A derelict discourse with Mrs. Web

Dear Mrs. Web,

You’re growing old. And fat. But we love you.

At first, we brought you up with tenderness and could track your growth. We sat back and observed with awe and constraints what you offered us. Then, you exploited our innocence by bursting in 2001 and seriously hurting the feelings of some of us.

We still loved you, but we didn’t like you anymore.

We thereby tried a few behavioural and structural tweaks onto you. That is, to empathize with the fellow humans you hurt, we decided to indulge your complacency by proclaiming you a platform. Not undeservedly — we chose to engage every single human that could have Internet access to participate into shaping your body and mind. We invented new paradigms and shifted existing ones. We enriched our experience with you. We started liking you again. Alas, your body was exponentially being fed more and more so than your mind.

It seems you’re happy with this, so you haven’t burst a second time. We love you and like you again, but we don’t share your enthusiasm.

We want your mind to be really functional because we’re tired of having to bug other humans to wait to get some answers we could very well get from you. You have all our data, linked even, but you can’t yet use your head to engineer knowledge and reason for us. Also, I want you to be solely mine. And so does every other single human being. Thus, we’re coming to shape you a third time, hoping you won’t burst a second time.

***

That would be my unborn child’s letter to the Web, assuming, of course, that by then Web 3.0 would not even be at most semantic. (That is my expectation and definition of Web 3.0.)

In other words, including the properties of Web 2.0 — which Tim O’Reilly lists succinctly in his paper — and a massive interaction of humans and machines to engineer knowledge from this collaboratively intelligent interconnectedness of us, Web 3.0 shall be an exciting generation of software integrating all possible systemic entities with open data and hopefully complete freedom of collaboration.

We were the audience and mere observers in what we were being offered. Now we are participants in what we’re offered. Next we shall be collaborators in all such matters from an intelligent web, wherein personalization and integrated rich experience is a strong focus.

Sanguinely.

For there are conflicting definitions or perspectives of what Web 3.0 will be like. Here’s a perspective for the next “5000 days”:

It’s always been like that. But, what next?

The size of the web has always been exponential since public accessibility was enabled. After all, Raman’s binomial summation can be applied to all sizes of W. That is allegorical, I believe. The point is to show how fast the web has been growing. And it has been growing exponentially. It will remain an exponential growth, as far as we can see. That should be clear to all of us — no mystery.

My focus on what’s to come, however, is in the interactions between users and the web through the concept of linked data. Web 3.0 shall be semantic in the ontological sense of the word. That is, the linked data shall be queried and reasoned upon in order to provide users with inferred answers or allusions to answers.

Raman points out that the web is now a platform. True. But it is still a matter of “choosing combinations” of existing web elements, “combining” them to create new elements “exponentially”. It is not yet a matter of being provided with reasoning on such links. That’s all I expect from the next generation of the Web.