This story is not a prophesy. It is not a prediction. Nor is it a prescriptive.

This story is a warning.

Reality is changing. Cheap, widely distributed bandwidth and advanced networking technologies are divorcing an ever-growing segment of the population from traditionally “real” constraints like geography and socio-economic status.

At work, your closest colleagues could be sitting in the next cubicle…or on the next continent. Cutting-edge simulation techniques will soon bridge even the visual divides, making you feel like you’re sitting across the table from someone thousands of miles away. Millions of people are already choosing what “reality” they inhabit.

At the moment, online multiplayer games are the most dramatic example of these constructed realities. According to economist Edward Castronova, at least 10 million people worldwide subscribe to an online world like World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies or WWII Online. While the vast majority of these worlds are centered around a videogame (kill the dragon, blow up the Death Star, shoot the Nazis), people are doing far more than just “playing” in them. They are making friends, discussing the weather and politics, getting (virtually) married, even making real money.

How “real” are these places? Plenty—at least to the people who live in them. According to Castronova’s book, Synthetic Worlds, fully 20% of the people who subscribe to EverQuest, a pioneering online game from Sony, consider its virtual world to be where they “live.” They travel elsewhere “occasionally.”

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An open-standards group has created a framework that could facilitate the global exchange of information among organizations. The naming system could benefit a wide range of disciplines, from disaster response to medical research.

The Open Group’s Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF) has the potential to hasten information exchange by indexing the world’s datasets — from e-commerce services to government registries and medical research databases — in one universally shared semantic repository.

And evidence shows that UDEF works. In October 2005, Open Group officials demonstrated the framework for members of the information technology community.

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Abstract
Personal Communication with mixed voice and data can be offered as a very rich set of applications, which can be rapidly introduced at low cost. Wireless and positioning technologies in combination with Internet’s demonstrated capability to integrate voice and data are further leveraged by the use of software agents. Our work clearly demonstrates the benefits of providing context-aware personal communication in terms of its potential to bringing about the rapid introduction, at low cost, of a rich communication space where artifacts, people, and non-physical entities are integral parts.

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The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the web. Leaving aside the artificial intelligence problem of training machines to behave like people, the Semantic Web approach instead develops languages for expressing information in a machine processable form.

This document gives a road map – a sequence for the incremental introduction of technology to take us, step by step, from the Web of today to a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful.

It follows the note on the architecture of the Web, which defines existing design decisions and principles for what has been accomplished to date.

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Many think the Internet is mainstream now, but that’s only true for nonpaying use, such as surfing for free information. As of 2003, commercial operations involving monetary exchange were limited to about 23% for broadband, 10% for e-tailing, 12% for B2B, 10% for distance learning, and 5% for music. And these are the most popular Internet applications. Others hardly register in adoption levels at all.

TechCast, a virtual think tank tracking the technology revolution, suggest that more-complex applications – online voting, e-health, the virtual university, virtual reality, and the global grid – are likely to follow later. These forms of e-commerce lag because they involve more exotic and costly technology, difficult institutional changes, and new forms of consumer behavior. Making the virtual university a reality, for instance, requires professors to switch from traditional lectures to communication technologies that are poorly developed, college administrators to justify the economic feasibility of more expensive systems, and students to feel comfortable and trusting in a virtual setting. E-health demands a similar transformation among physicians, hospitals, and patients.

Remaining developments – taxation, privacy and security, computerized research, telesurgery, and equal access – should appear at varying times throughout the next two decades. These applications differ because they do not serve major new social needs but involve modifications of existing systems.

Interwoven through these advances in e-commerce are other trends leading to a new generation of intelligent systems expected to emerge during the same time period. The TechCast project calls it TeleLiving – a conversational human-machine interface that allows a more comfortable and convenient way to shop, work, educate, entertain, and conduct most other social relationships [see THE FUTURIST, January-February 2003]. Advances in speech recognition, artificial intelligence, powerful chips, virtual environments, and flat-screen wall monitors are likely to produce this intelligent interface.

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A virtual human, Santos may save corporations big money and help the military save lives.

“Human modeling technology today is so refined, we can use it to test products before they’re ever produced,” said Karim Abdel-Malek, professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Virtual Soldier Research program at Iowa.

Because just about every manufactured product begins its life in the form of CAD data, a reduced prototype version can be loaded into the system, where it appears onscreen in three dimensions. With a mouse click on a control panel that resembles a PDA, an operator can command Santos to interact with the digital prototype, replicating how a human would engage with it in the real world. A physical prototype becomes unnecessary, saving manufacturing and materials costs.

Santos is so good at what he does that Caterpillar has hired him to make sure its heavy equipment is not only ergonomic but easy to service.

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A decade after browsers came into popular use, the Internet has reached into–and, in some cases, reshaped–just about every important realm of modern life. It has changed the way we inform ourselves, amuse ourselves, care for ourselves, educate ourselves, work, shop, bank, pray and stay in touch.

This entry is the Pew Internet Project’s contribution to “Trends 2005,” a publication of the newly-created Pew Research Center, a research orgnization that combines several analytical projects funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Taking a look back at adoption of the internet in the past decade, the Pew Internet Projects finds:

On a typical day at the end of 2004, some 70 million American adults logged onto the Internet to use email, get news, access government information, check out health and medical information, participate in auctions, book travel reservations, research their genealogy, gamble, seek out romantic partners, and engage in countless other activities. That represents a 37 percent increase from the 51 million Americans who were online on an average day in 2000 when the Pew Internet & American Life Project began its study of online life.

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A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities.

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The first steps in weaving the Semantic Web into the structure of the existing Web are already under way. In the near future, these developments will usher in significant new functionality as machines become much better able to process and “understand” the data that they merely display at present.

The essential property of the World Wide Web is its universality. The power of a hypertext link is that “anything can link to anything.” Web technology, therefore, must not discriminate between the scribbled draft and the polished performance, between commercial and academic information, or among cultures, languages, media and so on. Information varies along many axes. One of these is the difference between information produced primarily for human consumption and that produced mainly for machines. At one end of the scale we have everything from the five-second TV commercial to poetry. At the other end we have databases, programs and sensor output. To date, the Web has developed most rapidly as a medium of documents for people rather than for data and information that can be processed automatically. The Semantic Web aims to make up for this.

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