What is Web 3.0 ?

Web 3.0 is one of the terms used to describe the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0.

Nova Spivack defines Web 3.0 as the third decade of the Web (2010-2020) during which he suggests several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously including:

1. transformation of the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.
2. ubiquitous connectivity, broadband adoption, mobile Internet access and mobile devices;
3. network computing, software-as-a-service business models, Web services interoperability, distributed computing, grid computing and cloud computing;
4. open technologies, open APIs and protocols, open data formats, open-source software platforms and open data (e.g. Creative Commons, Open Data License);
5. open identity, OpenID, open reputation, roaming portable identity and personal data;
6. the intelligent web, Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, GRDDL, semantic application platforms, and statement-based data stores;
7. distributed databases, the “World Wide Database” (enabled by Semantic Web technologies); and intelligent applications, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents.

Research under Spivack's definition

Transformation: Web 1.0 was "read-only", Web 2.0 is "read-write", and Web 3.0 will be "read-write-execute".

Network computing: Web 3.0 could be the realization and extension of the Semantic web concept. Academic research is being conducted to develop software for reasoning, based on description logic and intelligent agents.

Distributed databases: The first step towards a "Web 3.0" is the emergence of "The Data Web" as structured data records are published to the Web in reusable and remotely queryable formats, such as XML, RDF, Website Parse Template and microformats.

Intelligent applications:Web 3.0 has also been used to describe an evolutionary path for the Web that leads to artificial intelligence that can reason about the Web in a quasi-human fashion.

3D spaces: Another possible path for Web 3.0 is towards the 3 dimensional vision championed. This would involve the Web transforming into a series of 3D spaces

Socio-technological research: Web 3.0 is "the biological, digital analog web where information is made of a plethora of digital values coalesced for sense and linked to the real-world by analog interfaces.