The WEB 3.0 Story #001

They Will Do To Us With Web 3.0 What They Did With Insulin

Get it on the dollar from the people and sell it to the people for millions.

The story of the insulin patent being sold for one U.S. dollar is now common knowledge. Public funds paid for the R&D for it. Then the greed of the corporations stepped in, and the price of insulin became astronomical.

For no reason at all.

People died simply because they could not afford to buy insulin at the prices sold at various outlets—a human tragedy.

We also witnessed the almost comical testimony of Mr. O’Day, the CEO of Gilead, during a congressional hearing. His pharmaceutical company was selling a drug called Truvada for $1800 to $2000. A drug critical for patients who have HIV.

“Mr. O’Day, is it true your company made a profit of almost 3 Billion USD in 2018 alone?”. He responded, “3 Billion USD gross profit worldwide”. And then “The current list price for Truvada is $2000 in the USA. Correct?”.

Him again, “The list price for Truvada is more like $1700.” As if the difference mattered, but it only set him up for the next question “ Mr. O’Day, can you tell us why the price for the same drug is $8 in Australia?”

That question shocked him and the public. It was absurd beyond ridiculous. If he were alive during the Eastern Roman Empire (better known as the Byzantine Empire), his actions would have certainly been met with a crucifixion.

But modern-day society is less brutal. More forgiving of the actions of corporations. Corporations have managed to numb us down. They eroded our ability to think and consequently all but stifled our inborn curiosity to ask the questions that matter.

The same can be said of WEB 3.0.

This is a long story that will take multiple articles to cover. The best way to understand what is going on here is to start where it all started.

Tim Berners-Lee, considered the principal inventor of the Web itself, did not favor this versioning of the Web. In his original vision of the Web, he was already talking about Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. The only difference is he was talking about the Semantic Web and Data Linking.

Tim Berners-Lee insisted very early on the need to provide on the Web “more machine-oriented semantic information, allowing more sophisticated processing” (Berners-Lee et al., 1994). To bootstrap that evolution Tim Berners-Lee then proposed in September 1998 a “Semantic Web Road map” (Berners-Lee, 1998), giving more than 20 years ago the blueprints of the architecture of the Semantic Web.

The history of the Web is well documented, but our point here is to try and find patterns that will show us, or not, how corporations are high-jacking the hard work of scientists for pure profit.

Yet again.

Leaving us, the people, to pull the short end of the stick. Yet again. Is it insulin and Truvada all over again? To attempt to answer that question, we have to ask what the Web pioneers asked. Given that we now have the third wave of scientific study well on its way, in which ways should we look at the Semantic Web?

• As an upgrade to the current Web/Internet?
• As a meta technology for business software?
• As a social movement favoring open-source data?
• As a new generation of artificial intelligence?

Those four questions on their own already get the thinking juices flowing, and they were asked more than fourteen years ago. Let’s briefly add some context to each of them in the hope it sparks debate.

An upgrade to the current Web/Internet.

The seminal article announcing the arrival of the Semantic Web was published in May 2001 in Scientific American magazine. Starting in 2004, a special focus group on social collaboration has produced a wave of new Web sites that call themselves Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is a term used to distinguish Web sites (such as Amazon.com, Facebook.com, YouTube.com, Digg.com, Wikipedia.org, Twitter.com, and so on) that harness the collective inputs from hundreds or thousands of people to make their features and content more engaging than could ever be developed by just one company.

Most people agree that the first Web (Web 1.0, if you please) has profoundly changed the world. It has connected people in faraway places and ushered in a new era of learning opportunities for people of any race, creed, culture, or religion to become exposed to fresh ideas with the click of a mouse.

The Web hasn’t solved world hunger, but it has leveled the educational playing field for millions of souls who would have otherwise been denied fair access to the amassed knowledge of humanity. The second wave of the Web, Web 2.0, as it is known in pop culture, is no less profound, and it has a more subtle reach.

Web sites that are part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon have already altered the political landscape of many countries. It helped to elect the first African-American president of the United States — a well-documented case study.

It cracked major news stories before the networks, impacted an entire generation of kids under 18, and collected the largest cache of human knowledge in the world — not bad at all.

It is fair to conclude that there was an upgrade to the Web/Internet for the common good.

A meta technology for business software.

If you’re interested in core technology and money-making, the business side of the Semantic Web will hold a lot of appeal for you. Each year, companies all over the globe spend trillions of dollars buying and installing Software that will help them run their businesses.

A significant portion of that money spent on Software is spent on getting the Software to talk to other kinds of Software. The Semantic Web technology represents a fundamentally new way of formatting data. This can potentially save businesses billions of dollars and help software vendors spur a new growth wave of business software.

Semantic Web data formats were designed from the ground up as purpose-built languages for metadata — providing a way to describe and define data by using more data accurately.

These new formats provide a way to connect and exchange data with many systems more efficiently in business software systems. The Semantic Web also offers new ways to model complex data environments that can be more simply maintained over time.

Business software created between 2010 and 2025 will be built substantially on the Semantic Web formats of the future.

Since we are looking at this from the eyes of the visionaries, we do not have the luxury of hindsight. We are working our way forward between 1998 and 2005 to build our version of how all this unfolded.

This will allow us to form our own opinions based on the questions we ask as we work our way up to contemporary developments.

A social movement favoring open-source data.

A social movement for the ordinary people requires copious amounts of Linked Open Data in the cloud for the common good of the people. A giant database in the sky is what the visionaries call it.

A controversial dream of many is to enable the Web itself to evolve into a global federated database. This idea of massive technology virtualization is the kind of science fiction that used to make serious people laugh.

But as of 2008, more than 30 organizations published their libraries of data into Semantic Web formats and made them queryable from the Web itself. The leap of understanding that you need to absorb is that the Semantic Web data and data models can be directly and precisely linked together over the Web itself, unlike a regular database.

Instead of going through proprietary software APIs and query listening services, the data and data models are fully accessible from the Web itself. I can publish some data in a model from Australia, and you can include it directly in your data and data model published from New York. As long as we both have an Internet connection and use the Semantic Web, a lot of magic happens for free.

The organizations participating in this movement aren’t fly-by-night companies or mom-and-pop shops with a small amount of data. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook, containing detailed data about every country globally, is accessible in Semantic Web formats.

All the data from Wikipedia containing data about practically everything is accessible in Semantic Web formats. Every data item in Freebase, a Web database for anybody to use, is accessible in Semantic Web formats.

Since we can travel into the future from 2008, here is a fun fact. Freebase was developed by a company called MetaWeb. It made the Freebase data available to the public in 2007.

In 2010 it was bought by Google and since then the Freebase software has been powering Google’s Knowledge Graph. Not freely available to the public. Go figure.

Back to the timeline of our visionaries. The idea was that you and I could build any software application we want that will remix and mash-up data from any of those sources for free!

But taking this vision even further, media giants were expected to offer free service — cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) — that can automatically semantically parse any unstructured text you send it. This service then returns a Semantic Web–compatible list of people, places, things, and so on that are automatically linked to any open-source data models available in that giant database in the sky.

The data still belongs to you. It’s only the service that aggregates the data and returns it in Semantic Web format that belongs to the media giants. They have the computing power, and the people have the data.

Now you can start from any document, anywhere, and automatically get structured data about the concepts and data from your raw text. Welcome to the Semantic Web!

Or were we welcome? What happened there? Corporate greed?

I don’t know. They don’t know. Nobody knows.

A new generation of Artificial Intelligence.

The science of artificial intelligence (A.I.) goes through ups and downs in the academic community. In times past, artificial intelligence research has seemed to hold the promise of radical new computers and the keys to new forms of life, but after years of failed promises, the research funding for A.I. inevitably dries up.

This boom-and-bust cycle for A.I. has repeated itself many times throughout the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. The boom cycle started again, primarily due to the Semantic Web excitement. New research funding since the late 1990s into the areas of knowledge representation (K.R.) and A.I. for the Web grew substantially worldwide, with particular growth in Europe and Asia.

The Semantic Web has been yet another source of rebirth for A.I. Most of the Semantic Web roots go deep into K.R. and A.I. problems that originally emerged several decades ago. For academics and researchers, these A.I. foundations of the Semantic Web were the most exciting and fruitful.

The modern origins of the Semantic Web can be traced to Netscape and the Defense Departments of the United States and Europe. In 1998, Tim Bray and Ramanathan Guha built a metadata language called MCF (Meta Content Framework) for XML to help Netscape describe content ratings of Web pages.

Soon after that, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) looked to create a general-purpose metadata language called RDF (Resource Description Framework). This new language was based mainly on the original MCF specification by Guha and Bray. Also, in 1999, the Defense Departments of the United States and the European Union (E.U.) Commission independently opened research topics in the area of intelligent agents.

Both the United States and the E.U. had recognized that for Software to act more autonomously — without the constant updating by human engineers — the Software needed a better data format than XML, relational databases, or the Unified Modeling Language (UML) could provide.

So the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) created DAML (DARPA Agent Markup Language), and the E.U. created OIL (Ontology Inference Layer). These two formats were remarkably similar and were eventually combined to form DAML+OIL, which finally turned into OWL (Web Ontology Language).

Today, RDF and OWL are the backbone of the Semantic Web and are recommended standards maintained by the W3C.

As we will see in later articles. Private corporations took RDF and OWL and bullied and bashed it around so much that it is now known by more than one hundred different names.

They all call it WEB 3.0, but under the bonnet, the public will have a hard time telling one motor from the other.

Not even the WEB 3.0 bros. They don’t have to. The marketing engine of the corporations has only one use for them.

Come over here. Don’t ask questions. You are our self-selected ambassadors. Start screaming WEB 3.0! Web 3.0! The best thing since sliced bread!

Final thoughts

By studying the history of anything, society keeps itself informed not to repeat the same mistakes made in the past. Even better still, society creates the space for itself to think about alternative paths that will allow it to steer down more favorable paths.

We’ve only scratched the surface of the thinking of our pioneers in this field. They realized, more than twenty years ago, how this technology could have a massive impact on the advancement of our society.

As we explore further down this road, we should appoint ourselves as the gatekeepers of the knowledge first documented by those pioneers.

No high-jackings allowed.

As the saying goes:

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

If you have any thoughts or questions on this, feel free to engage in the comment section.

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