.

 As group size increases, productive collective intelligence becomes dramatically harder to achieve. Thus, ironically even though larger groups offer the potential for exponential increases in collective intelligence, in practice the opposite is usually the result: the larger teams get, the dumber they get. An entire industry of management consultants and facilitators exists because of these inefficiencies.

 The Semantic Web may be able to help with this age-old problem. By enabling software to understand information and relationships, we may be able to begin to automatically and intelligently facilitate interpersonal and group collaboration and knowledge management, and this may finally enable larger groups to become exponentially smarter instead of dumber.

Twine.com—A New Service for Collective Intelligence

My own company, Radar Networks, has recently introduced a new service based on the Semantic Web, called Twine (www.twine.com) that focuses on amplifying human collective intelligence. Twine helps individuals and groups manage and share knowledge more productively, using the Semantic Web.

 As people use Twine it learns from them and automatically organizes and connects their information with other related information, saving them valuable time and enabling them to discover connected knowledge. Twine provides individuals and groups with a smart virtual environment for their knowledge.

 Twine works with all kinds of knowledge—email, RSS, Web pages, documents, photos, videos, audio, contact records, or anything else. Regardless of where information actually resides, Twine enables users to view it as if it were in one place, and to see how it is connected and organized. Twine also automatically helps to make sense of information and to make it more easily searchable.

 Twine is a Web-based online service that is completely built using the Semantic Web. Although it is only in early beta-testing at the time of this writing, it is already demonstrating that intelligent machine-augmentation of individual and group knowledge management is possible and improves productivity and collaboration.

 As Twine unfolds and spreads to more individuals, groups and teams, and organizations and communities, it has the potential to become a new backbone for collective intelligence and knowledge sharing worldwide. At least that is the vision of the project. Time will tell whether we succeed it.

From Global Knowledge Commons to Global Brain

If the Semantic Web develops as predicted, it is possible that within 20 years much, if not all, human knowledge will be represented on the Web in machine-understandable form. We have seen the beginnings of this trend with services such as the Wikipedia. More recently, another initiative called the DBpedia is creating a Semantic Web version of the Wikipedia. But this is just the start of this trend.

 As more and more applications and services start producing Semantic Web metadata and exposing it back to other applications and services on the Web, we will begin to create a new global knowledge commons. At first these different services will function like islands of knowledge, but then they will begin to interconnect.

 A piece of knowledge in one place will link to and from pieces of knowledge in other places. Eventually this will become a giant associative network, not so unlike the brain, but on a global scale. And as people and applications surf through its connections and consume its knowledge, adding new knowledge and connections back to it as they do, it will change and self-organize dynamically. Just as the first generations of the Web have enabled a global medium for “hypertext,” the Semantic Web will enable a global medium for “hyperdata.”

 As one projects the future evolution of the Web and the emerging Semantic Web, one cannot help but notice certain similarities to the human mind. Some have even ventured to call this the beginning of an emerging “Global Brain.” It is too early to tell how similar it will truly be to the actual human brain. However we can already predict with confidence that it will a system that collectively will be capable of at least rudimentary learning, memory, perception, planning and reasoning.

 The human brain is a massively parallel collective intelligence engine in which billions of neurons interact across trillions of connections to process and generate knowledge.

 Similarly, the collective intelligence of the Web will involve the combined interactions and intelligence of billions of humans and machines across trillions of relationships. These processes will not be guided centrally, and the system will most likely not be centralized around a single construct of a “self” nor will it have anything like a human body.

 While it will be possible to say the system as a whole is intelligent, it will be difficult to locate any particular source of that intelligence; the intelligence will come from everywhere: from the humans, the software and even the data and links that comprise the Web.

 Because the Web is quite different from the human brain, it is likely that its intelligence will be different from what we think of as human intelligence today. But it will nonetheless be intelligent—in a massively distributed, emergent, and chaotic way that we humans may not be able to even comprehend. The “thoughts” the Web will think may be just too vast and complex for us to even recognize, let alone imagine or understand. Yet perhaps in decade-long time-scales at least, we will begin to be able to see the outlines of its thinking.

---

[1] Nova Spivack is the CEO and founder of Radar Networks, a San-Francisco company that is pioneering applications of the Semantic Web for distributed collaboration and knowledge management with a new service called Twine.com. Mr. Spivack is a recognized authority on the Semantic Web and future of the Web, which is sometimes called “Web 3.0.” A more detailed bio can be found at his company website: http://www.radarnetworks.com/about/management.html#nova.

My Visit to DERI -- World's Premier Semantic Web Research Institute

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to visit, and speak at, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), located in Galway, Ireland. My hosts were Stefan Decker, the director of the lab, and John Breslin who is heading the SIOC project.

DERI has become the world's premier research institute for the Semantic Web. Everyone working in the field should know about them, and if you can, you should visit the lab to see what's happening there.

Part of the National University of Ireland, Galway. With over 100 researchers focused solely on the Semantic Web, and very significant financial backing, DERI has, to my knowledge, the highest concentration of Semantic Web expertise on the planet today. Needless to say, I was very impressed with what I saw there. Here is a brief synopsis of some of the projects that I was introduced to:

• Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE) and YARS, a massively scalable triplestore.  These projects are concerned with crawling and indexing the information on the Semantic Web so that end-users can find it. They have done good work on consolidating data and also on building a highly scalable triplestore architecture.
• Sindice -- An API and search infrastructure for the Semantic Web. This project is focused on providing a rapid indexing API that apps can use to get their semantic content indexed, and that can also be used by apps to do semantic searches and retrieve semantic content from the rest of the Semantic Web. Sindice provides Web-scale semantic search capabilities to any semantic application or service.
• SIOC -- Semantically Interlinked Online Communities. This is an ontology for linking and sharing data across online communities in an open manner, that is getting a lot of traction. SIOC is on its way to becoming a standard and may play a big role in enabling portability and interoperability of social Web data.
• JeromeDL is developing technology for semantically enabled digital libraries. I was impressed with the powerful faceted navigation and search capabilities they demonstrated.
  
• notitio.us. is a project for personal knowledge management of bookmarks and unstructured data.
• SCOT, OpenTagging and Int.ere.st.  These projects are focused on making tags more interoperable, and for generating social networks and communities from tags. They provide a richer tag ontology and framework for representing, connecting and sharing tags across applications.
• Semantic Web Services.  One of the big opportunities for the Semantic Web that is often overlooked by the media is Web services. Semantics can be used to describe Web services so they can find one another and connect, and even to compose and orchestrate transactions and other solutions across networks of Web services, using rules and reasoning capabilities. Think of this as dynamic semantic middleware, with reasoning built-in.
• eLite. I was introduced to the eLite project, a large e-learning initiative that is applying the Semantic Web.
• Nepomuk.  Nepomuk is a large effort supported by many big industry players. They are making a social semantic desktop and a set of developer tools and libraries for semantic applications that are being shipped in the Linux KDE distribution. This is a big step for the Semantic Web!
• Semantic Reality. Last but not least, and perhaps one of the most eye-opening demos I saw at DERI, is the Semantic Reality project. They are using semantics to integrate sensors with the real world. They are creating an infrastructure that can scale to handle trillions of sensors eventually. Among other things I saw, you can ask things like "where are my keys?" and the system will search a network of sensors and show you a live image of your keys on the desk where you left them, and even give you a map showing the exact location. The service can also email you or phone you when things happen in the real world that you care about -- for example, if someone opens the door to your office, or a file cabinet, or your car, etc. Very groundbreaking research that could seed an entire new industry.

In summary, my visit to DERI was really eye-opening and impressive. I recommend that major organizations that want to really see the potential of the Semantic Web, and get involved on a research and development level, should consider a relationship with DERI -- they are clearly the leader in the space.

Powerpoint Deck: Making Sense of the Semantic Web, and Twine

Now that I have been asked by several dozen people for the slides from my talk on "Making Sense of the Semantic Web," I guess it's time to put them online. So here they are, under the Creative Commons Attribution License (you can share it with attribution this site).

You can download the Powerpoint file at the link below:

Download nova_spivack_semantic_web_talk.ppt

Or you can view it right here:

| View | Upload your own

Enjoy! And I look forward to your thoughts and comments.

Quick Video Preview of Twine

The New Scientist just posted a quick video preview of Twine to YouTube. It only shows a tiny bit of the functionality, but it's a sneak peak.

We've been letting early beta testers into Twine and we're learning a lot from all the great feedback, and also starting to see some cool new uses of Twine. There are around 20,000 people on the wait-list already, and more joining every day. We're letting testers in slowly, focusing mainly on people who can really help us beta test the software at this early stage, as we go through iterations on the app. We're getting some very helpful user feedback to make Twine better before we open it up the world.

For now, here's a quick video preview:

A Video and an Audio Cast About Twine

Last night I saw that the video of my presentation of Twine at the Web 2.0 Summit is online. My session, "The Semantic Edge," featured Danny Hillis of Metaweb demoing Freebase, Barney Pell demoing Powerset, and myself Demoing Twine, followed by a brief panel discussion with Tim O'Reilly (in that order). It's a good panel and I recommend the video, however, the folks at Web 2.0 only filmed the presenters; they didn't capture what we were showing on our screens, so you have to use your imagination as we describe our demos.

An audio cast of one of my presentations about Twine to a reporter was also put online recently, for a more in-depth description.

What a Week!

What a week it has been for Radar Networks. We have worked so hard these last few days to get ready to unveil Twine, and it has been a real thrill to show our work and get such positive feedback and support from the industry, bloggers, the media and potential users.

We really didn't expect so much excitement and interest. In fact we've been totally overwhelmed by the response as thousands upon thousands of people have contacted us in the last 24 hours asking to join our beta, telling us how they would use Twine for their personal information management, their collaboration, their organizations, and their communities. Clearly there is such a strong and growing need out there for the kind of Knowledge Networking capabilities that Twine provides, and it's been great to hear the stories and make new connections with so many people who want our product. We love hearing about your interest in Twine, what you would use it for, what you want it to do, and why you need it! Keep those stories coming. We read them all and we really listen to them.

Today, in unveiling Twine, over five years of R&D, and contributions from dozens of core contributors, a dedicated group of founders and investors, and hundreds of supporters, advisors, friends and family, all came to fruition. As a company, and a team, we achieved an important milestone and we should all take some time to really appreciate what we have accomplished so far. Twine is a truly ambitious and pardigm-shifting product, that is not only technically profound but visually stunning -- There has been so much love and attention to detail in this product.

In the last 6 months, Twine has really matured into a product, a product that solves real and growing needs (for a detailed use-case see this post). And just as our product has matured, so has our organization: As we doubled in size, our corporate culture has become tremendously more interesting, innovative and fun. I could go on and on about the cool things we do as a company and the interesting people who work here. But it's the passion, dedication and talent of this team that is most inspiring. We are creating a team and a culture that truly has the potential to become a great Silicon Valley company: The kind of company that I've always wanted to build.

Although we launched today, this is really just the beginning of the real adventure. There is still much for us to build, learn about, and improve before Twine will really accomplish all the goals we have set out  for it. We have a five-year roadmap. We know this is a marathon, not a sprint and that "slow and steady wins the race." As an organization we also have much learning and growing to do. But this really doesn't feel like work -- it feels like fun -- because we all love this product and this company. We all wake up every day totally psyched to work on this.

It's been an intense, challenging, and rewarding week. Everyone on my team has impressed me and really been at the top of their game. Very few of us got any real sleep, and most of us went far beyond the call of duty. But we did it, and we did it well. As a company we have never cut corners, and we have always preferred to do things the right way, even if the right way is the hard way. But that pays off in the end. That is how great products are built. I really want to thank my co-founders, my team, my investors, advisors, friends, and family, for all their dedication and support.

Today, we showed our smiling new baby to the world, and the world smiled back.

And tonight , we partied!!!

Radar Networks Announces Twine.com

My company, Radar Networks, has just come out of stealth. We've announced what we've been working on all these years: It's called Twine.com. We're going to be showing Twine publicly for the first time at the Web 2.0 Summit tomorrow. There's lot's of press coming out where you can read about what we're doing in more detail. The team is extremely psyched and we're all working really hard right now so I'll be brief for now. I'll write a lot more about this later.

Gartner is Wrong about Web 3.0

I have a lot of respect for the folks at Gartner, but their recent report in which they support the term "Web 2.0" yet claim that the term "Web 3.0" is just a marketing ploy, is a bit misguided.

In fact, quite the opposite is true.

The term Web 2.0 is in fact just a marketing ploy. It has only come to have something resembling a definition over time. Because it is in fact so ill-defined, I've suggested in the past that we just use it to refer to a decade: the second decade of the Web (2000 - 2010). After all there is no actual technology that is called "Web 2.0" -- at best there are a whole slew of things which this term seems to label, and many of them are design patterns, not technologies. For example "tagging" is not a technology, it is a design pattern. A tag is a keyword, a string of text -- there is not really any new technology there. AJAX is also not a technology in its own right, but rather a combination of technologies and design patterns, most of which existed individually before the onset of what is called Web 2.0.

In contrast, the term Web 3.0 actually does refer to a set of new technologies, and changes they will usher in during the third decade of the Web (2010 - 2020). Chief among these is the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is actually not one technology, but many. Some of them such as RDF and OWL have been under development for years, even during the Web 2.0 era, and others such as SPARQL and GRDDL are recent emerging standards. But that is just the beginning. As the Semantic Web develops there will be several new technology pieces added to the puzzle for reasoning, developing and sharing open rule definitions, handling issues around trust, agents, machine learning, ontology development and integration, semantic data storage, retrieval and search, and many other subjects.

Essentially, the Semantic Web enables the gradual transformation of the Web into a database. This is a profound structural change that will touch every layer of Web technology eventually. It will transform database technology, CMS, CRM, enterprise middleware, systems integration, development tools, search engines, groupware, supply-chain integration, and all the other topics that Gartner covers.

The Semantic Web will manifest in several ways. In many cases it will improve applications and services we already use. So for example, we will see semantic social networks, semantic search, semantic groupware, semantic CMS, semantic CRM, semantic email, and many other semantic versions of apps we use today. For a specific example, take social networking. We are seeing much talk about "opening  up the social graph" so that social networks are more connected and portable. Ultimately to do this right, the social graph should be represented using Semantic Web standards, so that it truly is not only open but also easily extensible and mashable with other data. 

Web 3.0 is not ONLY the Semantic Web however. Other emerging technologies may play a big role as well. Gartner seems to think Virtual Reality will be one of them. Perhaps, but to be fair, VR is actually a Web 1.0 phenomenon. It's been around for a long time, and it hasn't really changed that much. In fact the folks at the MIT Media Lab were working on things that are still far ahead of Second Life, even back in the early 1990's.

So what other technologies can we expect in Web 3.0 that are actually new? I expect that we will have a big rise in "cloud computing" such as open peer-to-peer grid storage and computing capabilities on the Web -- giving any application essentially as much storage and computational power as needed for free or a very low cost. In the mobile arena we will see higher bandwidth, more storage and more powerful processors in mobile devices, as well as powerful built-in speech recognition, GPS and motion sensors enabling new uses to emerge. I think we will also see an increase in the power of personalization tools and personal assistant tools that try to help users manage the complexity of their digital lives. In the search arena, we will see search engines get smarter -- among other things they will start to not only answer questions, but they will accept commands such as "find me a cheap flight to NYC" and they will learn and improve as they are used. We will also see big improvements in integration and data and account portability between different Web applications. We will also see a fundamental change in the database world as databases move away from the relational model and object model, towards the associative model of data (graph databases and triplestores).

In short, Web 3.0 is about hard-core new technologies and is going to have a much greater impact on enterprise IT managers and IT systems than Web 2.0. But ironically, it may not be until Web 4.0 (2020 - 2030) that Gartner comes to this conclusion!

Knowledge Networking

I've been thinking for several years about Knowledge Networking. It's not a term I invented, it's been floating around as a meme for at least a decade or two. But recently it has started to resurface in my own work. In particular, I've been discussing this lately with one of our investors, Peter Rip, who has been quite interested in this idea lately.

So what is a knowledge network? I define a knowledge network as a form of collective intelligence in which a network of people (two or more people connected by social-communication relationships) creates, organizes, and uses a collective body of knowledge. The key here is that a knowledge network is not merely a site where a group of people work on a body of information together (such as the wikipedia), it's also a social network -- there is an explicit representation of a social relationship within it. So it's more like a social network than for example a discussion forum or a wiki.

I would go so far as to say that knowledge networks are the third-generation of social software. (Note this is based in-part on ideas that emerged in conversations I have had with Peter Rip, so this also his idea):

• First-generation social apps were about communication (eg. messaging such as Email, discussion boards, chat rooms, and IM)
• Second-generation social apps were about people and content (eg. Social networks, social media sharing, user-generated content)
• Third-generation social apps are about relationships and knowledge  (eg. Wikis, referral networks, question and answer systems, social recommendation systems, vertical knowledge and expertise portals, social mashup apps, and coming soon, what we're building at Radar Networks)

Just some thoughts on a Saturday morning...

Business 2.0 and BusinessWeek Articles About Radar Networks

It's been an interesting month for news about Radar Networks. Two significant articles came out recently:

Business 2.0 Magazine published a feature article about Radar Networks in their July 2007 issue. This article is perhaps the most comprehensive article to-date about what we are working on at Radar Networks, it's also one of the better articulations of the value proposition of the Semantic Web in general. It's a fun read, with gorgeous illustrations, and I highly recommend reading it.

BusinessWeek  posted an article about Radar Networks on the Web. The article covers some of the background that led to my interests in collective intelligence and the creation of the company. It's a good article and covers some of the bigger issues related to the Semantic Web as a paradigm shift. I would add one or two points of clarification in addition to what was stated in the article: Radar Networks is not relying solely on software to organize the Internet -- in fact, the service we will be launching combines human intelligence and machine intelligence to start making sense of information, and helping people search and collaborate around interests more productively. One other minor point related to the article -- it mentions the story of EarthWeb, the Internet company that I co-founded in the early 1990's: EarthWeb's content business actually was sold after the bubble burst, and the remaining lines of business were taken private under the name Dice.com. Dice is the leading job board for techies and was one of our properties. Dice has been highly profitable all along and recently filed for a $100M IPO.