A while back Anthony Townsend sent me a funny blog link which had him wearing a t-shirt that said “Every time you say Web 3.0 a start up dies :(”

This quickly became a running joke in the office since we had a Web 4.0 milestone running in Trac for a while. So we got a big kick out of a call a few days ago where someone referred to what we were doing as Web 3.0. The last time I’d really read anything on Web 3.0 was when the NYT wrote an article about it that bloggers had a bit of a field day with.

I figured I would take another look into it since we’d been labeled. Going to the Web 2.0 well Wikipedia kicks up:

“Web 3.0 is a term that has been coined to describe the evolution of Web usage and interaction that includes transforming the Web into a database, a move towards making content accessible by multiple non-browser applications, the leveraging of artificial intelligence technologies and the Semantic web and three dimensional interaction and collaboration.”

Lots of articles wax poetic on the issue and conflate it with the Semantic Web as in the Wikipedia definition. The Semantic Web has been around since 1999 or so and is most often associated with the thoughts of Tim Berners Lee. I’d done some research on semantic kind of things back in school and to be honest was put off by the general over complexity of it. Any time that core words to describe your work include things like semantics, ontology, lexicon etc. you are not exactly dabbling in the world of simplicity. Having spent a good chunk of my life in academia I can safely say we do an awesome job of taking simple concepts and making it so that 99% of world has no idea what we are talking about. Yes - post modernists - I’m talking about you.

My take is that simplicity forms the roots of what has made Web 2.0 successful. The API’s and defacto standards that have really taken off have the common theme of being mind numbingly simple. So, there seems to be a bit of a disconnect with Web 3.0 and conflating it with the 8 years of academic and standards work that have gone with the semantic web, which have created some very complicated white papers and manifestations.

The irony with getting labeled Web 3.0 is that what we were describing, at the time, was our attempt to simplify the world of geospatial data so that it could be consumable by non-technical people. To add to the irony there is a whole science of applying semantic web concepts to geospatial data and it is definitely not simple. Traditionally geospatial data comes in a variety of shapes and sizes - point, polygons, polylines, raster formats (satelite imagery, heat maps) etc. Part of the art to geographic science is knowing what geometries to use when - cenus tracts, census blocks, counties, zip codes etc. While this frame of thought matches up well with data formats it does not match up well with the way most people think. People think about locations and attributes or contexts about that location. I live in the Clarendon neighborhood and I associate contexts with that neighborhood like restaurants, parking, crime, housing prices, music, congestion etc. The data that describes those attributes could be a dozen different geometries, but as a user I don’t really care. I care about getting an answer to my question in the context of the location I care about - in this case Clarendon. We’ve been working on an architecture that will provide such a simplification and that along with the various other aspects we’ve been tying in is what created, at least one, Web 3.0 label. Whether what we are doing is Web 3.0 or not I really have no clue - we are hoping it solves a problem in a simple way for a user. At the end of the day that is what I think will be successful whether you label it 2.0, 3.0 or even, ack, 4.0. What is created needs to be easy and simple not only for the users but for the developers implementing it. While the next evolution will likely solve some of the problems targeted by the semantic web I think the actually technological path will be something far simpler than what is currently being touted.

***All ideas about the new architecture and contexts came from Mookie - a.k.a. Pramakta Kumar one of our lead developers. I simply regurgitate them in some semblance of an idea. The F1 platform for it all is a Chris Ingrassia creation TM.

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Just thought I’d drop a quick line on the blog to let anyone who’s interested know that several of us are out in San Diego at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference.

Among the many reasons we’re out here is to get exposed to new ideas and technologies, so if you’re reading this blog and happen to be out here as well and would like to talk shop, or just go out and grab a beer to see how many bad heatmap jokes we can come up with, we’re definitely up for it.

Just drop me a line directly or add a comment to this post and we’d be thrilled to meet you.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech07

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We had a request for a map of VC investments in Boston from the Rob Finn data we posted up and could not pass up the opportunity to make more heat maps.

Some interesting patterns going on in Boston with a good chunk of activity happening in the central business district and Route 128 , which has been the classic case study of regional economic advantage ( see: Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by AnnaLee Saxenian ). The start ups are not stopping at 128 and you can see the dispersed activity in Framingham, Westborough, and even out to Lowell.

Always happy to fill requests, but we are burning the midnight oil to get this out of beta so you can fill your own requests. We’ve been getting some great feedback and have a cool new user interface being built out that will make it super simple to make your own map with a new world of geospatial data (at least new outside the stuffy confines of GIS). Also a kick ass new architecture to make the sometimes byzantine world of geospatial data as easy as local search.

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