Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
be immediately accessible without searching and software will be able
to extract meaning and order from the web and how people use it.
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The
idea of Web 3.0 is based on a set of technologies that are just beginning
to emerge, especially the use of the Semantic Web to create a seamless
space of interaction in which the web itself becomes able to “read” and
“understand” its own content. Navigating around in Web 3.0 promises
to be a process of both human and computer cognition—a further era-
sure of the boundary between minds and machines.
Others see Web 3.0 as allowing increased use of three-dimensional
spaces, an apotheosis of Second Life, which “opens up new ways to
connect and collaborate.”
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Yet more provocatively, it marks a return to
the sensual pre-web realm (Web 0.0): Web 3.0 is “the biological, digital
analogue web. Information is made of a plethora of digital values co-
alesced for sense and linked to the real world by analogue interfaces. . . .
The web . . . is digested, thus integrated into our real world.”
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In this
vision, Web 3.0 is a wet web, existing at the interface of the biological
and the digital. Biologists and doctors have already begun to specu-
late about the possibilities of Web 3.0 for biomedicine, arguing that,
“Whereas web 1.0 and 2.0 were embryonic, formative technologies,
web 3.0 promises to be a more mature web where better 'pathways' for
information retrieval will be created, and a greater capacity for cogni-
tive processing of information will be built.”
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These individuals imagine
an Internet like J. C. R. Licklider's “world brain”—a growing biological
system. Biological practice and the problems and practices of Internet-
working have become irreducibly connected. On the one hand, in the
very near future one will not be able to do biology without using the
tools of Web 3.0—vast amounts of heterogeneous data will be search-
able and intelligible only by using the Semantic Web. On the other hand,
the development of Web 3.0 has been driven by biological problems
and biological data. Biology and networking are increasingly organized
around a common set of practices and problems.
This periodization of the history of the web provides a suggestive
analogy with the history of biology over the last seventy years. Biol-
ogy 0.0 was the pre-informatic biology of the pre-World War II era—
biologists understood function in morphological terms, as being de-
termined by physical contact involving interlocking shapes (such as
lock-and-key mechanisms). The rise of communications and informa-
tion theory in the late 1940s and early 1950s inspired Biology 1.0, in
which biological molecules now communicated with one another by
exchanging information. Information was encoded in DNA, and it
was this information that drove biological function. The rise of bio-
