the reflexions insider

Last week I attended the Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The atmosphere was a cross between an academic conference and a trade show, trending toward the latter. Sessions were mostly organized as panel discussions split into two tracks: technology and business.

I’ve compiled some comments and insights from the sessions I attended. I thought I’d share them here for anyone who’s interested. This is the first of three rounds of comments, split into Strategy, Technology, and VC/Startups. These are my best attempts at paraphrasing based on my notes and I’ve done my best to attribute these comments where possible.

• Semantic technologies are about defining an architecture of participation (Tom Tague, Thomson Reuters)
• Shared ontologies are a necessary condition for web 3.0 and therefore must be community-driven (Marc Hatfield, Alitora Systems)
• Semantic tech is increasing the granularity of the web’s nodes, shifting from documents to things like objects, facts, places, and people. This increase of granularity is a defining characteristic of web 3.0. An effect of this trend is to increase the number of storable data points by several orders of magnitude. This presents an enormous information management problem. Therefore we need fundamentally new tools to process, organize, and consume this amount of data. (Tom Tague, Thomson Reuters)
• There won’t be a “killer semantic app” — people who are expecting this will be disappointed. Rather, there will be a gradual progression of semantic applications. (Tom Tague, Thomson Reuters)
• For the potential of web 3.0 to be realized, we need to shift away from a multitude of discrete APIs to a shared framework of APIs.
• One measure of success for the semantic web is for computers to make insights or draw conclusions that are not obvious. This scenario is two or three major steps away from where we’re at right now. In this regard the semantic web seems to have become a logical extension of the AI movement. It’s naive to think that once we have shared ontologies and metadata, this will “just happen.” (Tom Tague, Thomson Reuters)
• The domain (e.g., google.com) will no longer be the dominant channel of information distribution. This is terrifying to people who generate content and generate revenue from advertising based on that content. (Tom Tague, Thomson Reuters)
• The driving force behind semantic technologies is currently in improving business operations, not enhancing the user experience. (Lou LoPresti, RAPP)
• There is significant value in making worthwhile connections between people and places and concepts and things. (Lou LoPresti, RAPP)
• Semantic tech can be the driving force behind embedded messaging that will ultimately replace the content driven ads currently defining the marketplace now and which are largely ineffective and not closely targeted. The direction of advertising is in context-driven creative. (Lou LoPresti, RAPP)
• Tim Berners-Lee’s feeling of where the semantic web will be going is in tracking the source of triples. The majority of data on the web are not facts, but assertions said by a particular person at a particular time (just like all of these!). The semantic web will need to differentate between assertions and facts and attest to trustworthiness of the data source.
• Social networking: in the future of the web, the only social network is your social graph in an openly exchangeable format. There needs to be object oriented sociality; ultimately people are connected by social objects. (Marta Strickland, Organic)
• True semantic search will answer the question the user doesn’t know to ask (Eghosa Omoigui, Intel Capital)
• Web 3.0 makes music out of web 2.0’s noise. (Marta Strickland, Organic)

Stay tuned for more take-aways from the Web 3.0 Conference. The next topic will be technology, with a focus on cloud computing.

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