1. Web 3.0 – challenge or
opportunity for
accountants?
Clive Holtham
Cass Business School
c.w.holtham@city.ac.uk

2. Timeline
1951 First Business Computer
1969 Internet
1982 IBM PC
1991 WWW Web 1.0
2000 Web 2.0 (social)
20?? Web 3.0 (semantic)
20?? Web 4.0 (artificial intelligence)

3. Nova Spivack Roadmap

4. Tim-Berners Lee, 1999
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers]
become capable of analyzing all the data on the
Web – the content, links, and transactions
between people and computers. A „Semantic
Web‟, which should make this possible, has yet
to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day
mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily
lives will be handled by machines talking to
machines. The „intelligent agents‟ people have
touted for ages will finally materialize.

5. Web 3.0 perspectives
Semantic Web
The Internet of Things
M2M
Pull

6. Importance of 3.0 to directors
Transformations of information and knowledge
Investments and risk
Openness and transparency
Efficiency
Barriers & mindsets

7. The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Cathedral: carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of
mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be
released before its time
Bazaar: a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and
approaches
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3/raymond/
http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/

8. Cathedral Bazaar
Standards-based Organic
Collaborative Competitive
Taxonomies Natural Language
Processing

9. Records 3200 BC
Physical Human Archive/
Record Process
Object/ Notes Destroy
Event
Human
Action

10. Records – machine based
Physical Machine Archive/
Record Process
Object/ Data Destroy
Event
Machine
Action

11. Metadata
Data on, in,
Physical Machine about the
Object/ Data
Event
object/event

14. Pull – Semantic Web Acid Test
1. Is it semantic?
1. Are the terms unambiguous?
2. Are they tagged in a royalty-free format, governed by a
non-profit institution, that all software programs can
understand?
2. Is it on the web?
1. Is it online using a common name space that makes it
easily findable?
2. Is it shared between collaborators and companies?
3. Does it use the information already online to get
smarter as more people use the system?

16. Turn of the
screw

17. The Machine Screw
Principle discovered around 400 BC
Limited use until machine tools made mass production possible (18th
cent.)
Every machine shop and foundry made unique sizes and thread
dimensions
1841: Joseph Whitworth presented “The Uniform System of Screw-
Threads” to Britain‟s Institute of Civil Engineers
1864: William Sellers proposes “On a Uniform System of Screw Threads”
to the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia
Enabled interchangeable parts and tooling for mechanization and mass
production
1945: British and American standards merged

18. A successful standard
on

19. ISO 216 Communications
Standard
Globalization starts with getting the details right.
Inconsistent use of SI units and international
standard paper sizes remain today a primary
cause for U.S. businesses failing to meet the
expectations of customers worldwide
Marcus Kuhn, University of Cambridge Computer
Laboratory

20. German standard DIN 476 in 1922, and soon introduced in many other
countries, Belgium (1924), Netherlands (1925), Norway (1926), Switzerland
(1929), Sweden (1930), Soviet Union (1934), Hungary (1938), Italy (1939),
Uruguay (1942), Argentina (1943), Brazil (1943), Spain (1947), Austria
(1948), Romania (1949), Japan (1951), Denmark (1953), Czechoslovakia
(1953), Israel (1954), Portugal (1954), Yugoslavia (1956), India (1957),
Poland (1957), United Kingdom (1959), Venezuela (1962), New Zealand
(1963), Iceland (1964), Mexico (1965), South Africa (1966), France (1967),
Peru (1967), Turkey (1967), Chile (1968), Greece (1970), Zimbabwe (1970),
Singapore (1970), Bangladesh (1972), Thailand (1973), Barbados (1973),
Australia (1974), Ecuador (1974), Columbia (1975) and Kuwait (1975). It
finally became both an international standard (ISO 216) as well as the
official United Nations format in 1975 and it is today used in almost all
countries on this planet, leaving North America as the only remaining
exception.

21. Taxonomies
Physical Machine Archive/
Record Process
Object/ Data Destroy
Event
Rules to
Machine
represent the Action
data

22. XML (Deloitte, 2010)

23. Acord XML Dictionary

24. XBRL
eXtensible Business Reporting Language
“a free XML-based specification that uses accepted financial
reporting standards and practices to exchange financial
statements across all software and technologies, including the
internet”
AICPA led, with 30+ sponsors including Big 5, software vendors,
ICAEW, IBM
www.xbrl.org
Conceived in April 1998 Charles Hoffman, a CPA with the
firm Knight Vale and Gregory in Tacoma, Washington
October 2, 1998, AICPA agreed to fund the project to create
a prototype

25. XBRL
.. a standard for the electronic exchange of
data between businesses and on the
internet. Under XML, identifying tags are
applied to items of data so that they can be
processed efficiently by computer software.

26. Taxonomies (Deloitte, 2010)

28. Semantic Web Stack

29. Related Technologies
Tagging
RFID
M2M
Remote Control
Digital to Analogue

30. M2M

31. Openness and transparency

32. Conclusion
Techology already exists
Not necessarily economic yet
Standards are central
Conflicting stakeholder interests
Vendors will continue to oppose standards
Professions will be central to the open standards
without which Web 3.0 will be stifled