So you've become an avid tweeter, you can't go a day without updating your Facebook status and you can’t remember what it was like to not be on Linkedin. You are officially a “2.0 aficionado.” Life is good and you're on top of the digital world when you start to get this uneasy feeling, much like the many scantily clad teenagers of the 80's slasher movies have gotten before, that there is something lurking in the murky woods of your next Google search.

Web 3.0 is out there and on the tip of many of our professional tongues. Before we get into how the next evolution of the Web will affect our digital landscape, let us take a few steps back, pre-dot com bust, right back to when Sir Berners-Lee proposed the concept of the “World Wide Web” and what he envisioned as the core use of the new venture. The Web essentially began as a tool for researchers to facilitate the sharing and updating of information among their communities.  The concept and eventual creation of this tool was just that simple and I’m sure that Sir Berners-Lee could not have foreseen the impact his solution would bring when he started down this road back in 1980. The root of this idea still remains, but the community has become global and the amount of information almost incalculable, almost.

Currently, there are approximately 2 billion people worldwide that are online communicating with each other. The robust nature of the Web and its users grew exponentially during the 90’s, but at the time the mainstream view of this revolution was more skeptical and somewhat weary as the use of the Web was not as widely available as it is today. Many believed that the Web in the early 90’s was a passing fad until the business world realized how the Web could impact their company’s bottom line. In just a few short years the world was buzzing about the Web and how it was going to change everything. Many believed this to be the beginning of a new age, but history will look back on this time as more of a false start. The Web was primed to take off, but unfortunately for many within the industry this was just not meant to be - at least not yet.  

The realization of this was not lost on many, like Sir Berners-Lee, and while the world was enveloped in the eventual downfall of the dot com bust many of us were looking towards an even bigger revolution, the Semantic Web, which took off slowly and then picked up steam a few years later in 2004. By this time little companies like Google had reached the milestone of indexing over 4 billion Web pages and over 800 million images, while Facebook had yet to make its way out of Harvard. Picking up steam, yet another wrinkle had been added to this story - social, which is where many of the Semantic conversations began.

The Semantic Web is best defined by Sir Berner-Lee himself when he said, “The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”

In other words, the creation of the World Wide Web allowed computers to communicate, or more precisely mimic the communications between people by allowing them to pass information back and forth. If we break this down into simpler terms, currently computers interpret the syntax of information being exchanged, which if we are talking about a simple sentence like “I love computers,” the computer only sees the letters, words and punctuation that it contains and does not understand the meaning of the sentence. The Semantic Web will interpret that sentence as, “you love using and learning about computers,” which opens up a new world of possibilities.

Using tools like microformats and RDFA will produce richer, more precise search results for users as the computers start understanding the meaning of the terms being sought out.

To understand the Semantic Web we must begin to familiarize ourselves with the tools it will use to bring this evolution forward. This article is just the first part of a series examining the Semantic Web. Our next article will get more in-depth with the formats and technologies that make up the Semantic Web, the work currently being undertaken and most importantly how it will affect our world in the future.

For more information on Sir Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web projects he is currently working on, you can go to W3C at http://www.w3.org/.