20th Anniversary of the Web: Congratulations!
Did you know? On March 13, 2009, the World Wide Web celebrated 20 years and to quote,
“...something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled “Information Management : a Proposal”
To assess the impact of this “proposal” on society and the way we communicate, wow, look at so called collaboration 2.0 tools like blogging, wikis or perhaps evolution of the web to “semantic web” or Web 3.0.
Tim’s vision of the semantic web is as follows;
“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web - the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”
- Tim Berners-Lee, 1999
Whilst my last posting was around the journey of impossibilities e.g. holograms and teleportation, it is quite stimulating to re-visit Tim’s vision and the semantic web; it’s impact to communications; scientific publications overall.
What are your thoughts around the web, its impact to society, and the semantic web goals?
Posted by Monique Morrow at 11:40AM PST
Maria Tseng Mar 24, 2009
The Semantic Web is the next big advance in the cyber world. The web enabled a ‘borg-like’ shared consciousness for its users; but unlike “resistence is futile,” it’s an opt-in experience, from instance to instance. Furthermore, we decide our own way of using, being present, on the web. Google is working on vertical search and proximal search which will help us to concentrate as well as broaden our web experience. Intelligent agents in the semantic web will GREATLY increase our ability to manage our experiences (plural). Imagine, instead of having to maintain one type of content on Facebook (social), another on Linkedin (business) and a third, fourth and fifth on each of my blogs; plus on the intranet, on email… intelligent agents can help me aggregate or separate those types of content!
I strongly believe that the semantic web is a great opportunity for network vendors like Cisco. Its effective implementation requires definitions, assignment of meanings, catagorization and relating… a vast amount of data. The ability to manage and deliver those chunks in the best relevance is a key differentiator. A really pervasive, efficient, intelligent network would be the right solution.