School of Information Systems

Evolution of the World Wide Web

04 May 2021

World Wide Web

World Wide Web (Web) or WWW is an area of information used by global identifiers (URLs / Uniform Resource Locators) to identify useful resources. WWW is a collection of server sites from around the world with the aim of providing data and information for the exchange.

Different between Internet and World Wide Web.

Some people usually use the words “Internet” and “World Wide Web” interchangeably. They think they’re the same thing, but in fact it’s completely different. The Internet is completely different from the WWW. The Internet is a global network of devices such as computers, laptops, etc. The Internet enables people to send emails to other people and chat with them online. For example, when you send an email or chat with someone online, you’re using the Internet.

However, if you want to open a website like google.com for search, use the World Wide Web. a network of servers over the Internet. You request a web page from your computer using a browser, and the server renders that page in your browser.

The computer is called a client, which runs a program (web browser) and asks the other server for the required information.

The Evolution of the World Wide Web

  • Web 1.0 – Read Only Web

Web 1.0 was the first web generation that is a new revolution in the world of the Internet because it has changed the way the industry and the media work. Basically, the website that was built in the first generation is generally developed to someone who want to accessing information and it has a slightly interactive nature where visitors can only read because there is no process to input data.

  • Web 2.0 – Read and Write Web

Web 2.0 was the second stage of the World Wide Web. This generation was also known as the “The Social web” because in this generation the users not only able to read the websites but they also can connect with other users. Now, most of the people started to collaborated on ideas, they could share information and create information that was available to the whole world.

In web 2.0, the focus was on connection and interaction between people but Web 3.0 focuses is mainly on connecting people with devices using the internet, that’s why we call it “Internet of Things”.

IoT means the interconnection between all of the devices and the internet so that they can send and receive data. It is most important developments in the field of internet and will finally lead from Web 3.0 to Web 4.0. Now we can see several mobile apps based on IoT which connect many homes or office devices that interact with each other through the internet.

  • Web 3.0 – The Semantic Web

Web 3.0 is a technologies that give a new way that for helping the computer to organize and draw conclusions from the data online. By definition, basically the Semantic Web has the same goal because the Semantic Web has Web content that can not only be expressed in natural language understood by humans, but also in forms that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents. Through this Semantic Web, various software will be able to search, share and integrate information in an easier or more precise way Web 3.0 is a realization of the development of artificial intelligence systems (artificial intelligence) to create global data that can be understood by the system, so the system can reinterpret these data to visitors properly.

  • Web 4.0 – The Symbiotic Web

Web 4.0 is also known as symbiotic web. The dream behind of the symbiotic web is interaction between humans and machines in symbiosis. It will be possible to build more powerful interfaces such as mind controlled interfaces using web 4.0. In simple words, machines would be clever on reading the contents of the web.

Web 4.0 will be the read-write-execution-concurrency web. Web 4.0 (The webOS) will be like a middleware in which will functioning like an operating system. The webOS will be parallel to the human brain and implies a massive web of highly intelligent interactions. Although there is no exact idea about web 4.0 and its technologies, but it is obvious that the web is moving toward using artificial intelligence to become as an intelligent web.

References : 

  • http://geekswithblogs.net/Xicomtech/archive/2018/04/09/244669.aspx
  • https://medium.com/@deni.kurniawan/perkembangan-web-1-0-ke-4-0-inovasi-di-industri-4-0-5-0-2776339d2f8b
  • https://medium.com/@tuhfatussalisah/world-wide-web-from-web-1-0-to-web-4-0-and-society-5-0-48690a43b776
Marisa Karsen