Gartner rejects the temptation of Web 3.0

A very recent post told that Gartner touted Web 2.0, but scoffed at its sequel. "There are a lot of constituencies trying to hijack the term Web 3.0," Gartner fellow David Mitchell Smith said Thursday at Gartner Web Innovation Summit in Las Vegas. In particular, David referred to the vendors pushing forward virtual worlds, semantic Web and mobile web.

I totally agree with this response from Gartner. The term Web 3.0 is still too early to be assigned to any new progress about World Wide Web. As I presented in my web evolution article, we are at present still in the middle of the Web 2.0 stage. The critical transition to Web 3.0 has not started yet. And at present we still have only few unclear visions about what Web 3.0 really might be.

One thing is certain. Web 3.0 is not the Semantic Web. Neither is Web 3.0 a collection of virtual worlds, nor is it the mobile web. If we really have to predict what Web 3.0 might be. Most likely it could be a mixture of entry-level Semantic Web that can be visualized by virtual worlds and accessed through mobiles. If this vision could be realized, several new inventions as important and valuable as blogs and wikis must be done. These inventions might include such as the embedding of semantic specification into virtual worlds and the interpretation and specification of semantics through mobile devices. Beyond these specific inventions, we also need to first resolve cross-site ID identification (possibly the adoption of OpenID) and cross-site identification about authority of information (not yet resolved). We are still far away to Web 3.0.

Please don't tie Web 3.0 tight to Semantic Web. Yes, please, as Gartner has disapproved.