If ‘Web 3.0′ is Here, Does That Mean We’ll Have to Call it ‘Enterprise 3.0′?
by Joe McKendrick
This headline caught my eye: InformationWeek just published an article entitled “Web 2.0 Arrives to Find Web 3.0 Under Way.”
Yikes! Is the Web 2.0 era already passe? Is it so 2006?
The article talked about some vendors, including TopQuadrant and Franz, which leverage Web 3.0 approaches in their data management products.
So what is Web 3.0? It appears to an attempt at a more catchy name for the much-awaited and long-predicted “Semantic Web,” in which meaning is attached to content accessible across the Web. Semantic Web promises to put a lot more intelligence — artificial intelligence — out there in the network of networks, and is certainly a step in the right direction.
Dan Farber even looks beyond the horizon at the rise of Web 4.0, or the notion of a “WebOS” that implies that machine intelligence has reached a point that the Internet becomes the planetary computer, a massive web of highly intelligent interactions.”
But back to Web 3.0 — which is purportedly about the application of artificial intelligence to the bazillion terabytes of data that can be brought together for analysis from across the Internet. It’s predictive analytics — now in use in financial risk management tools — along with association between datasets. It has interesting potential at the enterprise level — vendors such as SAS have some interesting tools that provide some interesting capabilities.
Web 3.0 says these tools can be applied on a grand scale and made available to Joe consumer. As The New York Times noted in a November 2006 article which first broke “Web 3.0″ into the lexicon:
“In the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college.”
The question is, in the interest of correct versioning, do we also move on to Enterprise 3.0 to discuss the application of semantic Web capabilities in enterprise settings? Or do we still have a lot of work just getting to Enterprise 2.0?
