Web 3.0: Convergence of Web 2.0 and the Semantic WebThe World Wide Web (WWW) has drastically improved access to digitally stored information. However, content in the WWW has so far only been machine-readable but not machineunderstandable. Since information in the WWW is mostly represented in natural language, the available documents are only fully understandable by human beings. The Semantic Web is based on the content-oriented description of digital documents with standardized vocabularies that provide machine understandable semantics. The result is the transformation from a Web of Links into a Web of Meaning/Semantic Web [1]. On the other hand, the traditional Web 1.0 has recently undergone an orthogonal shift into a Web of People/Web 2.0 where the focus is set on folksonomies, collective intelligence, and the wisdom of groups (see arrow B in Fig. 1). Only the combined muscle of semantic web technologies and broad user participation will ultimately lead to a Web 3.0, with completely new business opportunities in all segments of the ITC market.Wolfgang Wahlster, Andreas Dengel et alAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License (CC BY-NC-SA)
