Health 2.0

Yesterday’s CCTSI Informatics Seminar was presented by Dr. Diane Skiba on Health 2.0 Tools; how the ‘wisdom of crowds’ from Web environments is influencing health care and academia. Yes, despite the resistance, Web 2.0 is penetrating health care. Dr. Skiba’s message is that, with healthcare becoming more consumer driven, Web 2.0 technologies will continue to make inroads with or without full clinical acceptance. It is therefore incumbent upon healthcare providers to adopt the technologies so that the information and knowledge requirements of patients and their families can be served more effectively.

Personal Health Records (PHR) such as Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault, online patient communities such as PatientsLikeMe and health oriented Web sites such as WebMD and Revolution Health are growing rapidly, Americans are relying more on online sources for healthcare information than their physicians. The need and value of this resource is well established, it’s now a question of how the medical community intends to work with it.

Dr. Skiba also pointed out the need to meet the needs of the future nursing staff members most of whom are now in school and are submersed in social networking and online collaboration tools. These current students have developed learning and work processes are more aligned with Web 2.0 technologies than traditional methods. How will these future nurses be recruited and integrated into medical institutions unless the institutions adopt new the information technologies?

Finally, the amount of information being accumulated in PHRs, online patient communities, health wikis and blogs is increasing at an exponential rate and will continue for the foreseeable future. How can this knowledge be effectively used by clinicians to the benefit of future patients? In this respect, online health information is little different than the vast amounts of information being accumulated in other sectors. But if the potential exists for lifesaving therapies to lie hidden in the health data sources it makes these sources much more valuable.

Lijit Unplugged

A fun and, dare I say, educational event hosted by Silicon Flatirons tonight featuring Todd Vernon and Walter Knapp, the CEO and COO respectively of Lijit. This is part of the Entrepreneurs Unplugged series, a chance to introduce local Boulder entrepreneurs to CU students, faculty and community to get their entrepreneurial juices flowing.

Lijit's mission is to provide super cool services to online publishers of all sizes that help them understand their readers better and create a business around their passion. It’s featured right here on this blog. Lijit not only provides search capability for blogs, it links to the blogger's network to provide levels of authority in the search results.

This method of leveraging social networks to refine search results adds up to better targeted advertising, i.e. double the click through rate of Google Ads.

According to the two executives, Boulder still gets 80% of its venture funding from out of state. They didn’t go into any great detail on how those funds were distributed, but the upshot is that most profits flow out of state once a liquidation event occurs. Another issue they mentioned with the Boulder startup environment is that it’s easy to start, difficult to exit.

The audience was enthusiastic, perhaps cooking up new entrepreneurial efforts for the future.

The Promises of Web 3.0

Put off by the unfulfilled hype of Web 2.0, some in the knowledge management community are now clamoring for Web 3.0. Dr. David J. Roberts, Chief Scientist at iBASEt, writes in Oracle's Profit Online that Web 2.0 technologies aren't really worth the bother and that the real value sought by enterprises lies in Web 3.0 technologies.

The compelling promise offered by Web 3.0 technologies is the ability to make inferences between contextually linked information thereby pulling new, creative combinations out of knowledge bases automatically. This is the holy grail of knowledge managers; to get machines to be able to reason, even just slightly, would offer a great deal of value.

With such a compelling value proposition as reasoning will Web 3.0 technologies render Web 2.0 worthless? There are still some very large obstacles to Web 3.0 as Roberts has described, i.e. machines can't handle ambiguity and major pieces of the Web 3.0 language (ontologies) have yet to be produced.

But is the interim value of Web 2.0 technologies really that low? Web 2.0 technologies provide integration for well defined processes, and it’s the fact that they must be well defined that renders them inflexible and in need of constant maintenance. Yet this integration is indeed quite valuable, too valuable to be left on the shelf until Web 3.0 is ready for prime time. The future world of Web 3.0 is indeed rosy but don't count Web 2.0 out just yet.

Web 2.0 for the Enterprise

While social networking sites and wikis are rapidly gathering a large following the question of what value these technologies hold for business enterprises remains largely unanswered. Information Week has provided a useful summary of the adoption of various Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. In general they feel that much of the Web 2.0 functionality can be provided by existing technologies such as SharePoint and content management systems.

The highest value Web 2.0 functionality was that of collaborative content tools with 39% of responses from an online poll finding it to be important. Notably the social networking functionality of Web 2.0, the functionality the provides the value behind facebook and myspace, seems to be the least valuable feature to enterprises, only 5% of responses from an online poll found it to be important. But are they really distinct features? The real value of Web 2.0 is its connectivity; you can shift the focus of what you find valuable, whether it be practical solutions to business problems or who your favorite band is, the point is that it is networked and available.

The idea of focusing on those features that provide real business value is a good one, but focusing to the point of information silos is contradictory to Web 2.0. The ability to provide focus will be provided by better semantic integration, technologies that will allow a user to extract highly relevant information quickly rather than to sift through mounts of semantically mismatched information currently retrieved with non-specific searches.

Predicting the Future

If we could accurately predict what the price of a publicly traded stock would be tomorrow we would stand to make millions. We all know that we can't do that or even simpler predictions. But there are more general predictions that we can make that are just obvious; drugs will continue to improve to provide better healthcare benefits, computers will become better integrated to provide a more seamless interface with our lives.

I've been reading Neil Stephenson's book Snow Crash; an action, adventure, video game like view of the future. Probably not one of Stephenson’s best, yet the thing that struck me was that it was first published in 1992, really before the modern Internet, before the advent of serious computer virus' and certainly before Second Life, yet it's all here as if he had some portal into the future. Granted many of his predictions have yet to fully come to pass, he was probably shooting for 2020, but some of them are well on their way.

One prediction that Stephenson and other futurists make without fail is the ability to access multiple data sources seamlessly, i.e. by using a single interface users can quickly and easily access a multitude of data sources and mix and match the gathered data. It seems so effortless and so obvious. Yet in the real world the notion of this level of integration would be met with questions regarding the substance in your cigarette. We have created so many isolated and discordant systems that the effort of tying them together seems hopeless.

This is why we can marvel at systems such as Google which appear to make sense of it all. These search engines can seemly extract the needle from the haystack, which is in fact amazing, but falls far short of the real value of the Web. Far too much manual munging is required to get the information into something even remotely integrated. Start your own database and integrate to it? A workable solution, but just a drop in the information ocean.

If the rest of the Web insists on remaining silos, at least some visionaries are creating integrated environments, i.e. facebook. facebook is creating an integrated Web within the Web and members seem quite content to stay within its bounds. Relatively small now, it will continue to grow rapidly as third party applications add more value to the integrated environment. An entertaining toy? Maybe, but it may provide a glimpse of how other domains may provide integration.

The Future of the Web

BusinessWeek has run a special report on the future of the web in their April 9 issue and seems to be pointing the direction of the Semantic Web technologies. As an example, BW sights the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly as an early adopter of SW technologies for use in drug development. In an attempt to slash a third of the cost off the development of a new drug, they are implementing SW technologies to better manage their data.

Tim O'Reilly is quoted as saying "Web 2.0 is the messy way that the Semantic Web is actually happening." Messy in the fact that it's a bottom-up folksonomy rather than the top-down ontology driven structure required by SW specifications.

Does this exposure in BW mean SW is ready for prime time? "I'm still trying to figure out what Web 2.0 is" remarked one VC at last night's MIT Enterprise Forum in Boulder. But while the entrepreneurs try to sort out the business model, Lilly's IT department goes it alone, "There aren't a lot of people we can turn to with experience." Seems like there's got to be a business model in saving a pharmaceutical company $400 million off the cost of developing one drug.

Web 3.0 Already?

In the midst of the Web 2.0 hype cycle is it time to begin the buzz on Web 3.0? Although Web 2.0 was a big step forward, its limitations are becoming apparent even as its definition has only just been resolved. The connections put in place by Web 2.0 by social networking, folksonomies and tagging have provided a higher level of functionality for some applications, but the connections are only loosely defined. Much more powerful functionality will come with better defined connections and structured frameworks.

Although the term Web 3.0 was never used by the founders of Semantic Web, there is a growing acceptance that the two are synonymous. Certainly the proponents of Semantic Web technologies, including Tim Berners-Lee, could benefit from the idea that their ideas will form the next version of the Web. And it appears that the public is ready for the technology as well, the functionality if not the demands it will require.

So what can Web 3.0 do that 2.0 cannot? For one it helps computers better "understand" terms used on the Web. What is the difference between a book and a basketball? Simpler technologies would recognize that they are spelled differently and that would be it. Web 3.0 will categorize them and provide them with a set of associations that will define what they are. A book is a subject that contains information and is associated to readers by a relationship called "is read by." Many such associations can connect the book to other objects, i.e. "is stored on" a bookshelf. As these associated networks grow, more knowledge about what a book is, and how it is distinguished from a basketball, is compiled and a clearer vision of book is developed.

This is a similar process to human learning and, like humans, as the knowledge networks grow they will become more "intelligent." The process will begin with specific knowledge domains, such as libraries of books, airline travel or drug development, and continue, theoretically, until the barriers between the domains break down and connections through the entire Web are established.

One obstacle will be the structure imposed by the Semantic Web. Web 2.0 calls for a very informal structure where users apply their own tags however they see fit or not at all. Semantic Web on the other hand, requires strict adherence if it's going to function correctly.

But the pay off for applying structure is inference and reasoning; the ability for the software to make connections when given the proper data. This ranges from simple inferences such as: if hepatitis is a disease and it occurs in the liver, it must be a disease of the liver. Although not rocket science for humans, assembling networks of logical statements in a structured framework will be a big step forward for computers.

Much of human knowledge is acquired over time and through experiences. This type of knowledge is stored away in the brain to be pulled out at a later time when certain associations may be required, say in diagnosing a disease. A less experienced physician may not have experienced a patient with certain symptoms that an older colleague would have. But an effective Web 3.0 knowledge base may supplement the less experienced physician's knowledge and allow her to operate as if she had the knowledge possessed by the more experienced physician.

The value of such a system in the hands of a skilled user is to rapidly amplify the knowledge that they can process. Web 3.0 technology has been called "XML on steroids." Given the discipline that is required to implement it however, its use will be constrained to only the most valuable markets for the near term.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

This is quite an inspiring video that captures the essence of Web 2.0. We are undergoing a continuously increasing level of connectivity which is translating into a communal information pool. But this is just the beginning, the beginning of collective intelligence.