The Smart eXtended Web

Will the Web recurse infinitely?

Many of us are obsessed with the future, and are constantly wondering what new technologies, trends or events will change our lives forever. The Horizon Report is one of the most eagerly anticipated reports each year by educators, because it peers down the corridor of time and attempts to predict what we can expect to see in our classrooms in the next year, 2-3 years, 5 years. People spend huge amounts of money each year gambling on the future. The average person bets on horse races or the lottery, whilst the high powered executives buy and sell stocks and shares. Some put their faith in clairvoyants, who for a price will attempt to predict your personal future for you. In the world of learning, we are obsessed with questions about where education is heading next, how work based learning will be enhanced, and more effective methods of engaging learners. Many educators have invested their trust in the use of new and emerging technologies for the future success of learning. Others have been more reticent, preferring instead to rely on the old, tried and tested methods of education and training.

Regardless of personal perspectives, our society is advancing rapidly into a technological future in which just about everything will change. Nothing short of a global disaster will stop it. We have seen the trends. Over the last 20 years, mobile phone texting has taken a significant hold on the communication habits of billions of citizens. New computer interfaces are being introduced that will supplant the ubiquitous keyboard and mouse. Soon we will control our computers using voice and gesture, even facial expressions, mood changes.

We have never been so connected as we are today. Global telecommunications mean that anyone connected can link with anyone else, hear and see them in real time, and send and receive documents at the speed of light. We carry our offices in our pockets. We increasingly do more of our shopping online, and we spend significant proportions of our working days dealing in bits rather than in atoms. We generate enough media content every day to dwarf anything previous societies could create in an entire year.

In the last decade, we have seen the liberation of the microchip from the computer. Now processing power can be embedded into any object, allowing it to be connected to the global network. This is significant, because it heralds a new kind of network made not only of knowledge and people, but a network of smart objects, an Internet of Things. Not only will our personal possessions become connected and smarter, so will our homes, our classrooms, our communities, and ultimately our cities. Yet these rapid technological changes could also be our Achilles heel. We are now so reliant on our computing power and telecommunication capability that if it were suddenly removed or disrupted, much of our familiar world would grind slowly to a halt.

The Web has changed, evolving through a number of iterations, to become increasingly prescient not only about what we wish to search for, but also the context within which it is being searched. Semantic search also takes our previous behaviour into account. Now the Web is about to get even smarter. Where Web 1.0 was about connecting content, and Web 2.0 (the social web) was about connecting people, Web 3.0 (the semantic web) will be about connecting collective intelligence. It will be the global network of distributed cognition. But just what will this emerging hive mind look like and what will we be able to do with it?

I wrote about Web 3.0 in an earlier post and speculated that the 'Smart eXtended Web' would be characterised by a number of features that included intelligent collaborative filtering of content, 3D visualisation and interaction and extended smart mobile interfaces. Now several new developments will bring these ideals to fruition, and it will happen sooner than we expected, because change is not linear, it's exponential.

Paul Groth talks about Web 3.0 in terms of what it will be able to do for us. In his paper The Rise of the Verb he explains his vision of how the web will evolve beyond the representation of knowledge in static data sets to the point where it can turn our commands into actions. Already, he writes, we can say to Siri: 'Move my meeting from 3 to 4'. In the future we will be able to say to Siri: 'Mow the lawn' and it will be done. The difference, he suggests, is that at present we can command our tools to action in the virtual world, but in the near future, with the advance of the Internet of Things and an emerging capability of the Web to interpret verbs as calls for action, we will be able to command operations in the real world too. He argues that in the next ten years we will see a web that is not only grounded in mathematical functions and definitions, but one that is also able to operate through the smart objects around, providing us with uses in the real world too. Ten years? I think it will be sooner.

In the next blog post: Sentiment tracking

Image source Fotopedia


The Smart eXtended Web by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.