This Reuters report on Berners-Lee’s big plans isn’t notable for how it defines the Semantic Web. In fact it is exceedingly vague to the point it seems rather obvious the writers wrote down, as best they could, the simplest version of what Berners-Lee told them. There’s no shame in that. Berners-Lee called me to the carpet a couple of years ago because I didn’t quite get it, either. That’s why he’s at MIT and I’m not.

Tim Berners-Lee

The Reuters writers focused instead on things more tangible to their readers, such as his warnings about government and corporate snooping on Web users by creating individual profiles based on the data users supply. But this was my favorite part:

When Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989, his boss at CERN, the world’s biggest particle physics laboratory, scrawled "vague, but exciting" on the memo.

I found that interesting in light of a couple of things. Recently, futurist and cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling gave a controversial speech in New Zealand about the future of the Web. In it, he gave what appeared to be a blistering criticism of Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly’s term, which gave rise to many of the applications we see today—user generated content, AJAX, social media, on and on.

At Web 2.0’s inception, critics jumped on it as an ill-defined marketing buzzword and claimed it wasn’t really different from Berners-Lee’s Web 1.0; it just looked different. Sterling summed it up a few weeks ago by saying Web 2.0 was made of “useful, sound ideas that were creatively vague.” He followed that up with much vaguer tales of the “Transition Web” and turtles upon turtles upon turtles.

Vagueness, it seems, is incredibly useful. One needs specifics when trying to sell something, especially in a corporate environment. Try selling an idea to your boss without data to back it up. But the beauty of the Web is that it is created by a kind of collective intelligence that can run merely on a concept, with definitions to come later, or perhaps never. In the meantime, look at all the cool, useful stuff that got made.

An example of another creatively vague concept: Twitter. At this very moment the general public is asking the same questions we on the cutting edge were asking when it debuted two years ago: What’s the point? Why would anybody use this? Why does anybody care? On the surface it sounds stupid. People send 140-character updates about what they’re having for breakfast to a bunch of other people who apparently give a crap.

 But then it became a useful tool for journalism, for Congress, for celebrities, for marketers, and very recently and very suddenly, for realtime search, and Google shows a twinge of concern.

It turns out that creatively vague is very powerful, even world changing. I think that’s because concepts can’t be weighted down by justification. Instead the collective interprets what it could mean, and radical innovation ensues.

So what did Sterling mean by a “transition web?” Hard to say exactly, but on the surface a culture-based, unmonetizable Web free of business models (as he calls Web 2.0, a business model) seems much more utopian than Berners-Lee’s cat-herding Semantic Web.

Thomas D. Wason

Defining the Semantic Web is difficult. You can run the define: function in Google and it will bring back several definitions sounding vaguely similar but offering no simple explanation—except for one, another favorite: The gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye for a unified Web without metadata. Thanks for that, Thomas D. Wason, PhD.

Berners-Lee told me I had it backwards in 2007, basing my understanding on a common misconception that led a Semantic Web developer from Berkeley to declare it dead on arrival. The Semantic Web, said Berners-Lee, wasn’t so much about getting humans to adhere to a common language (fat chance!) when identifying data so that machines could better understand it, but more about getting machines to understand data in more human ways (um, I think), and then integrating that data in a way that is intuitively accessible and contextual.

Here’s how he defined it himself:

"The semantic web is about data integration. Most of the data is in existing databases. Much of it is currently exported in HTML and can be easily exported also in RDF using a tool like D2R Server. Data comes from many sources. Calendars. Scientific measurements. Applications such as calendars, financial programs, and so on.

"Yes, it is possible to write data into online media, but that (a) is very effort-intensive and (b) only covers a fraction of all the things data is about. I’m not holding my breath for that."

And that means? I don’t know, but my guess is we’ll know it when we see it, and so long as enough vagueness remains innovation could be limitless. All I really know is that if something the creator of the World Wide Web is doing sounds “vague, but exciting,” we should pay attention. 

 Amit Kumar And Semantic Content

"Without a killer semantic web app for consumers, site owners have been reluctant to support standards like RDF, or even microformats," wrote Yahoo’s own Amit Kumar on the corporate blog.  He then made the important declaration: "We believe that app can be web search."

More information should be shared over the next few weeks, but Kumar went ahead and named certain microformats and vocabulary components that will be supported.  We’re sure this is causing a lot of movement in certain circles; Google may have a massive market share, but site owners will rush to accommodate Yahoo just the same.

Also, that’s assuming Google doesn’t follow suit, which it quite possibly will.  Executives in Mountain View won’t want to miss out on the positive press, and although word of this development will take some time to travel, they won’t want to risk losing the average user, either.

Yahoo’s support of semantic web standards should allow it to offer much smarter search results.  While there is a decided "cool" factor, then, this seems like an intelligent business move, as well.

When people do that discovery, they have some options, but tops on the list has to be StumbleUpon, the browser add-on for Firefox and IE. Now owned by eBay, StumbleUpon serves 4.3 million members, the company’s Dave Feller told WebProNews in a phone interview.

The demand for discovery should be pushed by a couple of trends. Feller said the continued growth on online content makes it difficult for people to filter through everything that’s out there.

Also, more people have been heading online for entertainment, probably nudged there in part by the writer strike taking place in Hollywood. If and when it ends, a need and desire for discovery of great online content should persist.

Plenty of online companies want to get content to those visitors, from Google and Yahoo all the way down to the newest blogger. Discovery of relevant content, and in this case the StumbleUpon model, serves that well in Feller’s opinion.

In a way, our chat with Feller and recounting the basic approach of StumbleUpon – people categorizing and voting on submitted content – resembled what Reuters wants to do with its OpenCalais project. That project may serve as a catalyst to the promise of a semantic web, one where concepts find content better than keywords alone.

StumbleUpon may be fulfilling that role today. The random approach of Stumbling isn’t the same as a focused search, of course, but on a general topic level, like boxing or comics, StumbleUpon pulls up content based on those concepts.

We certainly don’t have a beef with that.

Through the Calais project, Reuters offered a reward for the developer who creates a plugin or application for WordPress that accomplishes the following:

1. Offer automatic blog content scanning
2. Support rich meta-tagging
3. Create and maintain a Semantic tag cloud for each blogger to post
4. Embed the related Calais URI

The benefit for doing this, Tom Tague of Reuters-owned ClearForest told WebProNews, will be to fulfill the promise of a semantic web. The company has been working on that idea for a decade, almost as long as the hypertext Web has existed.

Through meta-tagging, one turns a blob of text into knowledge. All kinds of relationships that would be inobvious to a conventional search engine become apparent in semantic search.

By using Calais, people can send the metadata for their content through an API. That information gets stored, and Calais returns a unique RDF identifier that can be used by others to retrieve the same content later.

Calais will suggest tags, in real time, based on data submitted to it. Handling an uptick in usage should not be a problem, as Tague said the system can scale to millions of transactions.

Ultimately the promise of Calais could mean a web that understands relationships as well as keywords. Looking for the CEO of a company could return all kinds of connections, from public appearances to rumors to outside activities that have been recorded online.

Naaman relegated Berners-Lee’s vision of a cooperative Web where people and machines get along in digitized, organized artificial intelligence harmony via tags (told ya, this is some heady, quantum stuff) to a pipe dream. Naaman reminds Berners-Lee that people, in general, especially collectively, just ain’t that bright.

The Semantic Web, you see, relies in large part on people tagging their online media in a rather standardized, academic, high-minded, meaningful, and structured way. And Naaman thinks that’s too much to ask:

There is no way that we can engage the masses in annotating media with “semantic” labels. At best, we can get the people to annotate content (such as Flickr images or YouTube videos) with short text descriptions or tags.  

Hmmm, yes, very Aristotelian. I like it. Sounds like Naaman’s actually observed the primates in question. (Down the block from me, one of these primates spray-painted his name on the road with stencil. It’s not a complicated name, a four-letter smacker, spelled J-A-K-C, apparently.)

Naaman modified his original use of the word "dead," as it was intended more as a conversation-starter, opting for something closer to unachievable.

Certainly, Berners-Lee has wowed the world in the past. It wouldn’t be surprising if he heard rhetoric like this before his historic launch of an HTML page. So what does ol’ TBL have to say about it? Let’s check his blog.

He says "blogging is great" … um, at least he thought so last November.  

I don’t think I could explain it in ASCII text. I think that’s the problem. I read Tim Berners-Lee’s paper. I didn’t get it. I read tons of other stuff about it. I didn’t get it. It took someone building a new system and demonstrating it to me for me to get it.

Basically Web pages will no longer be just pages, or posts. They’ll all be split up into little objects, stored in a database (a massive, scalable one at that) and then your words can be displayed in different ways. Imagine a really awesome search engine that could bring back much much more granular stuff than Google can today. Or, heck, imagine you could view my blog by posts with most inbound links.

And I’m not even doing it justice (and I’ve been asked not to reveal what Radar really is doing until later this year).

It’s funny, yesterday I was thinking to myself “the industry has gotten boring.” Then came along Radar Networks, which definitely is doing something not boring.

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At first it was playful as well as ominous, but now there’s serious development in Web 3.0 applications. Those in the know will say, yes it’s about time, we need to move on. After all, Web 2.0 is pass right? Truly, many are ready to shed the 2.0 hype and move on to something more meaningful and relevant.

But when the New York Times decided to make it official on a mass scale, it left a lot of people scratching their heads. Especially since 3.0 wasn’t really explained more than the next big thing and 2.0 still really means nothing to the masses other than the notion that it might be dotcom part two.

So what is Web 3.0? For quite sometime, it’s been referred to as the Semantic web.

Currently the focus of a W3C working group, the Semantic Web vision was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Calling it the next step in Web evolution, Berners-Lee defines the Semantic Web as “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.” – source

According to Markoff, “the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.” Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting – through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals – and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.”

The Semantic Web is a web of data. The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for interchange of data, where on the original Web we only had interchange of documents. Also it is about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing. – source

At the end of the day, Web 3.0 is a little artificial intelligence and a whole lot more of programming intelligence. It’s about stringing the data across sites in order to provide a more informative, seamless, interconnected, and productive experience.

In anticipation of the global dominance of 3.0, Nick Carr has already locked-in Web 3.0 Conference, Web 3.0 Summit, Web 3.0 Camp, Web 3.0 Uncamp, and Web 3.0 Olde Tyme Hoedown. I’m thinking about crunch3.0, 3 point oh my god, c 3 point oh, and 3.1 anything and everything.

I will keep my eyes open for new intelligent applications and report on those I find interesting – especially as they relate to business, marketing, and communications.

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Brian Solis is principal at FutureWorks PR, an award-winning PR and Social Media agency founded in 1999. FW PR bridges the communications gap between companies and their customers, and between products and their specific benefits for their target markets. Solis blogs at PR2.0, http://www.briansolis.com, and regularly contributes to many industry trades. He is also frequently quoted in articles relating to technology trends and Marketing/PR strategies.