The current interest in social websites dubbed Web 2.0 as exemplified by MySpace, FaceBook and others has launched myriads of copycat sites. To me, the market is saturated and it has been difficult even for the big boys to convert their visitors.
Web 3.0, the next big thing?
Lets look forward to the “next big thing”. Named, imaginatively enough, Web 3.0, it is thought that this implementation will be all about data. The web currently is about documents where you find pages to read through or rather, skim through if you are the average website visitor.
Pages of information are in a fixed format laid out by the author and it takes a lot of work to pull together information from multiple sources to answer questions people may have. In fact much of this added value is lost in the current web.
It is all about the data
Data, on the other hand, can be structured or unstructured and can be relatively easily manipulated and reordered as needed. Data at least theoretically can be pulled from multiple sources and integrated to provide a specific answer.
Some personal finance programs already do this in a rudimentary way. If you get a printed statement from your bank and another from your investment company on your stock’s performance and so on, how easily can you find out what your total net worth is? Using commercial programs such as Money or Quicken, this data can be imported and tables and graphs quickly generated. Net worth becomes immediately obvious and easily updated as new data becomes available.
The semantic web
The bigger vision is to have a semantic web which allows machine readable data to be shared across the web in addition to the documents. There are major obstacles to this including issues of privacy and software engineering but I can see it come into play in some settings.
Already companies are integrating data from public databases and consortium databases with their own internal proprietary databases and this combined data allows conclusions to be reached that couldn’t be reached with any individual database.
Data applications
Scientific databases
Scientific databases are already taking this approach with bio-informaticians using complex methods to pull testable hypotheses out of this massive combined data set.
Financial databases
The financial sector including personal finance is another obvious area for implementation. We see this with tax programs that compare your individual data to national averages for your particular parameters and there is a lot more potential to this.
Demographic data
Tremendous amounts of demographic data are collected but the average person rarely encounters it except in press releases or news report. This can change through applications that pull out the relevant statistics to answer questions the average web user may want to ask.
Health records
Another area that should benefit is health records. Every time you go to a new doctor’s office or to the hospital, you are asked to fill out forms about your medical history, medications and allergies. Errors in this information can have deadly consequences and patients are not always in a position to provide it, for example in an emergency where they are unconscious.
Family medical history is also used to spot and diagnose hereditary disease. Family history can guide a doctor on the appropriate monitoring practices that should be carried out for each patient.
What domains might be of value?
So this long introduction leads us to the question: “What is in it for us?”. The bottom line is that domain names associated with data sharing applications should rise in value at least in some of the sectors I have mentioned.
I personally liked FamilyHealthMap.com and registered it. The capture of family and even extended family medical history can provide new insights into family medical practise, even if the full data is only seen by the family doctor. Privacy issues loom large here but I think the benefits will outweigh the risks. The health-care industry is already taking notice and testing applications.
deCode, an Icelandic company is already using this type of data for fundamental medical research. The Icelandic population is special in several ways. It had a small founder population, great genealogy records and a single payer health-care system with extensive medical records. This data is anonymized and used to identify genes that might be associated with genetic disease. Several candidate genes have already been identified.
In summary, mapping out disease occurring in families benefits fundamental research as well as the health-care management of individuals in that family. Privacy laws especially in relation to the medical insurance industry will be critical.
Whether the semantic web becomes pervasive or not, certain sectors will definitely benefit and domainers can benefit by investing now in domain names that might reflect those services.
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