After taking one of the first Internet companies, EarthWeb, public in 1998, Nova Spivack, grandson of Peter Drucker, has now founded Radar Networks to take the Web to the next level.
Moving from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, the information in documents will have to be turned into data that a machine can read and evaluate on its own. Only then will computers be able to take over tasks we now do by hand.
The term "semantic Web" first gained prominence in a 2001 article in Scientific American. The article described software agents roaming across the Web, making travel arrangements and doctor appointments and muting the stereo when the telephone rings. This vision couldn't be achieved with today's Internet. For the semantic Web to work, online information needs to be computer-readable with enough metadata attached to it to make it meaningful.
Spivack's vision for Radar Networks grew out of conversations he had with Drucker in the summer of 2001, about four years before the professor-coach's passing. "We would meet for two hours a day and talk about organizations vs. organisms," Spivack says. Drucker was particularly interested in what he called the intelligence of organizations. "My grandfather helped me think about group minds," Spivack says. "How groups get more intelligent and how connections play into that."
In a sense, Radar Networks' engine allows a person to build a database around any question, project or interest s/he may have and then start looking at it from different perspectives. "You start to see new ways to look at the information," Spivack says. "What gets me excited is what we can do when we have billions of objects and 10 million people using them."
Radar Networks hopes to be the engine powering all that, providing a massive, meaning-filled Web of data that can be infinitely poked and prodded and leveraged. The company will make its money from advertising and premium subscriptions; the basic service will be free.
Today, Radar Networks, Google Base and Flickr are the first data islands to pop into public view. Larger islands are being formed by corporations and government agencies. Many more will rise. Spivack is counting on those islands to eventually coalesce. That's when the future vision becomes reality.
Source: BUSINESS 2.0, July 2007