Twitter
Facebook
Flickr
RSS
"Twenty years from now, we'll look back and say this was the embryonic period," said Tim Berners-Lee, 50, who established the programming language of the Web in 1989 with colleagues at CERN, the European science institute.
"The Web is only going to get more revolutionary," he told delegates Tuesday at the opening of the 15th annual International World Wide Web Conference.
While Berners-Lee shrugs at the use of the term "Web 2.0" - a Silicon Valley buzzword to describe the Internet since the dot-com bust of the turn of the century - he does say he sees a new level of vigor across the network.
To many in technology, Web 2.0 means an Internet that is even more interactive, customized, social and media-intensive - not to mention profitable - than the one of a decade ago.
It is a change apparent with multilayered media databases like Google Maps, software programs that run inside Web browsers like the collaboration-friendly word processor Writely, high-volume community forums like MySpace, and so-called social search tools like Yahoo Answers.
But the software specialists, technology executives and entrepreneurs attending the conference in Edinburgh are looking beyond that, focusing on another - though less user-friendly - catchphrase: the semantic Web, another brainchild of Berners-Lee.
In this version of the Web, sites, links, media and databases are "smarter" and able to automatically convey more meaning than those of today.
For example, Berners-Lee said, a Web site that announces a conference would also contain programming with a lot of related information embedded within it.
A user could click on a link and immediately transfer the time and date of the conference to his or her electronic calendar. The location - address, latitude, longitude, perhaps even altitude - could be sent to his or her GPS device, and the names and biographies of others invited could be sent to an instant messenger list.
In other words, the "mark-up" language behind each Web page would be cross-referenced into countless other databases, once developers agreed on a common set of definitions.
Much of that foundation has been established over the past several years by the World Wide Web Consortium, a technical standards and policy group headed by Berners-Lee.
Now comes the effort to push Web developers to adopt the components and put them into software, services and sites, said Nigel Shadbolt, a professor who teaches artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton in England.
"There is an obvious place for the semantic Web in life sciences, in medicine, in industrial research," Shadbolt said, and that is where most of the focus is today.
"We're looking for communities of information users to show them the benefits," he said. "It's an evolutionary process."
The big question is whether it will move on next to businesses or consumers, he said. A consequence of an open and diffuse Internet, he noted, is that unexpected outcomes can emerge from unanticipated places.
For instance, some early experiments in highlighting new relationships from existing Web data have come out of Flickr, a photo-sharing site that members categorize themselves, and FOAF, which stands for "friend of a friend," a research project to describe the various links between people.
Both add "meaning" where such context did not exist before, just by changing the underlying programming to reflect links between databases, Shadbolt said.
"Over a 5-to-10-year time frame, I think you are going to see increasing amounts of this semantic Web integration," he said.
Patrick Sheehan, a partner in 3i Investments, a venture capital firm based in London, said investment was beginning to follow the "blue sky" period of big dreams for the semantic Web. His company financed two such early-stage companies this year, both in Britain.
"You can now say 'semantic Web' without getting a totally blank stare back," Sheehan said, adding that he had seen "several, not hundreds," of proposals. "The technology is still mostly coming out of the universities. But these companies are real, solving real problems - they're not just doing research."
Garlik, based in Richmond, England, and listing Mike Harris, the chief executive of the online bank Egg, as its chairman, aims to use semantic programming to manage personal information online. OmPrompt, of Oxfordshire, focuses on message-driven trading communities.
Sheehan believes that Europe, particularly at places like the University of Southampton, is leading the world in semantic Web research, though it remains to be seen whether the region can be as successful at commercializing it.
Not that anyone is counting, but Berners-Lee, whose work at CERN was inspired by a desire to share research papers widely among physicists, sees only two distinct versions of his Web: the Web of documents, which emerged in the 1990s, and the Web of data, which will be the result of the semantic programming languages.
"People keep asking what Web 3.0 is," Berners-Lee said. "I think maybe when you've got an overlay of scalable vector graphics - everything rippling and folding and looking misty - on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource."
Said Sheehan: "I believe the semantic Web will be profound. In time, it will be as obvious as the Web seems obvious to us today."
