More and more people raise the question: “What is the next big thing on the web? Is it web 3.0? When does it come?”

This week I was part of great debate on exactly this topic on the Information Management DM Radio show. You can find the recording here: Web 3.0 — Are We There Yet? (I am on about 40 minutes into the recording).

It was a great panel of industry thought leaders including Tom Tague from Thomson Reuters who talked about the OpenCalais initiative, Jim Kobielus from Forrester, Robin Bloor from Bloor Group and of course the always inspiring DM Radio hosts Eric Kavanagh and Jim Ericson.

Eric Kavanagh opened up by referring to a presentation by Eric Schmidt from Google on Web 3.0.

In the heated debate on a topic like Web 3.0 we certainly heard a lot of opinions, but I think everybody agreed that Web 3.0 includes features like:

• Programmatic/automated access to any information or process on the web, often referred to as the “semantic web” or the “API enabled web”.
• A personal robot that knows what you want, provides alerts and advice on time critical matters, performs automated shopping for you based on your purchase behavior, and even balances your bank account. Scary, but very useful.

The way I see it, there are almost 200 million active websites (not including web applications inside company firewalls) based on the standards HTTP(S), HTML and JavaScript/AJAX. So for Web 3.0 to deliver on the promise anytime soon it needs to leverage these existing standards to access all web information and perform all web processes on these 200 mill websites.

Luckily this is exactly what the Kapow Web Data Server does and this is exactly what almost 500 customers of Kapow Technologies are increasingly using Web Data Services for. They turn the web into a database of programmatic interfaces to data and automate all off those processes everyone is doing both in their professional and personal lives on the internet.

If you want a more background information, here is a great article I recommend you read: How Web 3.0 Will Work.

Web 3.0 is indeed an interesting topic, let’s keep the discussion going.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Please tune in to hear Stefan and Jim Kobielus on Dana Gardner’s Briefings Direct Podcast, ”Web data services extend data access and distribution beyond the RDB-BI straitjacket”.  Dana moderates an intriguing discussion on making the most of Web Data Services for Business Intelligence, focusing on web data volume, relevancy and timeliness, as well as access, monetization, enablement, governance, security, and the unification and converging of structured and unstructured data.  And in looking towards the future, Jim and Stefan weigh in on the impact of cloud computing on Web Data Service tools.

Jim is a senior analyst at Forrester Research, and an expert on data warehousing, advanced analytics, and business intelligence.

Enjoy the Podcast!