Le web est mort, vive le web!

“Forty years ago, Bob Kahn and I did the design of the Internet. Thirty years ago, we turned it on. Just last year [2012], we turned on the production Internet. You’ve been using the experimental version for the last 30 years. The production version, it uses IP version 6. It has 3.4 times 10 to the 38th possible terminations. That’s a number only that Congress can appreciate. But it leads to what is coming next.”

This is a quote from Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the internet. What resonated with me was that he said the version we’ve been using the last 30 years had been the “experimental version.” In other words, we were not only the test subjects but the experimenters. We started learning what the internet was, learning the language and lingo, and the general ways of the web. Technologies came and went but everything gravitated back to the internet and web standards set out so long ago.

The Interspecies Internet: An Idea in Progress

What is “next” Vint Cerf alluded to is a couple of things. The quote is from a TED talk called “The interspecies internet? An idea in progress.” If you thought that Google Translate is really rough around the edges, just you wait until we are translating dog-human communication. Seriously, even though interspecies communication is really experimentation, human translation still is.

Apple’s ‘Siri’ voice assistant illustrates what may be the biggest problem facing AI

The web has been treated by many as a dumping ground of data. There is enormous data on the internet that is unstructured for which exists a web of links but little web of knowledge. The push to structure all this data in a meaningful way that can connect ideas, not words, but ideas to one another is called the “semantic web”. The “semantic web” was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web.

The other thing Vint Cerf had mentioned was the astronomical number of terminations, ie. IP addresses. The vast number of modern sensors and devices that map to IPv6 will be known as the “internet of things” and that’s another mountain of data that will need to be analyzed.

The “internet of things” + “semantic web” will require a whole new way of thinking. We will have to think what data means to us, how does it connect to other meaningful data and in different contexts or cultures. Experimentation is over. Businesses and organizations will have to retool their websites and web applications, and even think differently. The time when we treated the web as a dumping ground is over. The web is dead, long live the web.