Scope

- comment le business traditionnel s'approprie les media sociaux?
- le passage de web 2.0 au web 3.0
"from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.” (sourse)

Web 2.0, which describes the ability to seamlessly connect applications (like geographic mapping)
and services (like photo-sharing) over the Internet, has in recent months become the focus of dotcom-
style hype in Silicon Valley. But commercial interest in Web 3.0 — or the “semantic Web,”
for the idea of adding meaning — is only now emerging.
The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rentalhousing
Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows
the location of each rental listing.
In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a
reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to
vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”
Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel,
car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search
would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had
been assembled by a human travel agent.
How such systems will be built, and how soon they will begin providing meaningful answers, is
now a matter of vigorous debate both among academic researchers and commercial technologists.
Some are focused on creating a vast new structure to supplant the existing Web; others are
developing pragmatic tools that extract meaning from the existing Web.
But all agree that if such systems emerge, they will instantly become more commercially valuable
than today’s search engines, which return thousands or even millions of documents but as a rule
do not answer questions directly.
(idem)
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There is debate over whether systems like Cyc will be the driving force behind Web 3.0 or
whether intelligence will emerge in a more organic fashion, from technologies that systematically
extract meaning from the existing Web. Those in the latter camp say they see early examples in
services like del.icio.us and Flickr, the bookmarking and photo-sharing systems acquired by
Yahoo, and Digg, a news service that relies on aggregating the opinions of readers to find stories
of interest.
In Flickr, for example, users “tag” photos, making it simple to identify images in ways that have
eluded scientists in the past.
“With Flickr you can find images that a computer could never find,” said Prabhakar Raghavan,
head of research at Yahoo. “Something that defied us for 50 years suddenly became trivial. It
wouldn’t have become trivial without the Web.” (...)