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Tuesday, 16 October 2007 |
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Web 3.0 company demos service Friday…
While many in the industry are still trying to come to grips with Web 2.0, a bunch of pioneering start-ups are readying to launch and commercialise Web 3.0 products. One such is Radar Networks which on Friday will announce a new service that uses the power of the emerging Semantic Web to enable a smarter way of sharing, organising and finding information. Radar Networks founder and ceo Nova Spivack will also give the first public preview of Radar’s application at the ‘Web 2.0
Summit’ being held in
San Francisco.
There’s some differing views about what Web 3.0 might be though. Radar offers this: “The next-generation of the Web, in which the Web begins to function more like a database, and software grows more intelligent and helpful.”
Another Web 3.0 pioneer and ‘Web 2.0
Summit’ participant, Powerset, says it ‘…is undertaking a huge task: building a natural language search engine that reads and understands every sentence on the Web’. Powerset is trying to harness the wisdom of the masses. Its web site also contains the following statement: ‘We realise that most companies wait to launch until they have a completely usable beta version. Because Powerset is a natural language search engine, the earlier we have input from the best natural language processing units on the planet – the brains of humans – the quicker our search engine will improve. Through a combination of quantitative feedback, qualitative suggestions and AI learning techniques, Powerset will get much smarter when people are interacting with it.’
Metaweb, yet another ‘Web 2.0
Summit’ participant, is in alpha testing with its Web 3.0 Freebase product. The company states that: ‘Freebase is an open database of the world’s information. It is built by the community and for the community - free for anyone to query, contribute to, built applications on top of, or integrate into their websites. Already, Freebase covers millions of topics in hundreds of categories. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC, it contains structured information on many popular topics, like movies, music, people and locations - all reconciled and freely available via an open API’.
And for some trenchant-ish views on what Web 3.0 might or might not be, visit the blog of Tim O’Reilly, the individual credited with the coining of the term ‘Web 2.0’. He’s at: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/web_30_semantic_web_web_20.html
John Williamson |
