– What is Web 3.0, and why is it a big deal?
In: 1354
Most of these answers are focused on cryptocurrency and blockchain – but the crypto folks were actually late to the party. Years before Bitcoin the term was used to refer to an idea called the [“Semantic Web,”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web) the byproducts of which you actually probably interact with on a regular basis.^1
The general motivation behind the Semantic Web is that computers are great at serving content but can’t understand what it _means_, but if they could, we could use their knowledge and thinking power in all sorts of interesting ways.^2
So, lots of people thought of different ways to add extra data (called “metadata” – data about data) to their internet content (e.g. blog posts and pictures) to enable computers to understand what was inside of it and how it connects to other content. The word “semantic” in this case refers to adding that data to help computers contextualize it, and “web” refers to having that metadata link to other internet content (essentially so that a curious internet user or computer can go down rabbit holes to learn more about a topic if they want).
It didn’t catch on in the way folks might have hoped at the time, but the ideas and technology still linger in some places. A common example is when you Google search for a topic, and it shows you a card with all sorts of information on the topic. Some of that is Google AI magic, but a _lot_ of it just comes from Semantic Web-style metadata.^3 A big source of this kind of data is Wikipedia – when you look at a Wikipedia article, the information presented in those boxes at the top right is the kind of linked metadata that has been added by human editors that computers can easily read and use to try to understand how the world fits together.
As to why this is a “big deal” – we now live in a world where we can ask our computer a question out loud (e.g. “Who played Hagrid?”) and just reasonably expect that it can tell us. A lot of the data that is available for computers to understand and reason about the world started with Web 3.0.
—
1. Some crypto folks claim `web3` refers to crypto and `Web 3.0` refers to Semantic Web. These kind of people also claim “Web 2 + Web 3 = Web 5”.
2. [Tim Berners-Lee](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee) (inventor of the “World-Wide Web” [i.e. the parts of the internet you click on in a browser] and who also coined the term “Semantic Web”) has a poetic quote about this, I’ll lift it from [the FOAF spec](https://web.archive.org/web/20220518003509/http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/20140114.html) where I came across it:
> To a computer, the Web is a flat, boring world, devoid of meaning. This is a pity, as in fact documents on the Web describe real objects and imaginary concepts, and give particular relationships between them. For example, a document might describe a person. The title document to a house describes a house and also the ownership relation with a person. Adding semantics to the Web involves two things: allowing documents which have information in machine-readable forms, and allowing links to be created with relationship values. Only when we have this extra level of semantics will we be able to use computer power to help us exploit the information to a greater extent than our own reading. – Tim Berners-Lee [“W3 future directions” keynote](https://web.archive.org/web/20220518003509/http://www.w3.org/Talks/WWW94Tim/), 1st World Wide Web Conference Geneva, May 1994
3 . Cynically, this means search engine optimization is one of the places this lives on in a big way. For example, recipe websites are chock full of this stuff so they can drive traffic to them – but since they often include the recipe serialized in a way comptuers can read, this lets people build those website that just show you the recipe without all the life story around it.
Latest Answers