Web 4.0?

Web 2.0: The Social Web The term web 2.0 consists of giving site visitors the ability to make changes to the web pages, linking people to other users, providing fast and efficient ways to share content and expanding access to the internet beyond the computer. A Web 2.0 site gives its user the choice to interact and collaborate in a virtual community. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites like facebook and myspace, blogs, wikis, video-sharing sites like youtube and other web applications. The Web 2.0 wasnt a technology upgrade to the Web 1.0. The same technology is still used but with added layers of abstraction. The client-side/web browser technologies typically used in Web 2.0 development are Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), Adobe Flash and the Adobe Flex framework, and JavaScript/Ajax frameworks such as Yahoo! UI Library, Dojo Toolkit, MooTools, and jQuery. Ajax programming uses JavaScript to upload and download new data from the web server without undergoing a full page reload. To permit the user to continue to interact with the page, communications such as data requests going to the server are separated from data coming back to the page (asynchronously). Otherwise, the user would have to routinely wait for the data to come back before they can do anything else on that page, just as a user has to wait for a page to complete the reload. This also increases overall performance of the site, as the sending of requests can complete quicker independent of blocking and queueing required to send data back to the client. On the server side, Web 2.0 uses many of the same technologies as Web 1.0. What has begun to change in Web 2.0 is the way this data is formatted. To share its data with other sites, a web site must be able to generate output in machine-readable formats such as XML, RSS, and JSON. When a sites data is available in one of these formats, another website can use it to integrate a portion of that sites functionality into itself, linking the two together.

Web 3.0: The Semantic Web There are many definitions of the Web 3.0. Semantic Web and personalization are of the most used definitions. Semantic Web means that everything is linked, it is all about relationships and if there are enough relationships then we have contexts created. In Web 3.0 content will be generated by computers instead of humans generating content. Web 3.0 is going to be like having a personal assistant who know everything about you and can access all the information on the internet to answer any question. Web 3.0 will be a giant database. Web 2.0 uses internet to make connections between people while web 3.0 will use internet to make connections with information. An upgrade to the browsers technologies will occur. As you search the web the browser will learn what you are interested in. You will need to ask only: I want to see a funny movie and then eat at a good Mexican restaurant. What are my options? Search engines will be smarter. A web 3.0 search engine will be able to find not only the keywords in your search but also interpret the context of your request. Web 4.0: The Intelligent Web It is a bit early to start talking about Web 4.0 already but from what you can read on the different blogs the web 4.0 will use Artificial Intelligence in order to make decisions. This is called Reasoning. It will be able to think and make decisions with regard to user searches and content. It will be able to give suggestions based on educated studies of how we live and what we want or need.

Web 3.0 demystified: An explanation in pictures

Web 3.0 aims to make online content easier for machines to understand and opens up and links large sets of data in consistent ways. Finding a definition for Web 3.0 is no easy task when most people are still trying to grasp Web 2.0. However, it is a necessary task since Web 3.0 technologies are encroaching on the Internet quickly. Perhaps the best way is to start at the beginning.
Web 1.0: The Internet in one dimension

In the beginning, the Internet was flat. Think of it as a collection of documents (Websites) lined up side by side. Though many of the sites may have linked to each other, those links simply took a user straight to the linked site, and maybe back again. Each website was classified using metadata composed of meta-keywords, meta-descriptions, and meta-titles that described what the content of the website was about. At their simplest, search engines used established search algorithms to comb through all of the websites metadata to return what it considered relevant results based on your choice of keywords. The inventor of the Web, Timothy Berners-Lee, refers to this phase of the Internet as a Web of Documents.

Web 2.0: A two-dimensional Internet

This next generation of the Internet added another dimension: collaboration. This added dimension means that websites were linked in a more collaborative way. Instead of sending a visitor away from a site to view related content, the content is actually drawn into the visited site from the related site using RSS feeds or widgets. But it isnt only the websites that are more collaborative, it is also the users of the websites content. Internet users tag and comment on content and collaborate and interact among themselves. Search engines have a whole new layer to consider in their searches: user-tagged Web content and the relevant connections between the users themselves. Berners-Lee named this Internet phase the Web of Content.

Web 3.0: The third dimension

Even with the rich metadata, collaboration between websites and users, and user-generated relationships to draw from, machines are still machines, and they still find it difficult to discern actual meaning from human-generated content. The third evolutionary step of the Internet aims to fix that by adding the dimension of semantics. The goal of this phase is to make the content of the Web more easily interpreted by machines. Web content is typically written for humans, which means that it is produced with aesthetics in mind little attention is paid to consistency or relevancy of the content itself. Tim Berners-Lee calls this phase rather passionately the Web of Data.

With a more digestible definition of Web 3.0 in hand, the subsequent articles in this series aim to make the concepts of the Semantic Web, structured and linked data, cloud computing, and application-based technologies just as painless to digest. To be continued.