All things 3.0

When we do some pitching about ExperienceOn and our first vertical for travel, BeFogg.com, we normally end up receiving the same question. It’s more or less like: ok, so you are a Web 3.0 service, right?.

Our answer is yes, but the problem is that, as with most of the umbrella terms, it’s likely that our vision for Web 3.0 is not the same as other people’s vision. In fact, there’s huge discrepancy in the Web about what’s exactly Web 3.0, and even whether it should exist or not.

In this post we outline our vision about Web 3.0.

Should Web 3.0 exist?

The 3.0 in Web 3.0 is a version number. In software, we use versions when there are changes in the form of that software. Major version changes are used to mark very significant changes, and minor version changes are used mainly for bugfixing and minor improvements.

For us, Web 3.0 would be justified if a new major change was to be introduced in the web.

This major change may have many forms, for example, a significant modification or introduction of protocols, architectures or technologies that have clear end-user impact, or the introduction of a new behavioral or organizational paradigm for doing things in the Internet, among others.

For example, in the Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 transition, there were many technological improvements, but the major change that motivated the change of Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was not technological. It was mostly a behavioral and organizational change (people using the Web not only to consume information but also to produce it, and also using it not only to interact with websites but also to interact and group with other people).

Some definitions about Web 3.0

Here we present a brief summary of several articles about Web 3.0.

Victoria Shannon, from the International Herald Tribune, in the article A more revolutionary Web defines Web 3.0 in the terms of the Semantic Web, a web of structured data that is directly processable by machines.

Berners-Lee … sees only two distinct versions of his Web: the Web of documents, which emerged in the 1990s, and the Web of data, which will be the result of the semantic programming languages.

John Markoff, from the New York Times, in the article Entrepreneurs see a web guided by common sense, proposes the addition of a new layer over the existing web

… a new layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion …

Sramana Mitra, in her blog post Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS), defines Web 3.0 services by means of a set of ingredients that each one of these future services should have. In our opinion, she introduces a very important secondary change that Web 3.0 will introduce: contextual services. We will comment on that later in the post.

In Web 3.0, I predict, we are going to start seeing roll-ups. We will see a trunk that emerges from the Context, be it film (Netflix), music (iTunes), cooking / food, working women, single parents, … and assembles the Web 3.0 formula that addresses the whole set of needs of a consumer in that Context.

Nova Spivack, from Radar Networks, in an article called The third generation web is coming, introduces a list of technologies needed for obtaining a more connected, open, and intelligent web. He points to several technologies like Semantic Web technologies (mainly the ones defined in W3C Semantic Web Activity, like RDF, OWL, SWRL and SPARQL), associative databases (e.g. triplestores) and also natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning and autonomous agents.

The threshold to the third-generation Web will be crossed in 2007. At this juncture the focus of innovation will start shift back from front-end improvements towards back-end infrastructure level upgrades to the Web. This cycle will continue for five to ten years, and will result in making the Web more connected, more open, and more intelligent. It will transform the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.

Phil Wainewright, in his Software as Services blog, includes an article called What to expect from Web 3.0, where he introduces an architectural vision for the Web 3.0, composed of a multi-layered service architecture, where he defines an Aggregation Layer that builds upon several services in an inner backend layer called API Services Layer, and at the end an Application Layer that contains application that solve most of the problems in a broad context (in order to avoid the classical fragmentation problem). Also, Phil thinks that the delivery of the services of the Application Layer will be by means of rich client technology, that is managed (he says serviced) from the server.

Web 3.0 isn’t just about shopping, entertainment and search. It’s also going to deliver a new generation of business applications that will see business computing converge on the same fundamental on-demand architecture as consumer applications.

Hakia’s Emre Sokullu, in his article Pivots of the web: What’s next after social networking?, writes about the next big thing after social networking (using its own numbering scheme for web eras). He says that the next big things are a Social Web OS/social platform like Facebook, where almost any interactions and user actions are to be done, and also notes Joost online television as one of the future big players.

… we will end up with the rebirth of online TV. Since we are all born lazy, video on demand is the way to go. And what Joost is offering is higher quality content (thanks to their collaboration with big content providers), higher quality watching experience (thanks to P2P technology) and a legal hassle-free alternative to YouTube, which has already shown tremendous success.

Note that the different authors introduce their candidates for the major change that will trigger the next era, the change between Web 2.x to Web 3.0. In our opinion, some of them are important changes that will have their places in the Web 3.0, but that mostly are an improvement of what we have today.

Our prediction for Web 3.0

In our opinion the big change will come in the way we interact with the web. John Markoff includes the key point in his article above: the Web… less of a catalog and more of a guide.

Now we’re interacting with the web in a very primitive and brute-force way, we go directly to the chapters (we visit web sites by typing or following links to URLs ) or we use the keyword index to find in which pages appear some words (in this case search engines, like Google, that return the URLs that contain the words we’re looking for).

We advocate for the addition of a new model of interaction with the Web, an intermediated model where humans don’t interact directly with websites or search engines, but use software intermediaries that act as their guides. You tell them what’s your problem, and these intelligent services will try to completely or partially solve problems in your behalf, only interacting with you when it’s really needed (i.e. to show you important information, to request for your decision given the options, …).

Please refer to our previous post About ExperienceOn Ventures for more information about Intelligent Services.

What happens to the Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is a web of structured data that can be processed automatically by machines.

Reaching the full potential of the semantic web would imply that almost everyone in the Web generates and maintains machine-processable data. Clearly, this is a big hurdle for this vision to get real, mainly due to human and organizational behavior issues, as reported by Cory Doctorow’s Metacrap.

Notwithstanding the problems reflected above, there’s no doubt that many organizations, individuals and companies will start producing highly-authoritative, high-quality, structured meta-data that machines can directly consume.

Clearly, the availability of high-quality structured meta-data will impact in the quality of the intelligent services, and we will embrace this information when it’s available, but, even if the full vision of Semantic Web were to be reached, we’re far from there. It may fully materialize in later Web 3.x or Web 4.x. For the moment, we will mine concrete unstructured data sources to obtain useful information to feed our intelligent services.

We believe that the proliferation of structured data is very important, but we also believe that it’s most important what you do with this data. Intelligent services should benefit from the kind of information sources that are available at a given moment. We should start now, with the information that it’s available in the Web at this moment, without waiting for the further materialization of the Semantic Web.

Are there any more (secondary) changes to be included in Web 3.0?

Yes, we think so. And it will be important changes.

The continuous advances in broadband adoption and bandwidth and the current developments in rich-client technologies (AIR, Silverlight and JavaFX to name a few) will result in a spectacular improvement in the quality of the user experiences, gaining in interactivity, usability and real-time multimedia content, among others.

Also, there should be a movement of contextualization, that is, the creation or aggregation of multiple individual services to provide complete user experiences around specific contexts (travel, real-estate, jobs, …), avoiding the super-fragmented actual state of the web (where you have to visit a lot of services and web sites to complete a goal).

We will also continue seeing great advances in the market share, depth and completeness of the software delivered as a service (SaaS), due to the technical advancements and the increasing interest in the field of mainstream players like Google, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft.

Yet another Web 3.0 definition

Web 3.0 is the intelligent web. A web powered by a new kind of services, called intelligent services, that are able to access and reason over vast volumes of the information present in the Web. These intelligent services greatly simplify the tasks of doing research in the Web, acting as autonomous agents that analyze information and perform actions in our behalf, even in an unattended way.

Web 3.0 builds upon the foundations of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The intelligent services are able to process informational pages and use e-Commerce services from Web 1.0, and are able to benefit from the vast knowledge present in Web 2.0 social networks.

Web 3.0 will allow end-users to benefit, in a practical way, from the vast quantities of information present in the Web.

ExperienceOn Ventures is a Spanish company based in Barcelona, founded in June 2007 by two Spanish entrepreneurs, Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas and Sergio Berná Niñerola, who share a passion for technology and its practical applications to make people’s life better.

Today we’re a startup composed by five persons, and we’re working on releasing the first version of our first service.

What’s the problem we aim to solve?

There is too much information, too many products and services out there in the Internet, and every day we have less and less time to check this huge volume of information or perform research for products and services. The growth of the Internet is explosive.

The current way of interacting with this information is by directly browsing through web sites and web pages, combined with the usage of search engines to find more web sites and web pages. The problem with that approach is that, for non-trivial things, you end up making a lot of search engine queries, and browsing through a lot of information contained in a lot of different web sites. The process is tedious and time-consuming. Many users simply give up.

What’s our solution for this problem?

We call them intelligent services.

Intelligent services guide us in the process of resolving a problem, simplifying the information review and decision processes. They should be capable of:

1. understand what you want, using an appropriate interface (text, voice, …), in your language, when you’re using full sentences or just some keywords
2. search, retrieve and analyze the information needed to solve your problem at machine speed, without requiring you to find and read it.
3. presenting you summaries of only the relevant information, filtering out the irrelevant and noisy information.
4. when there’s a decision to be taken, presenting you the available choices, with enough information for taking decisions.
5. making recommendations relevant to the concrete situation and your concrete preferences
6. personalizing the results, taking into account your unique goals and preferences
7. when requested, working in an unattended manner, that is, being able to perform background tasks in a continuous way, requesting our intervention only when it’s really needed.
8. helping us discover new relevant information or services that we may not discover in other case.

A simpler way of describing this: let machines do what they do well (searching and retrieving tons of information, products and services and analyzing them for us, performing repetitive tasks, doing massive data-crunching, …) and let humans do what they do well (evaluating what the best options are and taking decisions).

How are we going to do it?

The first question you can have is: ok, are you going to create a super-Google that solves the questions for all the problems?.

We think that this is not only very hard to do (even if, like Google, you have a ton of money, some of the smartest people in the world and a great technology), but also we think it is just not the best approach.

We believe that a more contextual approach will be better for several reasons. By a contextual approach, we mean that we create services that solve the vast majority of the problems in an area that is big enough to be meaningful for the end users (i.e. electronics, jobs, real estate, travel, …).

First reason, your algorithms are tuned to solve these problems, you can get better and more effective results and things are easier to mantain, improve and scale. We feel that if you have one-size-fits-all super algorithms, it’s easier to break some thing when you fix another.

Second, you can create user interfaces that are tailored to the problem you are resolving. The multi-page list of results is applicable for almost any thing you can imagine, but it’s clearly not convenient for the end-users in many cases.

Our first vertical service

The first vertical we’re targeting is travel. Our brand name for the travel vertical is befogg.com, inspired by the mythical traveller Phileas Fogg, main character of Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days.

Why travel?. We feel that doing travel research, organization and booking is a pain. The user experience is broken.

When you know exactly what you want, e.g. book a flight from Tokyo to Bangkok for New Year’s eve, it’s easy, you can go to Expedia or Sidestep (or your local equivalent), and you’re done in less than five minutes.

But you’re out of luck if you want to organize your skiing holidays in some place you have not decided yet, flying with a company you have not decided yet, staying in hotels you have not decided yet … you know. Doing all the research in Internet (from more generic things like getting ideas to more concrete things like deciding which hotels or what places to visit there) is a very complex, time consuming and tedious process, that requires performing many Google searches, visiting many social travel sites, reading many repetitive travelogues, trip logs or reviews, obtaining country and airline security information, weather information, … (of course, all from different service providers), looking for quotes in different electronic travel agencies. Most of the people simply give up and perform this research via traditional travel agents or by other means.

We want to simplify and streamline the process, integrating all these sources for you, and analyzing the massive publicly-available travel information that exists out there for you. We ask your help when we need your feedback, and finally we present you with a small lists of results and summaries of the important information, so you can be better informed in less time, and therefore take better decisions.

You will never need to review hundreds of reviews (unless you want to :)) when choosing an hotel. We do it for you and present you a summary, with our recommendations. You will never need to browse through a pile of prices (unless you want to :)). No more irrelevant ’special offers’ that are not special at all.

We believe that it’s not necessary to choose between simplicity and power. We believe that is possible to just choose both.

Why are you doing this now?

It’s the convergence of several trends that make this moment so appropriate for intelligent services to come.

The first trend is, as we said before, the massive overload of information, product and services we’re suffering. Not only is a real problem for users (having a ton of information coming from multiple sources), but it’s also a lost opportunity if we cannot benefit from this massive set of information that are out there. Using a travel example, just imagine the power of asking questions to an intelligent service that has access to all the travel knowledge and experiences that are published in the Web and can process these information at a lightning speed.

The second trend is that now is economically feasible to rollout services that have such requirements of computing, networking and storage. Also, the economics are going to improve greatly with the rise of multicore and manycore processors as industry standards, driving down the ratio of price per computing power unit at an accelerated pace. With more computing power at cheaper prices, we will be able to solve more complex problems, resulting in an overall benefit for the users.

The third trend is that, after two eras of the web, end users are getting more and more sophisticated. They demand and are more prepared to absorb new advanced services. New ways of doing things, new different services, new interfaces, … This trend will be specially pronunciated in people that have born in the Internet age, persons that won’t conceive life without the web.

What about the technology?

We will write one or more detailed posts about our technology later.

As an apperitive, we use a lot of natural language processing techniques (with a focus on statistical ones), machine learning techniques, information retrieval and information extraction techniques, and a lot of constraint-satisfaction techniques.

All of these things are programmed using two programming languages (one imperative and one declarative), and are running over an HPC infrastructure composed by a distributed computation platform that support MapReduce-style computations and nested data parallelism, a distributed parallel fault-tolerant filesystem, several datastore backends in order to store and retrieve efficiently the different kinds of data we’re managing (a relational database, a document repository (similar to Google’s BigTable and an associative database), in a cluster composed by commodity boxes running Linux.

More to come …

Stay tuned!. More about technology, intelligent services, Web 3.0, … in the following posts. Thanks for your attention!