Translated from the french original article : http://gregoryrenard.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/ere-du-web-proactif-web-intelligent-des-services-intelligents-sonnent-nos-portes/
It is only 22 years old ( Birth of the Web by Tim Berneers Lee 89 ) but now, the Web or World Wide Web is passing a new milestone in its life. A new generation of Web services is coming, a generation that will go beyond your expectations and your needs. A generation of Intelligent Services, like Siri just announced by Apple, or launched in 2009 by NTT DoCoMo in Japan with Mobile Personal Assistant iConcier. This generation of Intelligent services will know you so well that it will bring you an everyday life Personal Assistant. As with the social web, after the beginning of this new wave, you’ll never be able to live without it.
This step, called the Web intelligent, will bring about a new kind of web: a "Proactive Web!"
Indeed, look at your use of the Web today … you go to it, you ask all sorts of questions and wait for a response (mail, web, social, chat, etc). You interact with Internet Services in a way we might call the Era of Reactive Web.
The future will be way different. Your data (preferences, uses, calendar, travels, mood, …) will enable these services to anticipate your needs in order to make appropriate responses and accurate propositions at the right time and the right place !
Imagine some very concrete services:
- You leave your home in the morning and an Internet service warns you to get your umbrella because it’s raining in Paris, the city where you are going to!
- You are at home and an Internet service warns you that a TV show might interest you tonight.
- During Christmas time or before a birthday among your relatives, your personal digital assistant will help you find the best gift and, even better, it will give you the link to make the best price / quality ratio purchase!
- … And I can certify that we have hundreds of such scenarios. Feel free to post as a comment what would be your preferred functionality for a personal digital assistant.
For the impatient, here’s an interview I conducted, in French, earlier this year for the AWT and the LeSoir blog of the newspaper in Belgium :
- http://www.awt.be/web/res/index.aspx?page=res,fr,tem,005,002
- http://geeko.lesoir.be/2011/04/27/de-reactif-le-web-devient-pro-actif-dimmenses-opportunites-de-business-sont-a-la-cle/
But before continuing this wonderful story we are living, let’s go back in time and try to understand all these concepts!
A short story of the Web:
"As I like to say to those who know me personally and have had the opportunity to experience these theories for so many years, I see the Web as a snowball rolling down a mountain pan. Predict its path is no so difficult if you take a good point of view! "
I have been working for 16 years as an entrepreneur of the Web, I had the opportunity to experience success and failure through the different stages of the global network, from its beginnings in the 90s, until today. But we’re still in the early days of the Web.
Remember:
Internet:
1961: Leonard Kleinrock theorizes the packet
1969: Birth of Arpanet
1972: First e-mail
1983: ARPANET switches to TCP / IPThe Web:
1989: Tim Berners-Lee launches the idea of the Web (Web) at CERN / Netscape
1993: The University of Illinois presents Mosaic – Graphic Web Browser
1994-1995: Creation of Amazon – Stanford
1998: Google – Stanford
2002 / 03: Creation of Friendster, MySpace
2004: Creation of Facebook
2005: Creation of Youtube
2006: Facebook opens to the public / Twitter Creation
We’ve taken so many steps so fast! Could you believe, a few years ago, that you would ever have access to so many information only with your Smartphone? The story of Internet is the story of an incredible growth.
But let’s carry on…
Life Cycle Web: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, web ², Web 3.0, … Web I.
About two years ago, I have created our Research and Innovation Center, xBrainLab. This unit, within our Usilink group, has a simple goal: "The Mission of the xBrainLab is to accelerate the spreading of collective intelligence and make it universally accessible and useful.”
In other words, we create tools for the Intelligent Web, Proactive Web.
This intelligence is coming from as many through the Web 1.0, social networking(Web 2.0), the CRM, ERP, mobility (Web 2.0), databases diverse and varied … but it is not all! Once this data is cross, we need to bring their intelligence, their sense ofcause! … As if you set the stage for BI then implement expert systems but the wholeapproach in public!
Let’s try to better understand the life cycle of the Web and the steps that led us to the next Web centered on collective intelligence, the Intelligent Web, Proactive Web:
- Web 1.0: Web Information, dominated by Google
- Web 2.0: The Social Web and Mobile Internet, dominated by Facebook and Apple / Google (Android).
- Web ² (square): the one in which we operate every day, the Web availability of data in real time with a critical need for structure (cf. Project Linked Data Tim Berners-Lee). Article founder of the Web²: http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194
- Web 3.0 (?) Remains for many, related to the arrival of semantics, but in the end it will be the emergence of Web intelligence (AI mixed with an aggregation of data, in a ubiquitous and pervasive environment where the semantics will be one tool among others)! To be dominated by who ? Siri Apple(iPhone4S and 5), Guru with Google , Facebook or a newcomer?
To better understand this logic, here is a French representation of a quality that Fred Cavazza made on this subject:
I invite you to browse two articles on the subject (sources) :
Before proceeding to the evolution to the Intelligent Web and Proactive Web, we should take a few minutes to understand the concept of Web Square or the Linked Data Tim Berners-Lee:
To listen to the presentation of Web² (Web Square) by Tim O’Reilly and JohnBattelle: http://youtu.be/sVtN8jlTCUM
Watch the video of Tim Berneers-Lee on the next Web (Linked Data):
http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html
After living with a web of information and a Social Web, it is now time to share and structure (Linked Data ) data to create a major foundation for the future of the Web!
Web 3.0: Intelligent advent of the Web!
Let’s try to quickly define Web 3.0 according to the approach of John Markoff, from New York Times, who forged this term in 2006:
“In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.”
- John Markoff, The New York Times
John Markoff said the Web 3.0 will be a generation of Internet-based services that collectively make up what might be called "intelligent Web" using the following concepts:
- the Semantic Web,
- microformats,
- research in natural language,
- data management and data mining,
- learning machine,
- Recommendations
- Artificial Intelligence technologies
To facilitate understanding of the information to provide a user experience more productive and intuitive: this new web brings comfort and time-saving for users!
Here are some videos illustrating these comments:
- Evolution Web 1.0, Web 2.0 to Web 3.0:http://youtu.be/bsNcjya56v8
- Eric Smidt, Web 2.0 vs. Web 3.0:http://youtu.be/T0QJmmdw3b0
- The Future Internet: Web 3.0 Service:http://youtu.be/off08As3siM
Of course, we should not forget connected objects ( web objects or things), because intelligent web will bring them the possibility to anticipate your needs and expectations.
The Era of Proactive Web: Definition, examples:
Here could be a definition of Proactive Web:
"The intelligence of the Web and Web 3.0 lies in its ability to interpret the data to extract meaning. Proactive Web is in its ability to anticipate your needs! "
We could say that Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web ² belong to the era of reactive Web while the Web 3.0 and future versions will be part of the Proactive Web Era.
Remember the examples given at the beginning of this post (take the simplest one, the one with the umbrella), the convergence of data such as your schedule, your geolocation, the motion sensors (sensors) of your Smart-Phone (A device that we could in the future call an exoBrain / / exo-brain ), and a weather service, will bring out an intelligent service such as observing the weather for you before you leave (we could observe the density of traffic or the schedule of your Train). Proactivity will come from the fact that smart applications will deliver information at the right time (just before you leave home) on the correct device (your PC, slate, mobile, vocal,…).
You can guess what is coming then. Many so-called intelligent services will be available! We will therefore initially call them intelligent services (exploiting the notion of intelligent and proactive Web) and then progress to aggregate notions of intelligent services to give birth to intelligent entities commonly called "Intelligent Agents or functional agents ".
This is exactly what we are building within our team, xBrainLab, since 2006 (the Wygwam R&D has been founded in 2006, and then has been baptized xBrainLab) based on research and development initiated in 1997. Currently, the coming services are more than stunning! Consumption with Digital Advisor, Personal Digital Assistant in Companies, Digital Personal Valet in your home…
Imagine that you can delegate to a digital intelligence engine recurring tasks with little added value to you but which, however, take considerable time in your daily life.
Hard facts of today!
It is clear that this could sound like science fiction to many people. But it is not, it is already on the way. Here are some facts from a list that is enriched day by day (which leads me finally to write this post, the market becomes mature and ready to integrate these concepts):
- NTT Docomo i-Concierge:
- http://www.paperblog.fr/2171085/ntt-docomo-met-un-concierge-virtuel-dans-ses-mobiles/
- http://www.latribune.fr/journal/archives/edition-du-1405/business-techno/197524/le-japonais-ntt-docomo-fait-face-a-la-crise-avec-son-iconcier.html
- Siri and Apple iPhone … 5:
- http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/apple-siri-200-million/
- http://9to5mac.com/2011/09/26/the-new-iphone
- Google Guru :
- Bing Microsoft and Facebook:
- Watson:
The need for new tools: xBrainLab !
The implementation of these new smart services requires new tools. Tools combining qualities from many disciplines such as business intelligence, expert systems, ubiquity of technology, social networking, AI, the universality of incoming and outgoing connections, semantics, together with the analog (home automation and robotics for example), ontology, … while providing quick and easy solutions to implement for developers!
This was the challenge of our xBrainLab team in recent years! And I am very proud of the results that emerged and partnerships we have developed! We are at the stage where we have finalized the server and SDK solutions to now creating the first consumer scenarios for year-end.
/ / Do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested in testing or taking part to this adventure!
A Big Picture: Web Reactive, Proactive Web, Web Self (Global Brain)?
We couldn’t end this post without having a look on a more distant future, and try to imagine what will happen at the end of Intelligent Web… as a human being naturally following its lifecycle, the web, after passing through its various stages:
- Children (information): Web 1.0
- Adolescence (socialization): Web 2.0
- Post-teen (structure): Web ²
- And finally the young adult (intelligence): Web 3.0
… Will then naturally lead to the time of independence or of Global Brain as some people may call it … a Skynet in the right way!
Or other visual representation adapted from Francesco Magragrino 2009 :
Source: Francesco Magragrino .
Gregory [Redo]
CEO / CIO & Co-Founder at xBrainLab
