After making it through its teenage years, the World Wide Web is getting ready for the huge task of organising all of its information.

Last Monday, to mark the 20th birthday of his creation, Tim Berners-Lee published an article in the Scientific American.

“The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending”, Berners-Lee opened.

Fragmented future?

A strong advocate of open standards and open data, Berners-Lee warned about the threat the closed nature of some of the most popular social media sites of our time pose to the web.

He also criticised both Apple’s iTunes and magazine publishers who create smartphone apps instead of web apps, for excluding their content from the rest of the web.

“The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space”, Berners-Lee wrote.

Web 3.0

Berners-Lee appealed for open standards as a driver for innovation and linked data to create a better, more meaningful web.

The term ‘Semantic Web’ has been talked about for a while, but as the world becomes increasingly well connected, the step towards the so called Web 3.0 seems more realistic than ever.

For those still unsure about what the ‘Semantic Web’ means, here’s a brief explanation. Quite simply, it’s a web of data as opposed to just data on the web – a global database, as Berners-Lee defined it more than decade ago.

So why would we want it?

To make the web of the future as useful as we can, Berners-Lee replies.

“The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine”, he said.

Scientists, Berners-Lee wrote, are already discovering the huge potential of shared information and linked databases.

“Researchers, for example, are realising that in many cases no single lab or online data repository is sufficient to discover new drugs.

“The information necessary to understand the complex interactions between diseases, biological processes in the human body, and the vast array of chemical agents is spread across the world in a myriad of databases, spreadsheets and documents.”

As Berners-Lee points out, linked data has already played a key role when a drug for Alzheimer’s disease was discovered. As more and more information gets shared and linked, the future is looking bright for the web as a young adult.

Case study

Search semantically with Wolfram Alpha

One example of what computers can do with data they understand is an ‘answer engine’ called Wolfram Alpha. Read more…