While organisations continue to struggle with adopting E2.0 through Web 2.0 products, some are looking beyond and asking the question “what’s next?”. If Web1.0 was about communication, and Web 2.0 about collaboration, what should we be doing now in order to prepare for the future demands of users and the workplace, and have the upper-hand on competitors?

To prepare for the future we need to understand the evolution of the web, and Gary Hayes suggests that it is moving toward a more immersive environment.

We’re just starting to see that now with Web 2.0 — pushing the boundaries of information sharing from centralised and controlled by organisations to decentralised, collaborative and controlled by consumers. In essence, this means:

• Web 1.0 - unidirectional and “push”. E.g. traditional brochureware-style websites
• Web 2.0 - interactive - “push” + “pull”. E.g. Social computing websites like MySpace, Wikipedia, and Facebook
• Web 3.0 - immersive. E.g. 3D Virtual Worlds and ubiquitous computing
• Web 4.0, 5.0 … the semantic world with intelligent agents and adaptive information

The real benefits of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 (as defined by Gary) are just starting to emerge, with online spaces to work and share information, technology that truly supports information anytime and anyplace. Society is witnessing the emergence of digital natives who are born ‘technology aware’ and expect to be able to use the same technology they take for granted in their social lives in the work environment. And while some may have thought that the notion of a truly semantic web was dead and burried, the problems with database interaction and data interoperability to provide true intelligent context to data and information in online environments has raised the issue again:

How can we prepare and provide for the future of the web?

Annie Rowland-Campbell, a researcher with FujiXerox, suggests that we need to start preparing our data systems for the future by using semantic technologies. That is, separating out our data and metadata, and introducing ontologies to articulate the relationships between data sources, and their relationships, in order to provide true context and meaning to information.

Why separate out these elements? Simply put, traditional database design isn’t scalable to the extent we need to provide for intelligent agents and adaptive information of Web 4.0 and beyond. Even if we’re only dealing with data exchange between 6 stores, for example, to provide a true and complete context of information to users, we still need 24 points of integration.

If we use semantic technologies, and introduce an ontological layer, suddenly we reduce the overall design complexity from 24 to 6.

For organisations in Europe, where language is the common barrier to information exchange, this approach is already reaping rewards, and is where the ISO/IEC 13250:2000 standard Topic Maps was born. The approach turns our original concept of the semantic web, a layer on top of the current web that annotates information in a way that is “understandable” by computers, into something that is actually able to be fully-realised to meet the needs of Web 2.0’s future.