How Web 3.0 Is Going to Change Data Access As We Know It

Web 2.0 is now fully entrenched in internet culture—it marked the shift from static, mostly read-only web pages to the interactive and social web, with increased user involvement, easily accessible multimedia (YouTube, streaming etc) and mobile support.

What will come to define Web 3.0 is yet to be determined. Many people want to use the term for marketing purposes, but there has yet to be a mass-adopted breakthrough in technology that fundamentally changes the way the web functions like we saw with Web 2.0.

There are, however, several likely possibilities that could merge together, including artificial intelligence and the ‘semantic web’, the ‘ever-present web’ and the decentralized web powered by blockchain technology.

All of this will have implications on how data is accessed, shared, and handled. Let’s have a closer look.

While it won’t necessarily change the way data is collected and stored and the rules on privacy, a ‘semantic’ and artificially intelligent web will change how web users find data and what data they do find.

The idea is to evolve from basic keyword searches and to assign deeper meaning to queries. It is about understanding the intent of a search, taking in to account the language around the keywords, and to provide more personalized results. It also aims to better understand the relationship between queries.

It’s the realization of what most people assumed Ask Jeeves was, when in reality Jeeves never answered questions directly.

Today a Google search for “who is the dancer in the chandelier video?” doesn’t just return results for dancers and chandeliers or the chandelier video itself, but knows the answer is Maddie Ziegler and that she starred in “the 2014 video for ‘Chandelier’ by Sia, who discovered her on Dance Moms” — showing this snippet from Wikipedia.

It’s a direct response to the question with other relevant information.

Coupling this with natural language processing, in Web 3.0, computers will understand information like humans and as more search data is collected, the AI gets better at interpreting what searchers are actually looking for. Goodbye spam results.

Another element of the emerging Web 3.0 is the ‘ever-present’ web and the encompassing range of interconnected devices.