WEB 3.0. From cytocentricism to user centrism, from anarchy to pluralism

The text summarizes the ideas expressed by the author in the report " Philosophy of Evolution and Evolution of the Internet ."

The main disadvantages and problems of the modern web:

1. Catastrophic network congestion with multiple duplicated content, in the absence of a reliable search engine for the original source.
2. Dispersed and disconnected content - the inability to make an exhaustive sample of topics and, especially, at the levels of analysis.
3. The dependence of the presentation of content on publishers (often random, pursuing their own, usually commercial, goals).
4. Weakly related search results to the ontology (structure of interests) of the user.
5. Low availability and poorly classified archived content of the network (in particular, social networks).
6. The small participation of professionals in the organization (systematization) of content, although it is they who, by the nature of their activities, are daily engaged in the systematization of knowledge, but the result of their work is recorded only on local computers.

The main reason for the littering and irrelevance of the network is the site device inherited from Web 1.0, in which the main person in the network is not the information owner, but the owner of its location. That is, the ideology of material content carriers was transferred to the network, where the main thing was the place (library, kiosk, fence) and object (book, newspaper, piece of paper), and only then their content. But since, unlike the real world, space in the virtual world is unlimited and costs a penny, the number of places offering information exceeded the number of units of unique content by orders of magnitude. Web 2.0 partially corrected the situation: each user received his personal space - an account on a social network and the freedom to configure it to a certain extent. But the problem with the uniqueness of the content has only worsened: copy-paste technology has increased the degree of duplication of information by orders of magnitude.
Efforts to overcome these problems of the modern Internet are concentrated in two, to some extent interrelated, directions.
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1. Improving search accuracy by microformatting distributed content across sites.
2. Creating "repositories" of reliable content.

The first direction, of course, allows you to get a more relevant search, compared to the option of specifying keywords, but does not eliminate the problem of duplicate content, and most importantly, it does not eliminate the possibility of fraud - the information is systematized by its owner rather than the author, and certainly not the consumer who is most interested in the relevance of the search.
Developments in the second direction (Google, Freebase.Com , CYC , etc.) provide unambiguously reliable information, but only in areas where this is possible - there remains an open problem of the pluralism of knowledge in areas where there are no uniform standards and a common logic of data systematization. The problem of obtaining, organizing and incorporating into the database of new (current) content is difficult to solve, which is the main problem in a modern socially oriented network.

What solutions does the user centric activity approach offer in the report “ Philosophy of Evolution and the Evolution of the Internet ”?

1. Rejection of the site structure - the main element of the network should be a unit of content, not its location; the network node must be a user, with a set of content units configured relative to it, which can be called a user ontology.
2. Logical relativism (pluralism), stating the impossibility of the existence of a single logic of information organization, recognizing the need for a non-finite number of almost independent ontological clusters even within the same subject matter. Each cluster is an ontology of a certain user (individual or generalized).
3. An active approach to the construction of ontologies, implying that the ontology (cluster structure) is formed and manifested in the activity of the content generator. Such an approach necessarily requires reorienting network services from generating content to generating ontologies, which in essence means creating tools for implementing any activity in the network. The latter will attract many professionals to the network who will ensure its functioning.

The last item can be described in more detail:

1. An ontology is created by a professional in the course of his professional activity. The system provides the professional with all the tools for entering, organizing and processing any type of data.
2. Ontology is revealed in the activity of a professional. Now it has become possible, since a large percentage of the operations of any activity are performed or recorded on a computer. A professional should not build ontologies, he should act in a software environment, which is simultaneously the main tool of its activities and the ontology generator.
3. Ontology becomes the main result of the activity (both for the system and for the professional) - the product of professional work (text, presentation, table) is only a reason for building the ontology of this activity. The ontology is not tied to the product (text), but the text is understood as an object generated in a specific ontology.
4. An ontology should be understood as an ontology of a specific activity; how many activities are so many ontologies.

So, the main conclusion: Web 3.0 is a transition from a website-centric web to a semantic user-centric network - from a network of web pages with arbitrarily configured content to a network of unique objects combined into a non-finite number of cluster ontologies. On the technical side, Web 3.0 is a multitude of online services that provide a full range of tools for entering, editing, searching and displaying any type of content, which at the same time provide ontologization of users' activities, and through it, ontologization of content.

Alexander Boldachev, 2012-2015