Web 3.0: An overview of next gen WWW standard

World Wide Web or WWW or Web as we know is an information space where information is identified by URLs and is available through internet. Since the birth of internet in 1990s Web has gone through many technological evolutions, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a main international standards organization for Web. The standards defined by W3C ensure common data formats and exchange protocols on Web. There has been a tremendous transformation in web standards from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and now Web 3.0. Web 1.0 was static web or read only web where information was available on the internet for the users to read. There was no active communication. Web 2.0 has offered the users with many new features like interactive websites and facilitates the social web that allows communication among people over the internet. It is about new methods of creating, collaborating and sharing the user-generated content online. Web 3.0 is the Internet era we are currently working in or possibly the era that we are creating.

The future of the web would be characterized by 3 major cumulative changes: There would be a tremendous shift towards smart phones, semantic processing of data for more appropriate and personalized results, and applying a wide range of analytic tools for processing large quantities of data that may involve cloud applications as well.

Web 3.0 is called "Smarter Web" because of use of semantics and Artificial Intelligence that can limit and control user's content. The features include: micro-formats, smart-search, data mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies which highlight machine enabled understanding of the information that will provide better user experience.

Web 3.0 is believed to be the next logical step in the progression of the Internet that would reshape the web, by evolving some stimulating ways in which internet will be used. The Web 3.0 browsers are capable of analysing user's response, search the Internet for the likely answers, and then organize the results.

Web 3.0 is defined as the 3rd generation of the Web, enabled by the convergence of several key emerging technology trends such as: Smart phones and abundant internet connectivity, Support for Virtual Reality, Open technologies and open data formats, Distributed computing, cloud & grid computing and web services interoperability, Open identity, personal data and roaming portable identity, Intelligent applications that make use of machine learning, autonomous agents and natural language processing, Making predictions based on user's behaviour and searching history, Enabling new levels of operability of applications by data integration and making data linkable and accessible in the form of web pages.

By Nandini Nayar - Assistant Professor, CSE Department Chitkara University H.P.

Reference

http://hospitalmarketing.blogs.com/my_weblog/2009/07/wake-up-its-web-30.html