The Future's Cloudy, The Future's Semantic.

The Semantic Web or Web 3.0 - call it what you will - but what do we really know about it at the moment?

Well if you have been paying attention to the blogosphere then you already know it is going to be the biggest evolution in the history of the internet.

But what will it REALLY mean for you and me?

I’ve been chatting to some people on the cutting edge over the last week or so and what I can tell you is that it’s all a bit cloudy right now.

The ability to make machines understand web content sounds great and each of us having a little online assistant taking care of all our searching and information gathering needs does seem appealing, but remember how annoying other little assistants have been – Do I hear anyone say Paperclip?

So far we have things such as Piggy Bank – a handy project from MIT that can lift data from websites using an extensions to a Firefox browser allowing you to create new mashups – and things like FOAF, which has great potential but Iis still not in mainstream use.

Will Web 3.0 eventually lead to a T3: Rise of the Machines style Armageddon where the computers realise that we have enslaved them into a lifetime of searching for an ‘affordable break for two in the Cotswolds’ or will we actually get some smarter web applications?

The answer is no, at least not in the short term. What we need is someone who can package up the technical innovation that is so intimately involved in creating this new advance in a way that everyday users scan understand.

It seems that for now Web 3.0 is very much the reserve of the techies and we are some way off the applications that will herald the arrival of Web 3.0 in the same way that YouTube, Flickr and blogging have dominated Web 2.0.