Web 3.0 – I don’t think so.

I’ve been reading several articles recently about the semantic web including one in last week’s Computing magazine. The article cited Tim Burners-Lee as espousing the benefits of the semantic web for the past decade and now it seems some progress is being made, albeit in small areas.

The latest to roll off the shelf is Powersets semantic search service. It searches wikipedia only at the moment but is set to go further soon. Importantly it searches via conversational techniques and is supposed to provide a more intuitive experience. So this is the future of the web, already being tagged web 3.0.

I was rather hoping that web 3.0 would be a little more than a sensemaking tool, not that it’s not useful but I imagined web 3.0 to include neural interfacing and total immersion, webTV and augmented reality. Speaking of which I saw the bionic eye technology (actually a bionic contact lens) being developed in Seattle by UoW. They showed a working demo of the technology in action on a recent episode of click.