Have you ever wondered what the Internet will look like in the future?  Most people have heard of some aspect of what has been called web 2.0.  You know things like social networking, lightweight programming, web as a platform, and collective intelligence.  Most people recognize these by their street names Facebook, AJAX, Google Maps, and wikipedia respectively.

Many people refer to Web 3.0 as the semantic web.  The semantic web is where machines read web pages as humans do today.  A web where search engines and software agents peruse “the Net” and find us what we’re looking for.  Some of the technologies required to perform such tasks exist today including the Resource description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL).  These work by adding all sorts of machine readable metadata to human readable web pages.

These technologies are beginning to trickle into real-world sites, service experiences, and tools.  Examples of these technologies can be seen with Yahoo!’s food site, which is driven by semantic metadata, the semantic portal developed by Radar Networks, the Jena development platform being creating at HP, and the Oracle Spatial database.

Just as much of life, the semantic web is a good-news, bad-news thing.  You can do all these wonderfully complex queries, but it takes a tremendous amount of time and metadata to make it happen.  This is due to having to completely re-annotate the entire Web in order to make existing web pages machine readable.

For this reason, many researchers opt for a very different approach to the semantic web.  Instead of an overhaul of Web formats, they’re building agents that can better understand the Web pages of today.  The pages aren’t easier to read, but rather the software agents are getting smarter.

There are some early examples of these smart agents, one particular example is the BlueOrganizer from AdaptiveBlue.  This browser plug-in, in certain situations, can understand what web pages are about and automatically retrieve related information from other sites and service experiences.  For instance, if you visit a movie blog and read about a particular film, it immediately links to sites where you can buy or rent the film.

There is yet a third view of the semantic web taken by so called “semantic searchers”.  Rather than providing automatic information retrieval, semantic search engines seek to improve on the Google-like search model that we’ve grown so accustomed to.  the idea is to move beyond mere keyword searches to a better understanding of natural-language queries.  This type of natural-language processing has been in development for years and now is beginning to find its way onto the public Web.  Several start-ups, like Powerset and TextDigger are developing semantic search engines based on the open source academic project WordNet.

While many associate Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web, the two are far from synonymous.  There are countless other concepts ready to alter our online experiences of the future.  Many of these concepts go beyond semantics using space, images, and sound.

One such concept is the so called 3D Web, a Web you can walk through.  This has been seen as an extension to the “virtual worlds” popping up on today’s Web.  It has been said that the Web of the future will be the big alternate universe reminiscent of Second Like and There.com.

As with everything in like there are those who scoff at this notion of the 3d Web.  They see the 3D Web as a re-creation of our existing world.  On the 3D Web, you can take a virtual tour of an unfamiliar neighborhood and shop for houses or visit famous sites you’ve never seen.  Google earth already offers a similar experience.  The problem is that 3D only goes so far and doesn’t enhance the 2D world of text, pictures, and video.  An interesting idea beginning to emerge is that of a media-centric Web which offers not only language-based search but pure media search.  Today’s searching mechanisms rely primarily on keywords, even when searching for images, videos, and songs, this is a woefully inadequate approach.  companies like Ojos and Polar Rose are looking to reinvent media search, hinting at a world where we search for media with other media, not just keywords.

We can’t forget about the Pervasive Web, a Web that’s everywhere.  The Web already reaches beyond the desktop, to cell phones and handhelds, but who says it has to stop there.  What about having the  windows in your home open when the temperature changes.  By leveraging mesh networks, wireless networks consisting of tiny nodes that can route data to and from almost anywhere, the possibilities are endless.