Web 3.0 is about to be born

Web 1.0 was about finding information. Web 2.0 was about giving the everyday user ways to create interactive web experiences - websites, calendars, picture galleries and other collaborative tools. "Rather than a search engine, it [Web 3.0] is an 'answer engine' that interprets actual questions and answers them in accordance with their intended meaning. The Futurist compares its significance to the launch of Netscape in 1994. It's dubbed "the Semantic Web" because it's all about asking questions in ways that will give you useful answers. (WolframAlpha : The Birth of Web 3.0, The Futurist, May 7, 2010)

So, what is an "answer engine"? Steven Wolfram demonstrates how such an engine could calculate, for a particular city in the US, what the weather was on a particular day, compared to the weather in London, England on that same day. You ask the question in plain Enlgish and Wolfman Alpha uses databases, algorithms and other existing ways to crunch numbers to give you an answers that makes sense. www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

How might we use Web 3.0? Why couldn't we, or someone, gather the information databases available on Hawaiian history and culture, language and

current Hawaiian issues, science and lifestyle and weave them together using Web 3.0 technology. Then we could ask questions such as for a particular date in history, what the mahina moon phase, climate and population of the islands in a particular mokipuna or district were. We could ask what the population centers of the islands of early 1700 were compared to today's. Did the life span of Hawaiians in a particular century relate to the state of land division and ownership, or different waves of foreigners, or government structure? The possibilities are endless IF the data is available and the inquiry is properly structured. The Futurist says by 2012 we will be into a whole new way of asking and thinking.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/3448804778/

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Kamehameha Schools Distance Learning (KSDL) Owau

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