A post in the ReadWriteWeb a couple of days ago, guided me to a very interesting document. A summary of Project10X’s Semantic Wave 2008 Report (available here).
I just finished reading the report, which provides some very insightful information about web 3.0. The semantic web will transform the web from an information-centric to a knowledge-centric system, by developing 4 fundamental attributes:

1. Knowledge

The web is a fragmented place. Knowledge is scattered in all its corners, sometimes locked in operating systems and complex algorithms. The semantic web, will pursue to change this. It will facilitate technologies, which will extract knowledge and

will enable communities to create, curate, and share knowledge in human readable and machine executable forms.

2. Transparency

Information will evolve in knowledge, through its encoding in a semantic form, which will be transparent and accessible at any time to any machine. Knowledge was previously stored either in human readable or in machine readable form. In the semantic web, it will be stored transparently, so that users and machines will be able to read the same piece of data. In that way, it will be possible for data to be used, validated and combined with other data. This will allow

a system to “learn” to do things that the system designer did not anticipate.

3. Connectivity

To overcome the limitations and restrictions of OS platforms, the semantic web will encourage a real time usage of automated and semi-automated methods, of interaction between man and machine:

Web-tops; platforms spanning multiple OSs connected over the internet
Mash-ups; two or more data sources or works combined to become a new data source or work
Context-aware mobility; dynamic composition and personalization of services across devices, networks, locations, and user circumstances and
Semantic service oriented architectures; using machine-interpretable descriptions of policies and services o automate discovery, negotiation, adaptation, composition invocation, and monitoring of web services.

4. Technology

The key of the sematic web is the usage of technologies, which represent meanings and knowledge seperately from content, in order to be interpretable from humans and machines. Such representations will range from pattern recognition, analogy and reasoning with uncertains to deep linguistics and causality.

The integration of social Web and semantic technologies in Web 3.0 allows new synergy that lowers the cost of data and knowledge creation, and raises the computational value of gathering.

The semantic technologies, which will power Web 3.0 will concentrate on:

• Semantic user experience (how the user comprehends things)

• Semantic social computing (how users communicate and collaborate)

• Semantic applications and things (how products and behaviors can be seen empirically and objectively)

• Semantic infrastructure (interobjective network-centric systems and ecosystems)

• Semantic development (how meanings and systems can share what they know)

Epilogue

The report refers also to semantic technology markets and other interesting points. It explains the the information I shortly mentioned above very well and I definetely suggest you to read it.

The 4 attributes I listed above gave me the impression, that they are the key traits, which will revolutionize the online experience. Where, the emergent behavior of the whole system will bring user interaction in new levels. I believe, that the development of services such as data portability and openID are steps to this direction. But, to a certain degree, it is a personal preference.

I’m interested to see, which attributes of the semantic web do you find most revolutionary.