Semantic Web will be more dominating than you could have ever imagined

Imagine an organisation with almost no infrastructure, sufficient enough to be called as a registered office. Almost all employees of this organisation operate out of home. Their connection/interaction with peers and other co-workers happens thro a web based virtual network where they can not only interact seamlessly with each other but also if required talk & see each other over the ‘web’, effortlessly. The conference room becomes a conference desk. Your interface is only a browser. This means you don't have a Pentium/AMD processor, a hard drive and a motherboard etc. In fact you don’t buy any of them at all. You only purchase an LCD, a keyboard and perhaps a mouse (if not already built-in in a keyboard). That is what a ‘computer’ will be minus CPU. An LCD has set of USB connectors, and one of them you'd use to connect to your ISP. Thus no desktop OS and no more (re)booting time! We will have a similar model like a free web-based email service. Now the ISPs or web companies will provide the infrastructure for you (a virtual HD and required computing speed) on their servers, free of cost. All the tools required for you to work on, and be productive, will be on the web. People will connect and use on-demand software - some free, some paid – on their virtual space.

The browser will track each action done by the knowledge-worker on the web - I am assuming here you guys know what a semantic web will be. The browser relays your action and your ISP stores the data systemically into a ‘cloud’, which in turn is available on the web. Slowly the karma of a web-worker is populated. Slowly one more human capital is added to the wired-web. A glocal emerges. A glocal starts leaving her strain on the web as & when she works. Btw much of this has been happening already. Now this is exciting: The phantom, your browser, starts capturing your expression. If, in some cases, the browser cannot derive the expression directly then it will do with in-built NLP. The reporting officers, on-demand, will process their team data and examine the health of their team. The HR folks will evaluate the cognitive bandwidth of employees. By this time they map the intellects of their knowledge-worker effectively now. The CEO, with super-rich BI tool, ascertains the mood of his organisation. The stakeholders too are hooked on a similar system. The stock markets now react based on this derived social-graph. The visualization software dopes in further to the dynamics. And so on … you will be watched not by any camera or a third person but through a keyboard & a mouse. After all, your mind interfaces with these electronic systems mostly through your fingers. Isn’t it?

On the social side, much of this is happening already with sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google etc. capturing user behavior time after time. Also some search engines have already been built around semantics, viz. hakia & wolfram-alpha. Will organisations adopt this social & semantic model within their units? Will one day work and social life be all on one stage available transparently? The world is already a smaller place. How much more will it shrink?

Of course there could be downside of having such a system in place (data security, safeguarding IPs etc.) for commercial organisations. But let me tell you: if banks can go online (24x7) then everything is possible. So will companies, in future, adopt such kind of more-or-less complete virtual model? Some companies, few years ago, who didn’t entertain the idea of hosting their confidential data with a 3rd party solution provider have realized the benefits of having such a extended system. The SaaS model, the cloud computing model and others are not only being explored but also being capitalized to the fullest. The mantra now is ‘outsource the overheads but keep the intellects’.

Welcome to virtual reality. Errr ... if that makes you think about a typical gaming stuff, no I don’t mean that. It simply means living-on-the-web. Ah, again, you got it wrong! No, I don’t mean the Second Life concept either. I meant an sound enterprise ecosystem where humans will interact, meet, and ideate with humans, more often, on the web - thro a browser than thick clients or physical means. The web (companies) will adopt what organisations adopted few years ago - open door policy … thus emerging as a transparent-web. So don’t be surprised if you find out, someday, that your e-DNA already exists on the web :)