The Internet of Things

Last week I spoke about Web 3.0 and the future of the Internet. Taking a step back, this week I’ll be talking about how the Internet can be applied to everyday objects. It is already happening through what is known as the Web of Things.

The Internet of Things is a network of digitally connected objects that are able to communicate with one another and send information to web services that manage these objects. Imagine a world where billions of objects can report their locations, identities and histories over a wireless network. If all objects were equipped with tracking/identifying devices, we would never run out of stock or waste goods and we could monitor the consumption of everything from food to electricity and oxygen.

Web 3.0, the next generation Internet

Web 3.0 will succeed Web 2.0, or the social web. As things stand, the web is geared for social interaction and bringing people together - just think of the massive growth of social networking sites like Twitter and Mebo and consider that more people are getting their news from Facebook than Google. Web 1.0, on the other hand, was an information storage medium and nothing more.

Web 3.0 is known as the Semantic Web (semantics is the science of meaning and in relation to Web 3.0 refers to the way the Internet will understand the meaning of things we type into it). At the moment, when we perform a search we are basically typing in a word or phrase that appears somewhere on the Internet: we are searching based on expected results. For example, if we type in ‘tasty pizza recipes’ we are searching for a site that contains the term ‘tasty pizza recipes’. With the Semantic Web, we will type in ‘what are some tasty pizza recipes?’ Web 3.0 will respond by probably searching for pizza recipes, analysing the popularity of certain pizza recipes, analysing comments and social media links, inferring what ingredients make a tasty pizza and analysing your own searching trends to deliver you a customised result. In short, the semantic web will be able to understand the information on the Internet rather than just index it. The tedious process of finding, combining and organising information on the Internet will all be done by computers.