# On the Future of Legal Publishing Services in the Semantic Web
## 2 From the Web 1.0 to the Web 3.0 (Or Semantic Web)  
The World Wide Web (WWW) is characterized by a continuous evolution which is necessary to respond to the increasing specialization of the users' information needs. The beginning of the Web era (early 1990s) is commonly known as \"Web 1.0\", namely the Web phase characterized by static information; a document-centric platform, including mainly text, images and hyperlinks, with limited interaction with the users. It made massive use of HTML as language to describe contents (a mix of contents and presentation features), including very little semantics. Information search and retrieval services were firstly developed to meet user's needs, hence the success of search engines, such as Altavista, Bing, Yahoo and Google. However, such retrieval services were (and nowadays are still mainly) characterized by keyword indexing, so that queries are mainly based on keywords while semantics is usually inferred by contexts (query refinement by other related keywords) as well as by algorithms able to infer semantics from contexts. The second phase of the Web (from early-mid 2000's) is commonly known as \"Web 2.0\" or _Collaborative Web_, namely the phase characterized by the possibility for the users to interact and share contents, as well as create them in a collaborative fashion. Success stories of this phase are services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Wikipedia, Myspace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc. This second generation of the Web introduced dynamic and interactive contents which need \"semantics\", namely explicit qualified concepts and relations able to describe contents and users' roles, as well as their relationships (examples are the \"friendship\" or the \"following/follower\" relationships in social networks). In this evolutive process the Web has become the main source of information not only for generic users but also for specialized ones, like scholars and professionals, holders of specific information needs. This is even more felt in the legal domain where users look for advanced information retrieval and reasoning services on legal materials. They are not only interested in legal documents matching certain keywords, but they are also interested in specific information, as for example the following expressed according to an increasing degree of complexity:  
* Which version of law n. [NN] issued on [date1] was in force on [date2]? [date1]? * In which laws Mr. [XY] is the first signer? * Which laws on consumer protection do apply in a [specific region]? * Which are the Rights of the Consumer according to the EU law? None of the current general-purpose search engines provides facilities able to respond to such specialized information needs. To implement advanced services able to meet such requirements, the semantics of the information has to be understandable not only by humans (as in the Web 1.0 and 2.0) but also understandable and processable by the machines. This is actually what the Web 3.0 (or _Semantic Web_) is: an evolution of the Web characterized by information understandable by both humans and machines. If endowed with semantically qualified data (_Smart Data_), the Web becomes the effective environment where distributed machines will be able to work together, as well as generate and distribute useful information tailored to the users' needs. We are nowadays on the edge of this important evolution whose main objective is the development of advanced information access and management services. In this regard, the W3C has promoted a hierarchy of standards (see Figure 1) for the identification of information resources, as well as the description of their structure and semantics. The basic level of this hierarchy involves digital encoding of information by using the Unicode standard as well as uniform resources identification (URI).