Since SOA is one of my greatest interests and SOA is a concept with ongoing development, It is interesting to follow the discussions of the relationships between SOA and Web 2.0.

The burst of the dot-com bubble in 2001 marked a turning point for the web and many people concluded that the web was overhyped and dead. More positive people like OReilly Media and MediaLive International said that bubble-bursting was a common feature of all technical revolutions and it marks the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. In this center stage, the real success stories will show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other. From these viewpoints the concept of Web 2.0 began with conference brainstormings session between the two organizations and the concept is still being discussed at the Web 2.0 Conferences.

Web 2.0 can be visualized as a set of principles and practices that are based on the Strategy of "The Web As Platform" and the core competencies of Services, Architecture of Participation, Cost Effectively Scalability etc. The whole setup is mapped in the mindmap, which u can see here.

According to Dion Hinchcliffe are some of the similarities between the two concepts:

- Both are slippery and nebulous concepts with many different definitions
- Both encourages the liberation of the underlying functionality of software systems as services by providing open access to everyone that need it
- Both provide the building blocks for creating people-centric processes

The main difference is that most SOAs are conceptually inside an organization's firewall or VPN while Web 2.0 envisions the global Web as scope for building functionality. There for must the organizations SOAs get out of the organizations boundaries so Web 2.0 can be conceptualized as a global SOA. More over can the organizations working with SOA as their architectural model connect it to their Web/Web 2.0.

Conclusion: There are synergies between the two concepts. Other synergies is that, SOA has much central control, management, and governance while Web 2.0 is autonomious, decentralized, grassroots, and with absolutely no command and control structure. Web 2.0 also talks about presentation or GUIs, while SOA is largely silent on this issue of presentation. So SOA tends to be generic and faceless where Web 2.0 have more human/service focus.

This was about web 2.0. Some IT-Architects and SOA-evangilists talk about 3. generation internet and semantic web and the connection to SOA. - Do anyone know anything about these concepts?