• Web of Data – Making knowledge of data accessible
• Web of Services – Making services available and connectable
• Social Web – Providing an identity to a user or organization

The semantic web delivers on the vision of creating transparency, efficiency, and greater collaboration around information. The objective would be to provide data in an open and standardized manner so that individuals and organizations can mine it, make comparisons, and perform analysis.

Web of Data

Your data space on the Web will be something you will control access to in a variety of ways, and it will include the option to provide licensed access to commercial entities on your terms.

Web of Services

The exponential growth in the Data Web will stimulate the evolution of Data Web Services. Functionality such as; wish-lists, offer-lists and lookup tables will gradually be integrated into mash-ups to create interesting new customizable knowledge.

Social Web

The Social web experience will become a personalized experience, where a user can browse via their profile, across platforms, and engage in communication on a 1-to-1 or 1-to-many basis.

• There exist slightly differing application and usage patterns of Social Software between the two groups, but the general trend says: Wikis are king! Social Bookmarking stays behind.
• There exists broad consent about the benefits of Social Software. Both groups say that quick access to information and knowledge is the biggest benefit generated by Social Software, followed by social networking functionalities and ubiquitous access to documents and data.
• There are differing notions about the barriers to Social Software, but consent exists that the amount of time necessary to use and maintain Social Software applications is the biggest obstacle.

Semantic Web

• The overall Semantic Web familiarity is already rather high.
• Most participants, especially from the research-domain, have dealt with the topic for more than three years. Application-oriented users catch up.
• More than 80 percent of application-oriented and research-oriented participants think that Semantic Web technologies are at least relevant to be used for corporate and business purposes.
• Search is the killer app! Integration costs & data control might be important aspects.
• There exist differing notions about the importance of certain barriers to the Semantic Web. Application-oriented participants believe that the organizational culture, the complexity of the technology, a general lack of experts and a lack of success stories are the biggest obstacles to the application of Semantic Web technologies. On the contrary research-oriented participants believe that the lack of success stories, a general lack of experts, a lack in quality of available software and the problem to quantify the benefits will hinder the broad adoption.
• While just a small minority believes that there won’t be any changes at all, most participants expect changes in regard to competencies of the knowledge worker and new forms of collaboration either between or within companies.
• The readiness to implement Semantic Web technologies is relatively high among both groups although the application-oriented participants seem to be a bit more reluctant.
• The last question of the survey reveals that expectations towards the Semantic Web are very high! Especially the application-oriented participants believe that the relevance of Semantic Web technologies in times of crisis is growing.

A few characteristics often noted as descriptive of Web 2.0 include:

• Blogging
• Ajax and other new technologies
• RSS-generated syndication
• Mash-ups
• Wikis and other collaborative applications
• Dynamic site content
• Ease of data creation, modification or deletion by individual users
• Interactive Cross-platform development across TV, mobile devices and the web

Many of the world’s largest organizations have an image of the Future of the web.
Intels view of the Future

So will steps in Semantic Web technologies provide the components required to fill the current strategic gap?
Semantics

Web 3.0 sometimes used as a synonym for Semantic Web, was a way of explaining how semantics can be integrated with Web 2.0 technologies to best effect. But what advances need to happen in the world of communication and technology to firmly make a leap into this web 3.0 space…..?

• Scalable Web applications that use Semantic Web languages or technologies – examples of Web 3.0 apps include Twine, Freebase, Garlik, Bintro
• Web Applications that use these technologies in concert with powerful AI technologies for example Powerset (now part of Microsoft) and the recently announced Siri.
• Augmented Reality Applications – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9KPJlA5yds&NR=1
• A variety of enabling technologies:
  • XML provides an elemental syntax for content structure within documents, yet associates no semantics with the meaning of the content contained within.
  • XML Schema is a language for providing and restricting the structure and content of elements contained within XML documents.
  • RDF is a simple language for expressing data models, which refer to objects (“resources“) and their relationships.
  • RDF Schema is a vocabulary for describing properties and classes of RDF-based resources, with semantics for generalized-hierarchies of such properties and classes.
  • OWL adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. “exactly one”), equality, richer typing of properties, characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and enumerated classes.
  • SPARQL is a protocol and query language for semantic web data sources.