One of the exciting elements about personalised medicine in general and gut microbiota research in particular is that it’s taking place at a time when the internet allows every user worldwide to easily share information. Altogether the information exchanged forms a huge amount of personal data, a key value of today’s web practice. The production of data is now even greater with the explosion of mobile web. In the context of personalised medicine, we see this value emerging from patients’ online communities leading to the quantification of symptoms, the booming field of personalised genomics and the development of personalised metagenomics…

 

The social web and its massive data production have a wider context, in which the evolution of technology is central: computer power, big data, analysis… And it is interesting to see how we’re witnessing a true crossroads of notions. This thread will thus collect and give examples of the various elements that illustrate how technology and the social web can bring value to research.