Web 3.0 is not without it’s problems. The first problem with Web 3.0 is that everyone is defining it to their own ends. As Montoya Herald summed it up at http://www.christianmontoya.com/2007/10/08/web-30-i-about-money/ , Web 3.0 is essentially whatever each of the companies that used the term are working on next. The second problem is that it does pander to the hypemeisters.

f Web 2.0 was so hot, how about Web 3.0? This has been a recurrent theme of would-be meme-engineers who want to position their startup as the next big thing. Nova Spivack started it by describing the as-yet-to-be-revealed Radar Networks as Web 3.0, but now Jason Calacanis has his competing definition, neatly tailored to fit his own mahalo.com. The resulting storm of derision is entirely to be expected.

I get asked this question a lot. And I’d like to get your help in answering it please.

As co-chairman of the Semantic Technology Conference, I see lots of customer organizations experimenting and adopting semantic technologies – especially ontology-driven development projects and semantic search tools - and seemingly as many start-ups and new products emerging to address their requirements. It’s an exciting time to be in this space and I’m glad to have a part to play.

My last column[1] ended with a promise to discuss the differences in the formal specification languages used by the semantic web and business rules communities. I had observed that there are differences in the expression power of the semantic web rule languages and the business rules rule languages.[2] The semantic web and business rule languages also differ in how they interpret particular expressions. I promised to give you more detail on these differences.