Article Title: Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense - New York Times

Excerpt: The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web. “I call it the World Wide Database,” said Nova Spivack, the founder of a start-up firm whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of information by mining the World Wide Web. “We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.”

Excerpt: How such systems will be built, and how soon they will begin providing meaningful answers, is now a matter of vigorous debate both among academic researchers and commercial technologists. Some are focused on creating a vast new structure to supplant the existing Web; others are developing pragmatic tools that extract meaning from the existing Web. But all agree that if such systems emerge, they will instantly become more commercially valuable than today’s search engines, which return thousands or even millions of documents but as a rule do not answer questions directly.

Excerpt: “It’s a hot topic, and people haven’t realized this spooky thing about how much they are depending on A.I.,” said W. Daniel Hillis, a veteran artificial-intelligence researcher who founded Metaweb Technologies here last year. Like Radar Networks, Metaweb is still not publicly describing what its service or product will be, though the company’s Web site states that Metaweb intends to “build a better infrastructure for the Web.” “It is pretty clear that human knowledge is out there and more exposed to machines than it ever was before,” Mr. Hillis said.

Article Title: An Intro To The Semantic Web

Excerpt: The concept of the sematic web is a few years old now, but is only now really beginning to gain real-world traction. The idea is based upon the simple observation that the current web mainly consists of a network of human-readable documents, not computer-parsable data. Because of this, the web is extremely useful for humans to gather data and information, but not at all useful for computers. The sematic web seeks to overcome this limitation by promoting standards for information representation and exchange to create a “web of data”. Much in the same way that technical interchange standards like HTTP and HTML allowed the organic growth of the “web of documents”, new technical standards will provide a fertile ground for the growth of this “web of data”.

Excerpt: Radar Networks is one of a handful of companies that are focused on bringing “sematic web” technologies to market. Other players in the field include the startups Metaweb (developers of Freebase), Zephira, and Franz. There are also a variety of public/aceademic/opensource efforts, including SIMILE, Jena, and dbepdia. But there are heavyweights, too — players like Oracle are active in the space. The field is just emerging from its infancy, but many see a bright future ahead for the Semantic Web. We’ve seen what the Network Effect can do for document repositories, software development projects, and community building. Just imagine what it can do with the world’s collective knowledge!

Article Title: Tips for Web 3.0

Excerpt: I'd suggest there are two initial aims for most Web 3.0 systems: maximising visibility on release by getting as many people on-side and enthusiastic as possible; maximising utility on release by having ready-to-use applications in place. These two aims complement each other - more enthusiasm means a bigger pool of 3rd party developers to create cool applications, more utility means there's likely to be more enthusiasm.

Excerpt: As a rule of thumb for any decisions, favour what's best for the Web. The success of a Web 3.0 system will be dependent on the progress of the Web. While there may be features in your system which provide the exact same functionality for the exact same market as features of competing systems, at this point in time, cooperation is the best strategy. It's pioneering time, there's a huge amount of land available, no need to grab.

Excerpt: Standards are the conventions that allow this stuff to work. Ignore them and you're doomed. There's nothing inherently wrong with proprietary formats and protocols, but the ROI is at best linear. Think of the bean counters. Follow established specs and your beans turn into magic beanstalks.