Communications - March 2010

the future Web
will facilitate
a more pervasive
and intuitive user
experience, providing
content or services
specific to the
user’s implied
needs, suggests
Richard Stanton.

most cases was not compiled for the purpose of matchmaking, making the effective organization of it a challenge that Stanton says is unique to the company. One aspect of this challenge, in particular, is replacing existing multi-select fields by using semantic data relationships from narrative fields.

According to Stanton, Bintro’s goal
is not only to demonstrate the use of
Web 3.0 technologies today, but also
to build an engine for powering other
Web 3.0 apps in the future. “Web 3.0
is all about personalization,” he says.
“Instead of simply looking at the user
as an eyeball, Web 3.0 aims to look
at the user as an engaged personality
with multiple facets from which the
context of a user’s statement can draw
a better result.”
Lassila points to this type of highly
customized user experience as an on-
going challenge at Nokia. “This is good
for the users, but I am not entirely con-
vinced how sustainable this is, as the
implementation part becomes more
and more difficult,” according to Las-
sila. Still, he says Semantic Web tech-
nologies hold great promise, particu-
larly in situations in which users might
require useful information from mul-
tiple data sources. “There are plenty of
existing opportunities for clever data
management,” he says.

Further Reading

Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., and Lassila, O.

The Semantic Web. Scientific American 284,

5, May 2001. Harris, D. Web 2.0 Evolution into The Intelligent Web 3.0, Emereo Publishing, Brisbane, Australia, 2008. Hendler, J. Web 3.0 emerging. Computer 42, 1, January 2009. Shadbolt, N., Berners-Lee, T., and Hall, W. The Semantic Web revisited. Intelligent Systems 21, 3, May 2006.

Warren, P., Davies, J., and Brown, D.

The Semantic Web: from vision to reality.

ICT Futures: Delivering Pervasive, Real-time and Secure Services, John Wiley & Sons, hoboken, nJ, 2008.

based in Los Angeles, Kirk L. Kroeker is a freelance editor and writer specializing in science and technology.

Networking
Bell Labs to Reduce Networks’ Energy Usage

Could today’s communications networks be 1,000 times more energy efficient? bell Labs thinks so, and has launched a global consortium, Green touch, which aims to make networks 1,000 times more energy efficient than they are today.

“a thousand-fold reduction
is roughly equivalent to being
able to power the world’s
communications networks,
including the internet, for three
years using the same amount of
energy that it currently takes to
run them for a single day,” bell
Labs said in a statement.

potential to be 10,000 times more energy efficient than they presently are. “a concerted effort to bring energy efficiency closer to these theoretical limits would not only shrink the estimated 2% of the world’s carbon emissions iCt contributes directly, but also lower the 98% contributed by all the other sectors touched directly and indirectly by iCt,” according to bell Labs.

the Green touch consortium will explore the fundamental properties of communication networks and technologies— optical, wireless, electronics, processing, routing, and architecture—and study their physical limits by applying established formulas such as shannon’s law.