Personal opinions on Web 3.0

Currently we are in the age of Web 2.0, but technologies are evolving day by day, so what's the prospect of Web 3.0?


First, I want to share my opinions from the perspective of usage range. I believe that Web 3.0 is going to be ubiquitous, which means that people can not only browse pages on computers and smart mobile phones like  we do today, but also on various devices that we are going to devise, such as electronic devices of smart home, fancy cars, robots and so on. Image that we can listen newly released songs online on a washing machine when we do laundry, we check our emails on a GPS navigator when we take a break in a long distance travel, researchers in Antarctica enjoy live sports matches on a robot at nights. Isn't that amazing! To achieve this, I don't think that how to render the content on all kinds of devices should be our main concern. It's the communications that between miscellaneous devices and web servers that appears to be the crucial factor. But I do believe that we can conquer this. On one hand, high speed Internet will be available, the bandwidth of  single fiber can reach 10 Gb/s; on the other hand, new technologies of wireless and mobile networking will emerge, for example 4G is on its way to the pervasive computing age, and also wireless LAN and Blue Tooth are innovating.


Second, I want to talk about Web 3.0 from the perspective of its content. My opinion is that Web 3.0 will be 3D. We know that the content of web pages have evolved from static ones to dynamic ones and social websites like Facebook have attracted so many people all around the world. But still the content of the web now is 2D, since 3D is so natural to human beings and I believe Web 3.0 will definitely be 3D. Let me demonstrate my imagination on how I use social websites of 3D. When I establish an account of a social website, I will also establish a virtual figure of myself, users can make the virtual figures of themselves exactly the same as the real them or not due to their preferences. The way I go to my friends' websites is no longer clicking the links, instead I, the virtual one, can walk, drive or even take a flight to my friends' according to my friends' virtual addresses. I decide to visit my newly friend Johnny, he lives at the other side of the city so I drive my Porsche to his house. In his salon, there are pictures on the walls; there is a board on which he has wrote something to share; there also is a stereo and his favorite CDs beside it so I just pick one and play it; a television is in the middle and I can watch the videos he likes......In another word, everyone lives in another virtual world. But how can we accomplish it? I think there are two important factors here. First, it's HTML5, the next html standard, because HTML5 has new features like video elements and audio elements and can do things like video playback and drag-and-drop which are depend on bowser plugins. HTML5 makes all these natural and more easier. Meantime, supporting for HTML5 means that browsers have to adapt for new technologies. Second, it's WebGL, the 3D graphic API intended to be applied in web browsers. We know that OpenGL can help us manipulating underlying hardware to render 3D graphs and JavaScript runs on the client side to enhance user interface. WebGL now brings them together, so our web browsers can certainly show 3D graphs! Equipped with HTML5 and WebGL, the future Web3.0 will be 3D without doubt!


Last but not least, Web 3.0 will be intelligent. For instance, you drive into a town where you have never been before and you are running out of gas, so you want to refuel your car. Since you are not familiar with the town, you can turn to the internet. As I said before, Web 3.0 will be ubiquitous, you can use the GPS navigator of your car to search in the internet. You just input "Where is the nearest gas station" in the search engine, and the nearest gas station is on the map of the town and the fastest route to the nearest gas station is indicated. What's more, a voice comes out saying "There is no traffic on the fastest route and within the maximal speed permitted by the traffic department you can reach the nearest gas station in ten minutes. Would you like to begin the voice navigation", and if you answer yes, the voice navigation begins. In this scenario, actually there embodies much intelligence. First, it understands what you input by the sentence "Where is the nearest gas station" like a human being; second, it knows your position whereas you may not know where you are yourself; third, it communicates with relative organizations automatically and get the information about real-time traffic situation and traffic regulations; fourth, it calculates the time you need and offers you the service you may probably want the most. What a great job done by Web 3.0 here! With Web 3.0, it seems that we have nothing to concern about our life! But can we really achieve this? The answer will be positively yes. As far as I concern, this can be achieved by the emerging technology called Semantic Web which, by the W3C definition, provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise and community boundaries. In the view of Semantic Web, Web 3.0 is a web of data based and all the data is interchangeable because the data is based on RDF. As the data interchange is available, useful data can be retrieved and intelligent results seem not so hard to produce. In another word, intelligent Web 3.0 isn't hard to achieve.


All in all, my prospect of Web 3.0 is that it is ubiquitous depending on various wireless communications, that it is 3D representing the digital world exactly like our real one, that it is intelligent facilitating us whenever and wherever.