Google and the Semantic Web (6d)

bydeelilah

1.3K followers

2 years ago

New Adventures in Web 3.0

With this article and a few parting words, we will leave Web 2.0 behind-- and we will enter Web 3.0-- with great anticipation, kicking and screaming, or something in between. In summary of last week's article, characteristics of Web 2.0 are :

• Blogs
• Networks and networking
• Wikis and Participation
• Communities
• WordPress, GoDaddy
• Wealthy Affiliate
• Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
• Let us not forget: The Smart Phone
• Sharing videos
• You get the idea.

As you can see, Web 2.0 is a social affair.

As an aside, my guru, Frank, the Guitar Man, pointed out that my timeline in the former article could have begun in 1935 when Alan Turing published a paper, which described the core concept of the modern computer, later known as the "Turing Machine".

Later, Turing helped Britain to break the Nazi's "Enigma Code" using a technique he called the "plain text attack", shortening the war and potentially saving millions of lives. Now called the "Turing Test", and used in reverse, we recognize the CAPTCHA system, a method of verification by which a website can tell a human apart from an algorithm.

The Answer To Last Week's Question

If you remember, due to some technical issues, the question posed in the title of last weeks post went unanswered:

What Does Tim Berners-Lee Have To Do With The Semantic Web? (6c) 

To review, Berners-Lee is credited with the invention of the World-Wide-Web (www) in 1989.

As it turns out, Berners-Lee is credited, also, with the invention of Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web. Not all sources agree, but it is clear he was/is involved in a collaborative effort with programmers and others from the beginning.

According to Semantic Web for Dummies by Jeffrey T. Pollock, Berners-Lee didn't care for the versioning of the web, i.e., webs 1,2,3, etc. Given that book was published in 2009, and now he is said to have invented the Semantic Web, we can now understand how he envisioned the evolution of the web, probably from the beginning.

It takes time for the technology to catch up with the vision.

In an effort to describe the semantic web, Tim Berners-Lee said, "If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like a huge database."

Simplified, If the current web is filled with many, many books, even all the books, the semantic web is one great-big book, containing all the information in all those books.

A Really Big Book

Think about a book. It contains text from one author on his/her subject. It has a TOC (table of contents), and depending on what kind of book it is, it may have an index, photographs, and an extensive bibliography-- on that subject.

Consider the semantic, great-big book. It's TOC includes, not the titles surrounding one subject, like how to cook, or how to take a photograph, but rather, its contents include all the subjects by all the authors and its bibliography supports them. Cross-referencing is an eternal challenge.

One cannot buy this book and put it on a shelf. There is actually too much information contained for our present internet or any giant computer data bank or cloud.

I read that quantum computing is a (not too) near reality. That is what it will take to perfect the semantic web dream.

Still, it surprised me how the technologies are just now catching up to the vision. It's a case of not seeing forest for the trees, an expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole.

We have some new applications (where applications are the trees) waiting in the wings for a new infrastructure (where infrastructure is the forest).

However, I should not be surprised. Technology moves in a geometric growth pattern, and we find ourselves now invested in the habit of web versioning, i.e., 3,4,5, and I think I read somewhere about 6.

We've answered last week's questions (almost). What about this week's? What do we know about Google and its latest upgrade? We can already see (or can we?) that Google is more interested in topics or clusters, which is a number of closely related blogs or articles revolving around one topic, than it is interested in the current system using random keywords relating to a topic.

See Partha's recent blogs on this subject. And Jay mentioned he may offer a course on "topic clustering". I hope so.

In terms of Google, SEO, and our online businesses, the semantic approach is and will affect our online businesses. Let's get ahead of the curve. I don't see this as a subject much discussed yet.

Since the semantic web, or beginnings of it have been in use since at least 2010, we can assume Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many others are deeply involved.

And they are.

Remember our discussion about McDonald's proprietary ordering system, which requires no human working the drive-thru window, which also hears the order at the counter and awaits the cashier to read and approve the order?

Then there is Checkers' drive-thru ordering system, complete with cameras and license plate recognition, or Outback's computer, which remembers you like your steak cooked medium-rare and your favorite wine is a Malbec from the mountains of Argentina?

These are examples of machine learning (ML). And we are actually quite accustomed to using all sorts of applications like these.

"Hey, Siri?"

How do you think she can answer your dumb questions with a quick and smartly humorous answer? She's heard all the dumb questions, and she's beginning to know who asks them.

Who doesn't use a chat bot now and then?

As I inferred earlier, the architecture to support the whole of a world-wide-data-base is not available yet. And we have not seen an end to html programming, though there are other forms of programming out there.

Now I'm going underwater and will kindly leave programming to the programmers. However, I invite you to take a look at this fascinating website, Oracle.com. This is definitely Web 3.0, though I believe it is more an example of Web3, which we have yet to explore.

I especially invite you, Dr. Frank, where as an MD, you are sure to enjoy Oracle.com.

There are more and more websites like these coming online, obviously invented specifically for Web 3.0. One such website is called promptbase.com. You can bake up (whoops, typo, though bake is probably a better word than make).

You can make up whatever you can think up, enter key words, and the program will do it's best to create it. I asked the program to generate a French Poodle jumping out of the ocean wearing sunglasses and a bow tie. Voila.

Except for the bow tie: the program couldn't handle that, this isn't a bad representation. I wish you could see this program. You can sell these composites if you want. There is another program that features really beautiful computer generated artwork. I'll bring that link next time.

There is an artist from Colorado who won the grand prize in a real life art show with a computer generated piece. I wish I could hang it on my wall. The art show board of graybeards tried, or are trying, to take the prize away from him. I'll get an update for you.

We've come a long way since the Commodore Amiga, haven't we, Frank?

As the internet evolves, passing from pre-web, Web 1.0, and Web 2.0, we are seeing a mixing and mingling of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0-- and Web3 technologies. (Watch for Web3 in upcoming article.)

A Final Point to Ponder

There is a difference between Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the internet and Google's. Let me explain. Much of the information on the internet is free, nearly all in the beginning, less as time goes by.

Web 3.0 will organize and contain, if not all, most of the information. It may end up on the blockchain, which will keep it free.

I speculate that blockchain is the technology, far from perfect, yet to be perfected, is the infrastructure Berners-Lee awaits, because of its decentralization model. But I am getting ahead of myself. . ..

(Blockchain, another new word we will get to, maybe, next time.)

Nobody owns the internet, though one could say Apple or Microsoft would like to, and perhaps actually believe they do, and any of the big corporations trying to control free speech think they do too.

PayPal was the last to fall. They announced a fine, taken right out of our accounts, to anyone providing "misleading information". This could seriously matter to some of us.

How do we stop them? Go, Elon.

Here is the example that cleared up the haze for me: Siri is built and being built on Web 3.0 technology. She obviously has truckloads full of information. So what is the difference between Siri and the evolving internet.

APPLE OWNS SIRI. Apple can, with some lawful restrictions, do whatever it wants with her. Apple does not yet own the internet.

Either google is on the side of free information or they are going for world dominance--

News just in:

Attorney General of Texas sues Google again, for misuse of biometric information.

In the next article I will go more into depth on blockchain and Web 3.

Thank you for reading. I hope you can see how the various components of this and the information presented in previous articles in the series affect and will continue to affect our online adventures.