Web 3.0 is poised to change the way small and midsize companies get business done. In this second of a three-part series, a look at how the next Web is transforming processes
Don't Miss: Part 1 -- Where We've Been And Where We Are: Web 1.0 and 2.0
Don't Miss: Part 3 -- Web 3.0: The Risks and the Rewards
The essence of the Web for business is the same as the essence of every business undertaking: communication, content, transaction, resolution, and mutual benefit.
For some time now, and from now on, content will be the most essential element. Whether it's a product description or catalog entry, a price and specifications negotiation, an e-mail dialogue, a Web-based consultancy or Web-marketed hard goods, the ability of your business to deliver the appropriate content to the appropriate recipients is now the name of the business game.
It's the same as it's always been — only, as the Web evolves, it's becoming different.
Maybe very different.
Among the biggest Web 3.0 (and beyond) buzzes right now is the pursuit of the semantic Web.
What the semantic Web's enthusiasts promise is the transformation of everything on the Web — documents, videos, e-mails, music, images, everything — into elements of a database.
This one database will stretch across, and through, the Web, and will be increasingly searchable in natural language – the language you, and more important, your customers, use.
The goal? Far more effective searches from far more natural queries, generating far more specific and appropriate results from within Web pages, documents, videos, exclusive of the applications in which they were created or housed, rather than the morass of Web sites and pages that searches return now.
Think of it as mashups on steroids. The difference is that the machines — your tools, programs, and software agents — do the mashing for you and your customers.
For this approach to Web 3.0 to work — at least work in the way the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) envisions it — will require the development of "common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources" – a true iteration or transformation of the way the Web works.
In short, it will be a Web of data designed — or redesigned — for interpretation by the machines we use to store and access the data. And as the next section shows, that has big implications for the way we'll do business.
|
Next Page: Have Your Machine Sell To My Machine
