Hungarian medical student and blogger Bertalan Meskó usually works to inform the masses about how Web 2.0 can help/change/improve the practice of medicine. Recently he gave his readers a glimpse into the future of the internet’s influence on science and medicine with Wiki-Proteins, the first Web 3.0 project. Web 3.0 is marketed as the development of the “semantic web”, which is claimed to be orders of magnitude more powerful and intuitive than today’s technology.
An excerpt from the Wikipedia article summarizes what exactly the “semantic web” will be:
Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for “car”, to reserve a library book, or to search for the cheapest DVD and buy it. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedium involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.
The mission of Wiki-Protein is to connect the scientific world’s protein resources like Medline, IntAct, the National Library of Congress, UniPort, and the GO Consortium to expedite the exploration and exchange of knowledge. Their web site is still in the developmental stages, but any scientists whose research is even remotely involved with proteins should absolutely check out the site and watch the demo.