Creating a global brain

“Google? That’s old school. Intelligent new Web 3.0 applications will revolutionize the way we interact with the world’s data.”
― The Globe & Mail, May 1, 2008

Today’s Globe & Mail offers an intriguing look at “the next generation of intelligent web applications . . . that bring together people to add content, organize information and build connections between different kinds of data. These applications will build on the success of Web 2.0 social technologies and become more intelligent as their user bases grow.” Collective knowledge systems, the semantic web, contextual browsing, and natural language searching characterize Web 3.0 technologies, writes Ken Hunt of the G&M.

These technologies include:

• Freebase: an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge
• Twine: allows users to organize and find the connections between different kinds of information
• AdaptiveBlue: a Firefox plug-in that allegedly recognizes the main subject discussed on a page.
• ClearForest: another Firefox plug-in. This one scours a page for every noun mentioned and organizes them into categories.
• Powerset: a natural-language search engine.
• TrueKnowledge: a search engine that seeks to answer a question outright rather than simply returning a list of search results.

You can read the full article here.