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The Natural Upgrade: The Web’s Search for Meaning

The best things happen naturally. The web has progressed in a way that I’m quite excited about and no one person, government, organization, or company decided the form that this progression would take. We did.

Grant it, when the web first came about it was mostly companies and universities using static HTML and images to share static information. This is what is often called Web 1.0. It was simple, and because it was simple it was flexible. This flexibility ended up being the seed of its perpetual growth.

Web 2.0, the collaborative web, was the result of three things:

Most people were able to afford computers and the internet.
The servers and memory needed to support data-driven web sites with dynamically generated content became cheaper.
The tools to develop software were cheap, and in many cases free, allowing for inexpensive but powerful software infrastructures to be built.

Now, the web is people-powered. And, they have online societies where they can share, communicate, learn, teach, and create.

The Semantic Web, also known as Web 3.0, is slowly taking form as a result of the following:

With so many people contributing to the web, the signal-to-noise ratio makes it difficult to find what is needed as well as filter out what is unneeded. Applications like search engines see content, but don’t understand it. The injection of meaning is needed, and who better to give content meaning than humans. And, it’s very natural for us to want to do just that.

This is where meta-data comes into play, which is simply data about data (or data that describes data). Humans decorate their content with meaning, and computers can use that meaning to help people find what and who they need.

This is often done through tagging and folksonomies, which are the seeds from which the semantic web will grow. It’s simply the act of describing things, often using simple one or two word terms. But, it can get more complicated once we start defined relationships between things.

Web 2.0 consisted of people collaboratively creating. Web 3.0 started when people started to give meaning to what they created.

From web 1.0 to web 3.0, the web has gone from looking like a stack of papers to a powerful mind that is beginning to “understand” meaning. The decision for this growth was not made by anyone. It was made by everyone. Each person searches for meaning, and it is as though the web is now searching for meaning. And, we are giving it (and each other) just that.