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By John Markoff, The New York Times, Nov 12

SAN FRANCISCO � From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of startup companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.

Their goal is to add a layer of meaning to the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide � and provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than 50 years.

The effort, referred to as Web 3.0, is in its infancy, and the idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies such as IBM and Google and at small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.

The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web.

"I call it the World Wide Database," said Nova Spivack, founder of a startup whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of information, rather than storing the information itself. "We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data."

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Spivack's company, Radar Networks, for example, is one of several working to exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.

Radar's technology is based on a next-generation database system that stores associations, such as one person's relationship to another (colleague, friend, brother), rather than specific items such as text or numbers.

One example that hints at the potential of such systems is KnowItAll, a project by a group of University of Washington faculty members and students that has been financed by Google. One sample system created using the technology is Opine, which is designed to extract and aggregate user-posted information from product and review sites.

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