Web 3.0

NY Times: Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense. Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

These ideas, which some people are calling Web 3.0, as the story notes, could well be the foundation for one of the Next Big Things in technology. Smart entrepreneurs are working now on making them real.

In the news category, the value of this approach is obvious: sifting through the huge amount of noise and finding the signal, then putting it all together in a coherent (or at least more coherent) whole than we can dream of today. Again, people are working on this, and some may be getting fairly close to a first approximation. But it will be an extremely difficult problem, the kind that tech folks call “nontrivial.”
Then again, the nontrivial problems are worth the most — when they’re solved.