Tim Berners-Lee on Web 3.0?
Rarely, do people get the chance to meet some of the luminaries in the Internet space. I was fortunate enough to meet the guy during the last GSM World Congress in Barcelona last February. Anyway, to the point. Here is an interesting interview with Tim Berners-Lee by Myla Crespo Villanueva of Meridian Telekoms and Wolfpac fame. The most interesting part of the interview for me is the part where Mr. Berners-Lee discusses a possible Future of the Web.
Oh, basically very exciting and certainly there are benefits that can way outmatch the worries. For example, the Semantic Web is starting to take off. In certain areas, it is going with very strong exponential growth. For example, webs of data that open webs of social networking information are being put out there in RDF with FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend) project. They just put it out there in an established format and then it becomes much more reusable when doing all sorts of exciting things with that data… Single Sign-on has been an issue from the practice of how people use it. Using multiple websites, going from blog to blog, they may have an account at one blog to actually put comments on another one. There are systems like Open ID, which will come, which may allow that.
We’ve got standards for digital signature and encryption which would allow us to make very secure systems. But we don’t have the trust model. So one of the things which are coming is connecting together the social networking output using RDF, FOAF and Open ID-type of things together with a trust model so that can start putting information which enables my computer to figure out who to trust as the social networks develop. Hence, there will be ways to figure out,’”How do I know this person? Why should I accept an e-mail from him?” and after a while I might say if you don’t have a Friend-of-a-Friend file, then you won’t be able to send me e-mail because you will have to first authenticate by showing that you are part of a social network which includes people that I trust. So, I think there’s a lot of exciting developments to come in that area. And interestingly enough as we get these trust networks developed, that I think will also enable more sharing… more collaborative editing. What people do at the moment with wikis is completely public, and what they do with a blog is completely public. But not everything you want to do is completely public… what you are doing within your team, within your company or within your family. And so, when we have this social networking structure you can easily make groups and those groups are shared across different websites, then that will open the door to a whole lot more collaboration.
The ingredients are mostly available now. We already have a possible single sign-on (SSO) solution, read-write web technology and even machine-readable relationship information (via the Friend-of-a-friend FOAF project). If we had a trust system in place then we would have a complete system. Not only do we have a fully interactive web. We can also have one that allows for better interaction based on relationships! Is this just Web 2.0? Or something even better? Web 3.0?
