Last updated
Last updated
What is the semantic Web 3.0? This posted by Chris Dixon explains it very well:
Why Web3 matters:
Web1 (roughly 1990-2005) was about open protocols that were decentralized and community-governed. Most of the value accrued to the edges of the network — users and builders.
Web2 (roughly 2005-2020) was about siloed, centralized services run by corporations. Most of the value accrued to a handful of companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.
We are now at the beginning of the Web3 era, which combines the decentralized, community-governed ethos of Web1 with the advanced, modern functionality of Web2.
Web3 is the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens!
Web3 offers a new way that combines the best aspects of the previous eras. It’s very early in this movement and a great time to get involved.
Tim Berners-Lee, computer scientist and the inventor of the World Wide Web, once said:
I have a dream for the Web in which computers become capable of analyzing all the data on the web – the contents, links, and transactions between people and computers. A “Semantic Web”, which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy in our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The “intelligent agents” people have touted for ages will finally materialize.
For a more complex and detailed explanation of the Semantic Web, I strongly suggest reading this by Ontotext.
In summary, the Semantic Web is an extension of the current web that provides a standardized way to express the relationships between web pages, allowing computers to understand and respond to complex human requests based on their meaning. It was envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of the World Wide Web. In this new Web, information is well-defined to enable better cooperation between computers and people. It's structured and tagged in such a way that it can be read directly by computers and AI, helping them to perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the web. The ultimate goal of the Semantic Web is to make the Internet more intelligible to computers and useful to humans by setting up a universal framework that allows data to be shared and reused across applications, enterprises, and communities.
Here are some key components of the Semantic Web:
Resources and URIs: Everything in the Semantic Web is considered a resource, which can be a web page, a part of a web page, or a piece of data. Each resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).
RDF (Resource Description Framework): RDF is a standard model for data interchange on the web. It has features that facilitate data merging even if the underlying schemas differ, and it specifically supports the evolution of schemas over time without requiring all the data consumers to be changed.
Ontologies: Ontologies define the concepts and relationships used to describe and represent an area of knowledge. Ontologies are used by people, databases, and applications that need to share domain information.
SPARQL: SPARQL is a query language for RDF. It's used to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description Framework format.
Linked Data: Linked Data is a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful through semantic queries. A great example is OriginTrail's Decentralized Knowledge Graph, where data is not only linked but also distributed and decentralized, promoting a more open and collaborative web. More details below.
The Semantic Web offers an exciting opportunity to expand the way users interact with assets. Both assets, those anchored in the real world (cars, building, rare items such as an expensive bottle of whiskey, educational or vocational credentials, etc.) and those digitally native (NFTs representing digital art, gaming avatars or fungible tokens used for trading) are poised to change the way we manage, protect and increase the value of our wealth. Things we own are now converging towards becoming Web3-grade assets – assets made discoverable, verifiable and valuable using the Internet technology comprising both a semantic layer – knowledge graphs and trust layer – blockchain.
“The weakness of it is that it’s too complicated to explain” to ordinary mortals, said Metcalfe of the technology. The OriginTrail technology appears a bit like middleware, which is a category that only tends to excite a handful of people. “Yes, and I’m one of them,” said Dr. Metcalfe.
Despite the complexity of the tech, “What they are doing is right in line with where things are going.” More importantly, he took on the advisor role because he’s learning from what OriginTrail is doing, educating himself on what new forms of value there will be in the connectivity of Web3 assets.
Dr. Bob Metcalfe, The Grandfather of network effects, joined Trace Labs’ advisory board. In the event below, they talked about knowledge graphs and the switch from Web 2.0 to the semantic Web 3.0 extensively.
For details on each stage, visit the link below
Leveraging both the groundbreaking knowledge graph and blockchain technology, OriginTrail is a neutral, inclusive ecosystem striving to deliver useful and foundational Internet technologies. The open source codebase and permissionless nature of the established OriginTrail network layers drive transparency and laissez-faire type of a market incentives that underpin security, transparency and antifragility of the system. OriginTrail is thus becoming a core component of Web3 infrastructure, also ensuring user asset sovereignty as data representing assets can only be managed by asset owners. ()
In a recent , the Father of Ethernet, at the Knowledge Graph Conference 2022, he was asked to rate OriginTrail’s chances of success
At this during Branimir’s presentation, the link between the Semantic Web3 and the DKG is thoroughly explained.
Now, if we think about these assertions not as separate things, but rather interconnected things, you’re able to query them, and you’re able to formulate all kinds of answers and analytics based on verifiable data – that is the semantic, and that is what we can base our decisions on. All of this makes data valuable. Going back to Google, one of the biggest thing associated with Google searches is the SEO (Search Engine Operation) friendliness. You know how high your website ranks or shows up on the list for Google search – all this basically determines the website value. Therefore, if you are really easily discoverable through some search term, it means that your website is being clicked on a lot and it has a lot of links pointing to it. Google gives it much higher value, and it actually sorts the list according to the value. This value is calculated, among others, with also this . This algorithm essentially harnesses the power of network effects. So again, the Decentralized Knowledge Graph is designed to make data discoverable, verifiable and valuable. It conforms to the Metcalfe’s Law, which is basically that the value is proportional to the square of the number of entities in this interconnected network. Robert Noyce, one of the co-founders of Intel, once said that knowledge is power. When you share that knowledge, knowledge sharing is power multiplied.
OriginTrail represents the third generation of the World Wide Web