Post absorption of Web 3G commentary emanating from the Talis blog space. Ian Davis appears to be expending energy on the definition of, and timeframes for, the next Web Frontier (which is actually here btw) :-)

Daniel Lewis also penned an interesting post in response to Ian's, that actually triggered this post.

I think definition time has long expired re. the Web's many interaction dimensions, evolutionary stages, and versions.

On my watch it's simply demo / dog-food time. Or as Dan Brickley states: Just Show It.

Below, I've created a tabulated view of the various lanes on the Web's Information Super Highway. Of course, this is a Linked Data demo should you be interested in the universe of data exposed via the links embedded in this post :-)

The Web's Information Super Highway Lanes

1.0

2.0

3.0

Desire

Information Creation & Retrieval

Information Creation, Retrieval, and Extraction

Distillation of Data from Information

Meme

Information Linkage (Hypertext)

Information Mashing (Mash-ups)

Linked Data Meshing (Hyperdata)

Enabling Protocol

HTTP

HTTP

HTTP

Markup

HTML

(X)HTML& various XML based formats (RSS, ATOM, others)

Turtle, N3, RDF/XML, others
Basic Data Unit
Resource (Data Object) of type "Document"
Resource (Data Object) of type "Document"
Resource (Data Object) that may be one of a variety of Types: Person, Place, Event, Music etc.

Basic Data Unit Identity

Resource URL (Web Data Object Address)

Resource URL (Web Data Object Address)

Unique Identifier (URI) that is indepenent of actual Resource (Web Data Object) Address.

Note: An Identifier by itself has no utility beyond Identifying a place around which actual data may be clustered.

Query or Search

Full Text Search patterns

Full Text Search patterns

Structured Querying via SPARQL

Deployment

Web Server (Document Server)

Web Server + Web Services Deployment modules

Web Server + Linked Data Deployment modules (Data Server)

Auto-discovery

<link rel="alternate"..>

<link rel="alternate"..>

<link rel="alternate" | "meta"..>, basic and/or transparent content negotiation
Target User
Humans
Humans & Text extraction and manipulation oriented agents (Scrappers)
Agents with varying degrees of data processing intelligence and capacity
Serendipitous Discovery Quotient (SDQ) Low Low High

Pain

Information Opacity

Information Silos

Data Graph Navigability (Quality)