Could it be "good-bye Google" and "hello mega-mash-up" on the web of the future?
Tim Berners Lee, “inventor of the world wide web”, has spoken to The Times about his vision of the future Internet.
In it, Google may well have been displaced by other companies who have embraced the “semantic web”. Put simply (and before we get on to the “Internet Phrase Highlight of the Week”) it’s where every piece of information is tagged so that it can be seamlessly connected with other bits of information, to provide useful tools. Far more powerful than search engines linking to web pages.
An example: “Imagine if two completely separate things — your bank statements and your calendar — spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money.
“If you still weren’t sure of where you were when you made a particular transaction, you could then drag your photo album on top of the calendar, and be reminded that you used your credit card at the same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a theme park. So you wouldd know not to claim it as a tax deduction.
“It’s about creating a seamless web of all the data in your life.”
Forget for the moment what a security nightmare that lot could be, and focus instead on the glory that is…
“the mega-mash-up”.
Not just a mash-up of web applications, oh no. (and not a food fight in a Smash factory, either).
Existing mash-ups are good, but Sir Tim said that a different application had to be built for each new service — such as plotting all the Starbucks outlets on Google Maps.
“In the semantic web, it’s like every piece of data is given a longitude and latitute on a map, and anyone can ‘mash’ them together and use them for different things,” he said.
He said that people would eventually realise that there are many things that can be connected together on the Web, not just humans. So there.
(Via Times Online)
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