webbing exchange and Semantisize and Free Online Course in Ruby on Rails Powered by Google App Engine

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Hadron Collider Tested!

The Hadron Collider has been tested(http://www.news.com.au/comments/0,23600,24328608-5014239,00.html)! Are we trying to create a black hole here on earth? Remember "Songs Of A Distant Earth" ! And we haven't even invented proper embryo freezing to save mankind.....

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Online RoR Tutorials ....

Free peoples of Middle Earth !


The rulers at http://www.buildingwebapps.com have been gracious enough to bestow knowledge to us commoners on RoR. Please head over there to enhance your skills! The direct link to the tutorials is on the bar at the top of this page, to your left .....

May open source live long and prosper....


Thursday, September 4, 2008

Tempus Vernum

Ergo 
Oceanus, maritimus, 
Ergo 
Opacare, matutinus, 
Ergo 
Septentrio, meridies, 
Ergo 
Occidens et orientis, 
Ergo 
Oceanus, maritimus, 
Opacare, matutinus, 
Septentrio, meridies, 
Occidens et orientis, 
Ergo 
Terra, stella, 
Hiems et aestas, 
Ergo 
Autumnus et tempus vernum, 
Ergo 
Radius solis 
Et umbra, 
Ignis, aqua 
Caelum, luna, 
Terra, stella, 
Hierns et aestas, 
Autumnus et tempus vernum... 

Tempus vernum... 

SCARAB ....

What is SCARAB ? and who are SCARABians ?

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Web Evolution Part I : Past And Present Web

An important reason of studying history is to watch future. By knowing what will happen future we are able to do right things at present. It is very valuable to everyone no matter who he is and no matter what he is doing. Especially because of the success of the traditional World Wide Web and also the new hype of Web 2.0, many people are eager to know what the next one is. Knowing it before others may represent success, satisfaction, fame, wealth, and anything good you name. There have been many buzzwords "available to answer" this question, such as Web 3.0Semantic Web 2.0Pragmatic Semantic WebPragmatic Web, and there could have been more. But a common problem is that these buzzwords actually explain very little more than their literal meanings. We need more illustrative answers.

Scientists have successfully practised scientific ways of predicting future in varied realms. As a typical example, scientists can often correctly predict the landing location of a missile before it hits a target. Once a missle is launched, it follows a consistent orbit to its end. Its final landing position (or even any position during its flight) is predictable for the ones who have studied its orbit. Historians also frequently use this method to predict future of historical events. A historical orbit shows how an event begins, advances, and may eventually vanish to the end. Surely this methodology can be applied again to study the future of World Wide Web.

Although not historians, we have a few observations particularly about web evolution. The relationship between web pages and their webmasters is similar to the relationship between children and their parents. As well as parents raise their children, webmasters maintain and update their web pages. Human children have theirnormal stages of development, such as the newborn stage, pre-school stage, elementary-school stage, teenage stage, and so on. Analogically, web has its generations, such as Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and so on. If we compare the orbits of humans' growth and web evolution, these two orbits are amazingly similar to each other. This observation leads us to an interesting, but certain, analogy between World Wide Web and human society. This analogy explains many debatable issues in current web research, such as why Web 2.0 indeed represents a new-generation web instead of a "useless jargon." Following this analogy, we can watch a clear and convincible line of web evolution.

World Wide Web as a Human Society

If someone asks what the World Wide Web is to 100 different web users, there might be 101 varied answers. The extra one is answered by who asked this question. Different answers bring us various views of WWW. This article is about our answer to this question: the World Wide Web is a virtual society in which web spaces are residents. In Part 2, we are going to formally define web spaces because it requires many explanations to lead to this definition. In Part 1, however, we simply assume web spaces being web pages. W3C defines that the World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, the embodiment of human knowledge. In this offical definition, WWW is a collection of information, or knowledge. Since either "information" or "knowledge" is abstract, it must be materialized by explicit representations. In WWW, a self-contained, independent, and explicit representation of information (or embodied human knowledge) is often a web page. The World Wide Web is thus a universal network of web pages. Or in analogous, WWW is a society of web pages.

A web page (in fact, a web space) on World Wide Web is analogized to a person in human society. Three essential similarities support this analogy. First, there is similarity between web-page content and human personality. Personality is a determinant of humans. Unlike DNA, personality is abstract and it is the complex of all the attributes that characterize a unique individual. Analogically, content is also abstract and it is the complex of all information in a web page. If we analogize URLs to DNAs, URLs can be faked as well as DNAs can be cloned. But content must always be different otherwise two pages are in fact the same. We cannot measure in quantity on either content or personality. The varity of web-page content can be analogized to the variety of personalities. Moreover, since we analogize web pages to humans, the degree of machine-processibility of web pages is similar to the degree of being educated of humans.

Second, there is similarity between hyperlinks among web pages and friendships among humans. A hyperlink between two web pages can be analogized to a friendship between two persons. While distinct personalities make human world various and exciting, it is friendships that unite these distinct ones being a society. Similarly on the WWW, when distinct web content enables attractive and various, it is hyperlinks that weave these distinct web pages being an interconnected web.

Third, there is similarity between built-in services (or functions) in web pages and human capabilities. This aspect is often overlooked to be an essential property of web pages. Different people have varied capabilities of doing things. Different web pages may have been embedded varied services to do things as well. These capabilities of web pages are often coded as clickable buttons, editable textarea, etc. Until now, the majority of web services (or functions) are reactive. Enhancing web pages with active and proactive capabilities is an important direction on web evolution.

These three aspects of web pages---content, link, and service---constitute the foundation of our analogy between World Wide Web and human society. In the following sections, we discuss this analogy in details through one-to-one comparsions between different web evolution stages and varied stages of humans' growth. In fact, the evolution of World Wide Web is almost a clone of the growing up of human generations.

Web 1.0: a world of newborns

The traditional World Wide Web has often been named Web 1.0 since the hype of Web 2.0. Because we discuss web evolution, we adopt this buzzword in this article. Essentially, Web-1.0 pages are for humans to read and understand. There is no obligation of machine processibility. On Web-1.0 pages, the majority of hyperlinks are manually assigned by webmasters. Web-1.0 pages contain only reactive functions or services.

Web-1.0 pages are newborn babies. The following table explains their similarities.

 

a Newborn Baby

a Web-1.0 Page

I have parents

Webmasters

Watch me, but I won't explain

Humans understand, machines don't

Talk to my parents if you want to discuss about me

Contact information (email, phone number, fax, address, ...)

My parents decide who my friends are. Actually, I don't care

Manually specified web links

Hug me, I smile; hit me, I cry (conditional reflex)

Reactive functions on web pages

These analogies are explained in sequence as follows. Every newborn has parents. Analogically, every web page has its webmasters who create and maintain it.

Second, newborns could not explain themselves, though adults (especially ones who have experiences on raising babies) can often understand them well. Similarly, though Web-1.0 pages do not support machine-processable semantics, human web readers (especially ones who are also webmasters) can well understand their content.

Newborns cannot deliver messages for their parents. We need to directly contact their parents if necessary, i.e., to find the contact information of parents. For example, if we saw a baby girl whose father is John, and we want to appreciate how cute this baby girl is, we cannot ask her to deliver this message. In constrast, we need to get John's contact information (such as his phone number) and contact John directly. Exactly, this is the communication model on Web 1.0. If webmasters look for feedbacks from readers, they must keep a block of "Contact Information" on their web pages. Otherwise, no messages could be delivered back to them.

Newborns also do not make friends themselves. It, however, does not mean that babies have no friends. In fact, parents "assign" friends for their babies. For example, John brings his newborn daughter to visit Alice, who also has a newborn son. Being put together by their parents, these two babies play with each other and then they become friends. This type of friendship is vulnerable; or at least it is not controlled by babies themselves. For example, when John and Alice break up, John stops visiting Alice and thus the friendship between the two babies is terminated. During this process, babies do not suggest anything. In fact, babies do not really care of this process. This is the hyperlink model of Web 1.0. In analogous, when John thinks Alice's web page is cool (or maybe simply John personally likes Alice), he adds on his web page a hyperlink pointing to Alice's web page. This hyperlink makes Alice's web page be a "friend" to John's web page. Later on, when John becomes dislike Alice's web page (or John and Alice break up), John removes the link to Alice's web page. As its result, the link from John's web page to Alice's web page terminates completely.

Although newborns do not response to external stimuli intentionally, they do react instinctively, which is commonly known as conditional reflex. For example, newborns often smile when they are hugged; and they cry when they are hitted. The built-in services (or functions) in Web-1.0 pages are analogous to these conditional reflex actions. When their programmed conditions are satisfied, these services (or functions) can response results as expected. These services (or functions) are reactive only, i.e. conditional reflex. Neither do they really understand remote requests, nor do they actively prepare answers for potential questions. To the end, Web-1.0 pages are only babies.

These five analogies show us that Web 1.0 is a world of newborns. Because they are babies, they cannot do much contribution to adults. In the society of Web 1.0, human interactions are required by almost all valuable web operations.

Everyone likes newborn babies. They are lovely; they are reflection of parents; they are extension of life; and the most important, they are OUR children. Adults (especially parents) can often play tirelessly with newborn babies. Exhaustlessly web users have loved to stay with the web, though it is only Web 1.0. World Wide Web has been a great success. And this success continues.

But this successful story is only the beginning of a long journey. Newborns are cute. But we are happier when watching them growing up. We have more joyful experiences with grown children than newborns. One important and joyful job of all parents (and possibly all adults) is to help children grow up.

Semantic Web: a world of educated children, but ... dogmatic?

Ten years after the birth of Web 1.0, the father of World Wide Web decided to announce some changes. He proposed a visionary new web---the Semantic Web. By our analogy, Tim's announcement can be translated as "Babies, you need to be EDUCATED!"

An important criterion of grown children is being educated. As the consequence, they can meaningfully present themselves and understand others. This is the goal of Semantic Web: enable machine-processable content and automatic machine processing. Semantic Web demands rich machine-processible semantics in web pages so that machines can understand web content. In analogous, it means to build a world of educated people. For the sake of our discussion, we limit it to be a world of educated children. The following table explains our analogy.

an Educated Child

a Semantic-Web Page

I go to school and learn formal knowledge from textbooks

Ontology

I can explain messages and everybody can understand

Semantic annotation, ontology matching

I can provide suggestions based on my understanding

Reasoning and inference

I have friends with common interest

Semantic grid

I can handle requests by understanding them

Semantic web services

First, being educated means learning formal knowledge from textbooks. It also means going to schools. In fact, textbooks are ontologies since both of them express formal, explicit, and shared specifications of conceptualizations. Moreover, both authors of textbooks and creators of ontologies are experts on specific realms. Following this analogy, schools are ontology servers. A school can provide varied courses, while a course can adopt differnt textbooks. Similarly, an ontology server can support varied domains, while a domain can have different ontologies. Furthermore, different schools can provide the same course using the same textbook. Similarly, different ontology servers can provide exact the same domain ontologies. As well as parents help their children choose schools, courses, and textbooks, Semantic Web webmasters need to select ontology servers, domains, and appropriate ontologies for their web pages.

By learning from textbooks children are educated. Particularly, they can explain facts using formal terms from their learned textbooks. The use of formal terms allow their explanations being publicly understandable. The process of explanation is actually a process of semantic annotation (and/or semantic authoring). Similarly, semantic annotation and authoring on Semantic Web allow content in web pages being mapped to formal ontology definitions, which are machine-processible. Even for people who learned the same course but using different textbooks, it might still be a little bit difficulty to communicate smoothly. But humans are good at overcoming this difficulty by sharing common agreements with each other. This is thus the process of ontology matching.

Being educated means having the capability of drawing implicit conclusions out of explicit facts. Children learn this capability also from textbooks. Well-formed textbooks show students not only domain knowledge, but also the ways of harnessing knowledge. The ways of harnessing knowledge are often homogeneous, while domain knowledge is heterogeneous. Similarly, ontology languages are often built upon common logic foundations, while individual ontologies can be very much different from each another. Common logic foundations support us to build homogenous inference engines that can be applied to draw conclusions based on understood semantics.

Friendships among educated children are not primarily enforced by their parents. Most of the friends of educated children are their classmates and schoolmates. By staying at the same classes and studying the same textbooks they share common interest. Common interest is the basis of friendship between educated people. On Semantic Web, sharing common interest means adopting the same ontologies, especially adopting the same ontologies from the same ontology servers. Thus, the hyperlinks between Semantic-Web pages are primarily decided by their shared ontologies. Through shared ontologies Semantic-Web pages are connected to be a semantic grid. This type of connections is much less vulnerable because it is objective. For example, John cannot force his Semantic-Web page not linking to Alice's Semantic-Web page by simply deleting an explicit hyperlink from his page to Alice's page. As long as John does not abandon sharing the same ontologies with Alice, the link between these two Semantic-Web pages is unbreakable. It is the same as that John cannot forbid his high-school daughter being friend to Alice's high-school son unless he can stop the common interest between these two kids.

Educated children can reply based on their understanding. It means they have the capabilities beyond conditional reflex. In analogous, Semantic-Web pages can be embedded in semantic web services. As its result, remote machine agents can understand the content of local services, and local service agent can understand the meanings of remote requests.

If the Semantic Web were realized, the web would become a society of educated people. This dream, however, has not been realized yet since 1999. There are many reasons. Besides all the technical difficulties, one main obstacle is due to the problem of dogmatics in many of current Semantic Web studies. Being educated is good. But being dogmatically educated is not preferred.

In order to explain the problem of dogmatics, we need to watch the problems of dogmatic persons. Being dogmatic does not mean uneducated. On the contrary, dogmatic people are often well educated. A little bit ironic, dogmatic ones are often even better educated than many other people. The problem of being dogmatic is that dogmatic persons often pertain to a doctrine of beliefs and they accept it as authoritative. Therefore, being dogmatic restrains versatility. Human society is lovely and it can progress forward because it allows versatility. Moreover, contradictive ideas are often the driving force of human evolution (e.g., the famous debate between the universe being either earth-centric or sun-centric). Rarely people like to live with dogmatics. It is more unrealistic to believe that people would like to BUILD a dogmatic society.

While being educated is our expectation, being dogmatically educated is unattractive. But certainly teaching dogmatically is much easier than teaching creatively. This is the dilemma we face when trying to build attractive and practical killer applications to realize the Semantic Web.

Web 2.0: a world of pre-school kids

Web 2.0 is what happened while we were waiting for the Semantic WebDion Hinchcliffe made this remarkable statement recently. This statement shows the reason of the Web 2.0 hype as well as some shortcomings of the Semantic Web. Our analogical web evolution study well matches this observation. So we start the discussion of Web 2.0 by this sentence.

 

Web 2.0 has been a great phenomenon. The TIME magazine elected YOU, which indeed is Web 2.0, being the person of the year 2006. The reason of its success, however, is still somehow in mystery. Skeptics are mainly from two sides. First, there are traditional Semantic Web researchers who think Web 2.0 being nothing new but a jargon. They believe that the elemental concepts of Web 2.0 had already been contained in Web 1.0. There are basically no theoretical advancement in Web 2.0 except of some new technologies such as AJAX. Second, there are over-realistic investors who doubt the potential revenue by adopting Web 2.0. They argue that it would be more likely a "bubble 2.0" than anything else. We need to watch this phenomenon of Web 2.0 from a broader view to response to these two types of arguments.

The success of Web 2.0 lies on the success of two technologies: blogging and tagging. Though there are numerous Web 2.0 companies that provide various services, almost all of them stand upon these two technologies. In addition to the two, they add their specialities. For example, YouTube adds videos and Flickr adds photos. Essentially, blogging enhances the character of content, and tagging enhances the character of link. The blogging technology extends the update of content from personal activities to social activities. The tagging technology enables the creation of hyperlinks from tedious, individual behaviors to handy, collaborative behaviors. Following our analogy, Web 2.0 advances a world of newborns to a world of pre-school kids. The following table explains the details.

a Pre-School Kid

a Web-2.0 Page

I have parents

Webmasters (blog owners)

Parents teach me knowledge (though often not well organized)

Tagging

I understand but maybe imprecise and incorrect

Folksonomy

I can deliver and distribute messages, especially for my parents

Blogging technology

Who my friends are is primarily determined by my parents' social activities and their teaching

Social network

Multiple of us can be coordinated to do something beyond individual's capabilities

Web widget, mashup

I can do suggestion based on my communication with friends

Collective intelligence

Web-2.0 webmasters (typically blog owners) play a more important role than before on updating web pages. Once web pages have been created, Web-1.0 webmasters often only update them occasionally and slightly (such as updating daily prices). Web-2.0 webmasters, however, often significantly update web content (such as adding new blog posts). It is not hard to explain this difference by our analogy. Although parents love newborn babies, these babies are too young to learn much. Hence parents often have less aspiration to actively teach them. In constrast, when children grow up to their pre-school stage, parents start to have more mutual communication with these children. As the result, parents often have more aspiration on actively teaching.

Sooner or later at our pre-school stage, almost all of us meet our first teachers, who are our parents. But very few parents start teaching children with textbooks. Instead, parent-teaching often begins with individual words and phrases. Many of the earlier words learned by young children are simple and generic. For instance, parents often teach their children beginning with words like "tree" instead of "alder" or "dogwood." This methodology is not only due to the easiness of teaching, but also for the purpose of helping their children build social connection to the other kids. Using generic terms means public adoption. Pre-school kids start having the capabilities of applying their learned knowledge, in which the first and most important capability is tagging. Basically, these kids tag everything they can see using their learned words. Certainly, these tagging activities are supervised by their parents at the beginning. This is exactly the current stage of Web 2.0. Tagging is a typical Web-2.0 technology. Through the activity of tagging, Web-2.0 webmasters teach their own web pages (which could be such as blogs, or YouTube's personal account web pages containing individual lists of favorites) new knowledge of web facts. Shared tags thus construct implicit hyperlinks among varied web pages. Most of these links could not have been created within the frame of Web 1.0.

By tagging a Web-2.0 page (such as a blog), it allows machines knowing its content (at least the themes of content). A tag cloud can constitute a loosely organized label set, which is often named afolksonomy. Knowledge in folksonomies is not formally defined. Folksonomies usually do not have deep hierarchical structures. Their structure is often flat and broad. Moreover, the inter-relationships among folksonomy concepts are often not rich. This knowledge structure of folksonomies well matches what most pre-school kids have. Many pre-school kids may have learned quite a few words. But they often do not have much knowledge on how these words related to each other. At the pre-school stage, kids are taught to tag objects (such as tree and sun). But they are still too young to learn complex, formal relationships (such as the sun is the energy source for trees' growth). As the result, pre-school kids can answer questions, but many times their answers are imprecise or even incorrect because they don't really understand questions. For example, I had asked my pre-school daughter how she felt about a recent Disney movie she just watched. Instead of answering my question, she told me about how wonderful the Disney World was in a TV show. Unlike newborns who know nothing, she caught the keyword "Disney." But she missed its relation to some other words such as "movie." And she thought the fun things she learned from a DisneyLand TV show were relevant to my question since both of them were about "Disney" (and even both were about shows). This is the current status of Web 2.0. By clicking tags, a Web-2.0 page can automatically re-direct web readers to "relevant" pages, which share the same tags. In fact, however, many of these "relevant" pages may not be so relevant.

Another capability of pre-school kids is delivering messages. Unlike newborn babies, pre-school kids know how to contact their parents. Therefore, they can be intermediate persons between parents and strangers. Adults who do not know each other can communicate through pre-school kids as long as the pre-school kid knows both of them. The embedment of blogging technology enhances web pages with this important capability. Based on the blogging technology, a Web-2.0 page becomes an mediator among webmasters and readers. Neither webmasters nor readers need to publish their private contact information (unless they are willing to do so) to join a communication. In fact, I address this advancement to be the first sign that World Wide Web is going to be independent of the human society. A messager among adults can also be a messager among peer children. In analogous, though currently the blogging technology is only enabled for humans, one day it can be enabled for machine agents. When machines start blogging to each other, the participation of human users is going to be less necessary.

In the pre-school stage, children start making consistent friendships with the other kids. Very important, these friendships start belonging to themselves other than forced by parents. Consequently, once these friendships are made, their parent cannot remove them easily. The initiative of these friendships, however, still very much depends on the parents' social activities and teaching. For example, if John frequently visits Alice, John's and Alice's kids become friends. Or as another example, John teaches his daughter "plant," while Alice also teaches her son "plant." Though John and Alice do not know each other, their children meet and find that they have learned the same thing. This common interest thus brings the two kids together being friends. Web 2.0 activities simulate both scenarios to build social networks. The first one is a blogging activity, and the second one is a tagging activity. The blogging behaviors directly bring readers to the publishers. The tagging behaviors create tags. By sharing common tags different Web-2.0 pages are also linked. Unlike the manual and hardcoded hyperlinks in Web-1.0 pages, these Web-2.0 links created by social activities are hard to be removed because they are objective.

Although a single pre-school kid may still have only limited capabilities, we can organize multiple of them to accomplish complex assignments that none of them can do individually. This is another capability that newborns do not have. Mashup is the term on Web 2.0 that simulates this human capability. The theory of mashup does not depend on the Web 2.0. But mashup only becomes popular after the emergence of Web 2.0. The reason is that the success of mashup very much depends on the degree of varities of services (or functions) provided on the web. As we have discussed, Web-1.0 users were not very much interest in creating unique services along with their web pages because of the lack of soical activities. Web 2.0, however, encourages its users to build interesting and personalized service components (as web widgets). The spread of web widgets leverages mashup applications. Unless people can watch the value of their creativities, they are not going to do creatively contributions. This is a lesson we learn from the rise of mashup.

Finally, pre-school kids can start suggesting answers. But their suggestions are not based on understanding questions, but based on matching keywords. Typically, they anwer questions by copying sentences they learned from their peers. Since they do not really know meanings, many times their copies are funny and inappropriate to the questions. But this is still a sign that the kids start collecting intelligence from their social networks, which is another important human capability. Respectively, Web 2.0 begins to realize the theory of collective intelligence. In the meantime, this realization is still on its very early stage. But this direction is certain.

Web 2.0 is what happened while we were waiting for the Semantic Web. Now we can translate this remarkable statement using our own analogy: pre-school is where our kids actually went while we were waiting for sending them to formal schools. It sounds very reasonable, doesn't it?

Inventory before the Next Launch

We have gone over the history of web evolution until now in analogy. This analogy tells that World Wide Web evolves on a very similar orbit as human grows up. Before we trace the orbit to explore the future, we summarize what we have learned so far.

First, it is convincible that Web 2.0 represents a new generation. Web-2.0 pages advances Web-1.0 pages to a distinct degree in all the three basic aspects---content, link and service. Both content and link on Web 2.0 become greatly relied on collaborative activities on web. In contrast, the majority of content and link on Web 1.0 is based on independent activities of webmasters. Web 2.0 also have advanced the third basic aspect of web pages (service), web feeds and web widgets have advanced services to be active rather than simple "conditional refelx" services that dominate the Web 1.0.

It is inappropriate to distinguish Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 by saying that Web 1.0 is "about connecting computers" and Web 2.0 is "about connecting people." As what Tim Berners-Lee had replied to this question, World Wide Web is certainly about connecting both people and computers no matter on which stage it is. It is not because of Web 2.0 that web users get connected, though Web 2.0 practices do have enriched the connections among web users. The real difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is: the web has grown up from its stage of newborn to pre-school. Certainly newborns already have all the "potentials" to do whatever pre-school kids can do. Essentially, these "potentials" are human capabilities instead of pre-school kids' unique capabilities. Though this assessment is reasonable, we cannot neglect the fact that newborns really cannot do many things even if they "have the potentials." From the newborn stage to the pre-school stage is an important stage transition in human life. As the same importance the web transits from its 1.0 to 2.0.

Based on our analogy, we also know that now it is still an early stage of Web 2.0. Our virtual Web-2.0 kids are just starting their learning lessons by parents. Or we can use a machine-learning term: Web 2.0 is still on its "training phase" right now. These kids have not gotten much chances to show their talent learned from parents yet. (We can compare how much time we have given our newborns to show their telant.) In the following several years, we can predict the flourishing of Web 2.0 applications. It would be the "testing phase" of Web 2.0.

Although there may be "bubble 2.0" someday, it is not at present. The bubble 1.0 happened majorly because Web-1.0 content must be generally consumed by humans. Suppose there are 100 million regular web users, and on average every one of them effectively consumes 20 web pages every day. It thus means that a web containing 2 billion pages may satisfy almost all of them. In fact, it allows every of these regular users 5 million days to explore the entire web without repeating a single page. A web bigger than this size becomes generally meaningless to this soceity because many of them may never been effectively consumed. This was what the bubble 1.0 encountered. The sudden explosion of web content greatly overpowers what regular web users can consume. As the result, many new dot-com sites have so few customers that they cannot survive. But Web 2.0 becomes different. An important phenomenon on Web 2.0 is that machines (such as web blogs) start joining the list of web consumers. Web feeds are typical examples. Due to the help from the machine side, every human users can now effectively consume more web pages every day. For example, web feeds can help every user consume 100 pages every day. It greatly saves human energy and improves the consuming rate of web content. Therefore, the totally consumeable volume of web can be immediately expanded to 12 billion pages. Certainly we have not used real numbers of web users in our calculation. But this simply calculation itself shows that Web 2.0 can endure much larger web volume without causing bubble. And this is the reason why bubble 2.0 is not going to happen in the near future, such as in two to three years. (But certainly it also depends on how fast we can create new web content.)

In a recent New York Times article, John Markoff assigned the buzzword "Web 3.0" to Semantic Web. This article has led to hot dicussions on the relation between Web 2.0 and Semantic Web in many technical blogs. We, however, do not favor this assessment. Web 2.0 and Semantic Web discusses web evolution in two different directions. Web 2.0 is a particular stage in web evolution. Semantic Web, however, is an expecting status on web evolution but not a particular stage. As we show in the analogy, the pre-school stage is a particular stage in human life. But being educated is an expecting status. Children get more and more educated when they grow up. Similarly, further and further the web is moving towards Semantic Web. But it is awkward to assign a particular stage label (such as Web 3.0) for Semantic Web.

Semantic Web is the future, but its realization is not ready yet. Our analogy tells us the reason: the web is far less matured enough to be a "network of educated people." "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven." (Quoted, Holy Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:1, KJV) Trying to skip to the end simply does not work most of the time. An old Chinese fable also tells us the bad consequence of destructive enthusiasm. In the fable, a man tried to help seedlings grow faster by pulling them out a little bit. As the result, all seedlings died the next day. When the objective conditions of a goal have not been ready yet, it is useless to push it hard. There is still a long journey to realize the Semantic Web as described in the 2001 Scientific American paper.

But we should not be disappointed. The Semantic Web would not be realized soon only if we define it to be a particular stage---"a network of educated people." But if we abandon this unrealistic perspective, we do move towards the Semantic Web every day. In analogous, during kids' growing up, they become more "educated" every day. In fact, Web 2.0 can be seen as the level-0 of the Semantic Web. The web is being educated now (though informally), isn't it? Informal education is still education. Informal semantics are still semantics. If we are optimistic enough, we can even claim that Semantic Web has already been realized at its beginning level.

At last, we discuss an interesting advancement in Semantic Web: the FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) project. Until now, FOAF might be the most successful pure Semantic Web project. It is built upon formal taxonomies and it uses all kinds of Semantic Web techniques. And the most important, it has attracted numerous real-world users. Even more, its philosophy has been adapted in many Web 2.0 development. But the success of FOAF has not braught up a hype of Semantic Web. The reason is its limitation. FOAF is on a very narrow domain and its applications are very much domain-specific. For people who are interested in this narrow domain, FOAF is great. For others, they do not even want to care of FOAF. This is a side-effect of being educated, which is an interesting phenomenon.Higher educated people often has less friends, while less educated ones can get a lot of peers. With the progess of Semantic Web research, the effect of this phenomenon could be stronger. Higher degree of education may not always be a positive choice.

Another lesson learned from the FOAF practices is that the emergence of a new generation cannot purely rely on geniuses. Existence of geniuses is another interest phenomenon in human society. When someones are called geniuses, they are significantly good at doing something, especially when comparing to their same-ages. But at the same time, there are no geniuses who are due to knowing everything. Geniuses are only good at working on narrowed realms. FOAF practices build geniuses on understanding the domain of friend-making. But the emergence of geniuses does not indicate the mature of a new generation. They are two totally different stories. So although FOAF is a great success, the Semantic Web still has not come yet.