In the beginning, the World Wide Web was introduced as a medium for sharing scientific and research documents, especially, among government organizations and academic institutions. But with the passage of time, it evolved and crossed the limits defined for it. Initially, until 1990, the World Wide Web (WWW) remained within the boundaries of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (a research organization) known as CERN, but by 1991, it became available to anyone using the internet.
Evolution of the web from Web 1.0 (The World Wide Web) to Web 2.0 (The Social Web) and then to Web 3.0 (The Semantic Web) is shown in the following figure.
Web 1.0 - The World Wide Web (1990 - 2000)
- Remained limited mostly to static websites.
- Mostly publishing / brochure-ware. Limited to reading only for majority.
- Proprietary and closed access.
- Corporations mostly, no communities.
- HTTP and HTML
Web 2.0 - The Social Web (2000 - 2010)
- Publishing as well as Participation
- Social Media, Blogging, Wikis
- RSS - Syndicate site contents.
- Rich User Experience
- Tagging
- Keyword Search
- AJAX, JavaScript Frameworks (jQuery, Dojo, YUI, Ext Js and so on), XML, JSON
Web 3.0 - The Semantic Web (2010 - onward)
- Mostly Drag n Drop
- Highly mobile oriented
- Widgets
- Micro blogging
- Cloud and Grid Computing
- Open ID
- Semantic Search
- Semantic Techniques like RDF, SWRL, OWL and so on.
Let's see how long Web 3.0 will go and what more will come with Web 4.0 (The Intelligent Web).
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