Introduction
Web 3.0 is intended to make the World Wide Web a better-organized network.
Current WWW is an unintelligent chunk of machines and data, a Web of chained nodes, nodes being the resources in the form of websites, and chains being the links. And the ruling partners of the Web, the search engines, index these resources. This is the basic organization of the Web today.
If a website is in the inception, the only way it can be known to the world is by getting chained to at least one of the resources already part of the web, thereby creating a link to all other parts of the Web.
The Problem with the Current Web
When you search for something, you usually put a keyword in the search engine box, click the search button, and you get the results within seconds. What the search engine does in that time is that it searches for the keyword through the websites indexed by it. And retrieves the results, containing the search term. At the end, it reorders the retrieved results according to the relevance, which is analyzed not based on the actual usefulness, but based on incoming links, number of times the keyword appearing on the page, etc. In case of Google, its value is known as PageRank.
Think of the Web as a huge, massive library of size several times greater than the New York Public Library. It’s one hell of a whopping building, with well over ten million books. And the most important thing about it is, there is no organization whatever. The books are just scattered on the racks—fiction, science, medical, financial, all the subjects interspersed with each other. So, you will find a John Grisham thriller in between two financial titles, the classic, Ramayana beside The Undermined Human Genes, and Technique of Floral Decorations among Stephen King’s Different Seasons and Insurance Woes by John Kenner.
Now, if you are to find one book from this Web library, and you only know the title, then what you do is that you start from one end of the library, and go through to the other and hope that by chance you will find the book somewhere. And the search engines help you out in finding the title. It just makes the search faster, by enabling agent-based search from different nodes—parts of the network—making the search faster. So, if it finds a Stephen King fiction with reference to floral decoration on a page, you will get that as result on searching for floral decorations. Is it worthy to you? Not at all.
Why this happens to us is because the search engine bots, the programs those search for information on the Web, don’t know whether the search result has any meaning or not. They just search and retrieve the ones, which seem to be important. They retrieve the sites containing the keywords searched for. The reason behind this is that the machines don’t understand any data they process.
Metadata, The Solution
With the advent of Web 3.0, what we achieve is a better organization for the whole Web, making it an intelligent network, making the machines aware of what the Web is and what particular pieces of information mean. To achieve this goal, the Web is organized based on the data about data, the metadata. For instance, “Thomas Harris is the author of
Now, if we organize the Web according to the metadata, the information like, author, title, name, etc., then the machines can retrieve the information from the Web a lot better than they can now.
To enable this, we use such technologies as RDF (Resource Description Framework), XML (Extensible Markup Language), OWL (Web Ontology Language), etc., to create the Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web.
ZCubes, The Application
ZCubes, the focus of this blog, is an application of the Web 3.0. It’s a website, where you can do virtually anything. It is a data organizer, using which, we can put together any information from anywhere in the web into a simple single file, which can be exported in HTML format and saved on the PC or published on the Web.
ZCubes is a complete word processor, advanced calculation application (with support for more than a 1000 functions, Calci), image-editing application (with vector graphics capabilities), web browser, video editor, etc., incorporated into one single page. So, you can create a website containing anything such as live calculation scripts (functions), videos, images, handwritings, drawings, text, and even live websites (which get loaded in real time).
ZCubes also gives you power to publish the created pages on their subdomain. Alternatively, you can go for a domain you own, and publish it there.
Conclusion
This new technology is fast acquiring users, and is already a very popular application of Web 3.0, which will prevail the next generation of Web, the decade from 2010.
Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008
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