ABSTRACT
The notion of the techno-social system refers to a system that enhances human cognition, communication, and cooperation. Cognition is the necessary prerequisite to communicate and the precondition to cooperate. In other words, cooperation needs communication and communication needs cognition. The Web is the largest transformable information construct, introduced by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Much progress has been made regarding the Web and related technologies in the past two decades. The original intent of core Web technologies was to enable linking and sharing of documents. But it has evolved from the basic web of documents into an intermittent web of people and eventually the current web of data. This chapter illustrates the evolutionary graph of the Web, explicating the generations of the Web referred to as Web 1.0 (web of cognition), Web 2.0 (web of communication), and Web 3.0 (web of cooperation). A special section on the buzzing term ‘big data’ is included too.
