We have had the first decade of the web, or Web 1.0, which was about the development of the basic platform of the internet and the ability to make huge amounts of information widely accessible, "and we're nearing the end of the second decade - Web 2.0 - which was all about the user interface" and enabling users to connect with one another.
"Now we're about to enter the third decade - Web 3.0 - which is about making the web much smarter."

So what is Web 3.0? It appears to an attempt at a more catchy name for the much-awaited and long-predicted "Semantic Web," in which meaning is attached to content accessible across the Web. Semantic Web promises to put a lot more intelligence — artificial intelligence — out there in the network of networks, and is certainly a step in the right direction.

Facebook, YouTube and the other social networks and blogs that fall within the scope of 'Web 2.0' may be beginning to penetrate the mainstream, but to those whose Cassandra-like vision lets them see the web in 2020 and beyond, they are but a pixel in a much larger picture.

Web 3.0 refers to the attempt by technologists to overhaul radically the basic platform of the internet so that it 'understands' the near infinite pieces of information that reside on it and draws connections between them.

Web 3.0 is purportedly about the application of artificial intelligence to the bazillion terabytes of data that can be brought together for analysis from across the Internet. It's predictive analytics — now in use in financial risk management tools — along with association between datasets. It has interesting potential at the enterprise level — vendors such as SAS have some interesting tools that provide some interesting capabilities.

In Web 3.0, the emphasis will revert to the back end, with a renewal of the web's key index - the essential data that is catalogued by search engines like Google. That in turn, Mr Spivack says, will make way for Web 4.0, another 'front-end decade', only with more advanced programs than the likes of Facebook.

A prime example of a Web 3.0 technology is 'natural-language search', which refers to the ability of search engines to answer full questions such as 'Which is the most visited place in India?'. In some cases, the sites that appear in the results do not reference the original search terms, reflecting the fact that the web knows, for instance, that Tajmahal is a place, and that is in India.