Web Singularity

Abstract

Tim Berners Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) as defined in his 2001 paper with Hendler and Lassila though accurate is incomplete. The evolution of the web is not going to stop at its cognitive stage but will move towards becoming an ultra-smart agent and for that to happen the web needs more than knowledge navigation systems, it needs knowledge assimilation systems. The basic form of knowledge assimilation is a conversation. According to Kingsley Zipf, the linguist who studied the statistical behavior of different languages in 1932 in his work ‘Selected Studies of the Principle of Relative Frequency in Language’, conversation could be explained mathematically. Zipf laid down the behavior of language but he did not articulate the mathematics of language. The missing mathematics could not only resolve the semantic puzzle regarding the nexus between automation and human language, it could also allow machines to be taught language just like a child learning to speak from a parent. The semantic mathematics could potentially teach machines to think, learn and converse. These conversational machines could cluster the web and together create the 'Web Singularity’, a smart, intelligent web which could obviate the need for supercomputers at every home as it will rely on knowledge assimilation and consistent semantic learning.

Keywords: Web 3.0, Web 4.0, Web Singularity