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At the risk of alienating any potential readers of an upcoming story in GHIT on Web 2.0, I should point out that the term is already old hat among those of us in the know (snif!).
Well, at least for those who really know their stuff. I won't pretend to be among that elevated crowd, but you would certainly count Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the Web -- or, at least, the first truly usable Web browser -- and who is now the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as one of them.
Berners-Lee has famously said on more than one occasion, but more recently in this podcast, that he doesn't believe in the existence of a Web 2.0. This is only the next, natural progression of the Web, he says, which was originally conceived as a place where people would be able to freely interact and share information.
In fact, Web 3.0 is already upon us. Berners-Lee also wouldn't agree with that term, but it's his notion of a Semantic Web, where information is shared and transmitted according to its inherent content rather than an external tag that's attached to it, where the true value of the Web may be found.
OK, I admit that saying Web 3.0 is already here is a bit of a stretch. The details and standards for this next iteration of the Web have still to be fully worked out, but media organizations such as the BBC are already entering into content-based tech partnerships, so it's maybe not too much to say that Web 3.0 Lite has arrived.
What does this mean for healthcare? When it comes to technology adoption the healthcare business has already proven itself to be a very conservative one. Hard though the government and other institutions have tried over the past few years, it's only recently that physicians have started to at least adopt the IDEA that they have to invest in such things as electronic medical records.
Chances are, then, that Web 3.0 will be upon it before the healthcare sector is fully vested in Web 1.0., so it might be worth its while to skip Web 2.0 completely.
In fact, some people are working on that very premise. The European Union, for example, has supported R&D into next-generation, Web-based healthcare for some time. The Artemis project, and its current offspring program Saphire, has been looking at how Web services and Semantic Web technologies can be used in eHealth.
Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and other hype terms aside, it's clear that the Web is advancing at a rapid rate. It's not clear if the healthcare business, particularly in the U.S., fully appreciates that.
Semantic Web, anyone?
By Brian Robinson, GHIT Contributing Writer
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