With 2010 fast approaching, it’s time to look into the crystal ball and see what might – or might not – take place in the Web 3.0 world next year. To that end, SemanticWeb.com asked some leaders in the next-generation Web space to share their own predictions around the Semantic Web, semantic technologies, linked data, social networks and all things related.
Read on and see if their future-think matches your own.
J. Brooke Aker, CEO of Expert System USA
● In 2009, we saw the semantic web take shape into mass adoption as heavy hitters such as Google, Microsoft Bing and Wolfram Alpha made headlines. Their involvement in the semantic web adds a new level of recognition and even credibility to the industry. As such, 2010 will be the year where we will see more enterprise adoption of the semantic web.
Semantics will be the enhancement—or counterpart—to already installed technologies such as knowledge management, business intelligence, master data management, content management and even advertising.
Lucien Burm, founder of Kimengi f>>forward
● API's will provide the breeding ground for the next phase of the semantic web.
● The Semantic web will NOT arrive in 2010 
Explanation: It doesn't mean that the web is not becoming smarter, but the air is out of the promise of the semantic web. This might be due to the economic situation of last year and the year before, but it seems the focus is more on providing smart tools for more specific situations than to improve the web in general. The focus is on making people's business and life easier and so the focus will be on money. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but the promise of the semantic web will take a little longer while we create all kinds of more specific tools that might or might not come together later on to fulfill that promise. This is a lot about sharing.
At f»dforward we believe in the lateral web of which the semantic web is just one important part, because even if all content is better connected semantically, it doesn´t mean you will get served the right content at the right time in the right context. This is called recommendation technology and previously dubbed the web 4.0, as semantic web would be web 3.0. We think that the growth to a new web is more of a path in which both 3.0 and 4.0 components work together, so we should stopped calling it x.o and focus on what we need first, which in our view is a combination. And that is what we would like to provide.
Tom Gruber, co-founder, CTO, and VP Design of Siri
● The tidal wave of cloud computing is beginning to crest now, with huge players putting giant investments that are making it a commodity computing service. When that happens, when computing is factored out of the problem, you can do big, smart things in the cloud now with semantic technology that you couldn’t do before. You can bring that to everybody in a mobile context – we haven’t really seen semantic technology on the phone much until Siri.
● Cloud computing lets you run lots of computers—it’s a parallel scaling thing so you can have a super computer, and also you can go at co-location bandwidth speeds to other players. So you can now talk to those other semantic technologies co-location to co-location, and that’s changing the game too.
Will Hunsinger, CEO of Evri
● With the emergence of the real-time Web and the increasing lack of productivity of keyword search as a filter of the stream, semantic web technologies will play a larger role in search and filtering of the content fire hose. We have already seen angel-investing activity in Silicon Valley and VC interest in Semantic technologies as front-leading indicators that there are applications.
● As Microsoft continues to apply semantic technologies to a greater degree in Bing, and startups like Evri and others push for innovation on consumer applications of Semantic Technologies, we will see the additional "Semantic Web" emerge from research and technology circles and niche B2B tool applications into the light of true consumer applications with broad appeal.
● As the big boys battle for keyword search supremacy, the next big thing in search in 2010 may not be about search at all, but rather discovery. As consumer behavior changes to the passive consumption of content via a stream-based metaphor (e.g. Facebook news feed or tweets), semantic technologies -- with a better signal to noise and superior ability to filter the stream -- will play a significant role in solving the growing problem: Helping consumers better make sense of the stream
Alex Iskold, Founder and CEO of AdaptiveBlue
● My major prediction is that semantic technologies, such as entity extraction,
become part of standard plumbing and are used widely by companies around the web.
●Semantic Web as described in the original vision is still not happening and Linked Data is not unfolding as quickly as some people have predicted.
Connie Kenneally, CEO of TextWise
● We believe 2010 will be the year of connecting information through relevancy and social popularity. Users will not be satisfied with only gathering information relevant to their interests but they will also look for ways to boil it down to ‘what’s happening now that’s important to me?’
William Mougayar, CEO of Eqentia
● The semantic web in 2010 will continue to struggle around two facets: is the semantic web "inside" or "outside" applications? So far, the technologies (inside) of the semantic web have been dominating, but we'll see more business applications (outside) that take advantage of these technologies while insulating the end-user from their intricacies.
● I foresee more "semantic web services", i.e. interoperabilities between various API's at the semantic level, kind of like SOA meets the semantic web.
Mark Montgomery, co-founder and CEO of Kyield
Public Web:
● Velocity of extension to mobile devices will spike.
● Tension will increase between government and private sector (Is semweb govweb?)
● Interests will increasingly collide between search and everyone else. Advertising is approaching the ceiling on the web and cannot pay for the functionality of the semantic web, or but a fraction of the knowledge economy. A big collision that has begun, question being how much damage will be done in an additional 12 months.
Enterprise Web:
● Velocity of extension to mobile devices will spike.
● Enterprise software will begin a long transformative conversion to adaptive semantic systems; the big question being to what extent it's organic.
Computing more generally
● Debate over voluntary standards versus compulsory will become noisier globally.
●Debate will become hot on ownership and control of data, with the ignition sparks in personal healthcare and intellectual property.
● 2010 will be the beginning of the compensation revolution for knowledge workers.
Nova Spivack, founder and CEO of Radar Networks
● Google and Bing will compete to produce and consume RDFa metadata.
● Semantic-web powered shopping and commerce services will launch.
● First consumer-ready linked open data (LOD) cloud applications will launch.
Amiad Solomon, CEO of Peer39
● There is and will be a greater need and demand for advertisers and marketers to leverage semantic data points and understand how to work with them in real time to get the right message to the right person in real time.
● Looking at 2010 it is going to be a major data year, especially in the semantic space. We see a lot of big players, both from traditional search engines and portals, moving into the space internally or via acquisitions, as well as social network sites that will leverage semantic data big-time in real-time. We are focused on the advertising angle but there is so much at stake here.
Thomas Tague, Thomson Reuters OpenCalais initiative lead
● As semantic capabilities are baked into more and more publishers’ sites, we’ll see a fight for dominance in the ability to effectively present user-defined microtopics – not just articles.
●At least one commercial organization will lead the way in publishing high value linked data – jumpstarting this space for business users and solution developers.
●Selected SEO / SEM practitioners will “get it” and establish a new semantically-enabled playing field. (The others had better be fast followers.)
● The biggest battles will be at the browser / device – not at the destination.
Andraz Tori, founder and director of technology of Zemanta
● Linked data growth and the first useful applications on top of it, but
there will still be a lack of success stories.
● Looking for alternatives to RDFa for the web use -- because of the
HTML5 and general dislike of RDFa by web developers. On the other hand, SEO community will start taking interest in using structured metadata for optimization.
