WEB 3.0 - the second approach to the projectile
First, a little history.
Web 1.0 is a network for accessing content posted on sites by their owners. Static html pages, read-only access to information, the main joy is hyperlinks leading to the pages of this and other sites. A typical site format is an information resource. The era of transferring offline content to the network: digitizing books, scanning images (digital cameras were still rare).
Web 2.0 - a social network that brings people together. Users plunged headlong into the Internet space create content directly on web pages. Interactive dynamic sites, content tagging, web syndication, mash-up technology, AJAX, web services. Information resources give way to social networks, blog hosting, wiki. The era of online content generation.
It is clear that the term “web 1.0” arose only after the advent of “web 2.0”, to refer to the old Internet. And almost immediately, talk began about a future version 3.0. There were several vision options for this future, and all of them, of course, were associated with overcoming the shortcomings and limitations of web 2.0.
Netscape.com CEO Jason Kalakanis was primarily concerned about the poor quality of user-generated content, and he suggested that the future of the Internet was for “gifted people” who would “create high-quality content” (Web 3.0, “official” definition, 2007). reasonable for himself, but he didn’t explain how and where they would do it, on which sites, but not on Facebook.
Tim O'Reilly, the author of the term “web 2.0,” reasonably suggested that such an unreliable intermediary as a person is not required to post information on the network. Technical devices can also supply data to the Internet. And the same technical devices can read data directly from web storage. In fact, Tim O'Reilly proposed associating web 3.0 with the term “Internet of Things”, which is already familiar to us.
One of the founders of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, saw in a future version of the Internet the realization of his long-standing (1998) dream of a semantic web. And his interpretation of the term won - most of those pronouncing “web 3.0” until recently had in mind the semantic web, that is, a network in which the content of the pages of sites would be meaningful for a computer, machine-readable. Somewhere around 2010-2012 there was a lot of talk about ontologization, semantic projects were born in batches, but the result is known to everyone - we still use the Internet version 2.0. In fact, only Schema.org semantic markup scheme and knowledge graphs of Internet monsters Google, Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn survived fully.
The powerful new wave of digital innovation has helped to hide the failure of the semantic web. The interest of the press and ordinary people has switched to big data, the Internet of things, deep training, drones, additional reality and, of course, blockchain. If the first ones on the list are mostly offline technologies, then blockchain is a network project in its essence. At the peak of his popularity in 2017-2018, he even claimed the role of the new Internet (this idea was repeatedly expressed by Joseph Lubin, one of the founders of Ethereum).
But time passed, and the word “blockchain” was no longer associated with a breakthrough into the future, but rather with unjustified hopes. And the idea of rebranding naturally arose: let's not talk about the blockchain as a self-sufficient project, but include it in a stack of technologies that embody everything new and bright. Right there for this “new” was found the name (though not new) of “web 3.0”. And in order to somehow justify this non-novelty of the name, I had to include a semantic network on the “light” stack.
So, now the trend is not blockchain, but the web 3.0 decentralized Internet infrastructure, consisting of several basic technologies: blockchain, machine learning, semantic web and the Internet of things. In the many texts devoted to the new reincarnation of web 3.0 that appeared over the past year, you can find out in detail about each of its components, but, bad luck, there is no answer to natural questions: how do these technologies integrate into something whole, why do neural networks need Internet of things, and blockchain semantic web? Most teams simply continue to engage in blockchain (probably hoping to create a crypt that can overcome the cue ball, or just work out the investment), but under the new signboard “web 3.0”. Yet at least something about the future, and not about unjustified hopes.
But not everything is so sad. Now I will try to briefly answer the questions asked above.
Why semantic network blockchain? Of course, here we need to talk not about the blockchain as such (a chain of crypto-linked blocks), but about a technology that provides user identification, consensus validation and content protection based on cryptographic methods in a peer-to-peer network. So, the semantic graph as such a network receives a reliable decentralized storage with cryptographic identification of records and users. This is not for you the semantic markup of pages on a free hosting.
Why conditional blockchain semantics? Ontology, it is generally about the distribution of content into subject areas and levels. And this means that a semantic web thrown over a peer-to-peer network — or, if simpler, organizing network data into a single semantic graph — ensures natural clustering of the network, that is, its horizontal scaling. The level organization of the graph allows you to parallelize the processing of semantically independent data. This is the data architecture, and not dropping everything indiscriminately into blocks and storing on all nodes.
Why is the Internet of things semantics and blockchain? With a blockchain, everything seems to be trivial - it is needed as a reliable storage with a built-in system for identifying actors (including IoT sensors) by cryptographic keys. And semantics, on the one hand, allows you to segregate the data stream by subject clusters, that is, it ensures the unloading of nodes, and on the other hand, it makes the data sent by IoT devices meaningful, and therefore independent of applications. You can forget about requesting documentation for the application APIs.
And it remains to find out what is the mutual profit from the crossing of machine learning and the semantic network? Well, everything is extremely simple here. Where, if not in the semantic graph, can you find such a colossal array of validated, structured, semantic data in a single format, so necessary for training neurons? On the other hand, and what is better than a neural grid, the graph will analyze the presence of useful or harmful anomalies, say, to identify new concepts, synonyms or spam?
And we need such web 3.0. Jason Kalakanis will say: I said that this will be a tool for creating high-quality content by gifted people. Tim Berners-Lee will be pleased: semantics rules. And Tim O'Reilly will also be right: web 3.0 is about “the interaction of the Internet with the physical world”, about erasing the line between online and offline, when we forget the words “enter the network”.
My previous approaches to the topic
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