Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Web 3.0: No humans required - July 1, 2007

Web 3.0: No humans required - July 1, 2007: "If you think of the World Wide Web as a cloud of largely undifferentiated information, the mission of the company he's about to unveil, Radar Networks, is to take that cloud and impose order on it. Not just any order, but a very special kind known to experts by one of the hottest buzzwords in computer science today: the semantic Web.

For all the wonders that today's Web can deliver to your fingertips -- the Norwegian word for ice cream, a seat on the next flight to Paris, the best price for a Clash CD -- it has a fundamental flaw.

It's basically a compendium of billions of text documents designed to be read by humans. You can search it for keywords, but the results aren't much use until you sort through them to find the page that has the info you want.

To take the Web to the next level -- to move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 -- the information in those documents will have to be turned into data that a machine can read and evaluate on its own. Only then will computers be able to take over tasks we now do by hand: find the nearest restaurant, book the best flight, buy the cheapest CD."

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