Back to dissertation.

5. Conclusion

This dissertation was really exiting in many ways. First of all, my researches on web history have pointed out one future for the web, a future following one man's vision.

This vision has driven my researches: How communities could live on the web? How Tim Berners Lee's vision could help them?

These deep researches about a web more semantic, open, trustable and accessible were also linked to nowadays tendencies as blogging, mobile web, etc...

The weird thing is that during the last days of my dissertation I have discovered that some parts of the Tim's vision are now becoming tendencies:

• September, 20: Six Apart is opening the social graph using FOAF (Recordon 2007)
• September, 25: Orange becomes an OpenID provider and consumer (Nixey 2007)

Even it sounds good, Web Semantic and more generally W3C values have still a long road to reach mass markets and niches.

This dissertation was also a good opportunity to create my first open project: PortalLib. Even the library is still quite empty (only 2 components), I have noticed that it already exists very nice tools for handling SW technologies (RDF/OWL) with PHP. Each day, these technologies seem more and more mature. Anyway, weaving the semantic web shouldn't take long anymore. Some great semantic web companies carrying a true vision are building the first semantic web killer-applications (dbpedia.org , freebase.com and radarnetworks.com are good examples).

Another very interesting point was the studies of current web communities. Horizontal networks have serious problems concerning security, child protection issues and specialized advertising. People are also bored by too big networks without any specific customization (horizontal networks are not build for a specific community) so new restricted networks are created: asmallworld.net or ning.com for instance. At the same time some horizontal portals are becoming vertical by the nature of their communities (Orkut can't be anymore considered as horizontal with a 72% Brazilian population). People should remember Chris Anderson's sentence: "The mass market is turning into a mass of niches".