The Health Graph: Mortal Threats & Signs of Life

Two years ago, I said that the executive branch of the U.S. federal government was the most interesting tech startup of 2009. That optimism started to bear fruit just a few months later, with one of my favorite examples being what I called "The Health Graph", the massive amount of new public health data being made available by the Department of Health & Human Services' open data project, the Community Health Data Initiative.

We know public data can drive huge businesses; in last month's Wired, Clive Thompson caught me being a little bit flippant about it:

The best-known example, of course, is the multibillion-dollar weather-reporting industry. For-profit weather services take free, public data produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and then make it worth oodles by adding analysis, tailoring it to local markets, and, as public-data expert Anil Dash playfully notes, “having attractive people stand in front of maps explaining tomorrow’s weather to you.” The Weather Channel sold for $3.5 billion two years ago, people.

And that potential is even greater for health data. As I said last year in my post on the Health Graph:
[S]tarting today, if I had to pick the next area where somebody's going to make an enormously successful and valuable business built on top of open government data, I'd put my money on health data. Because the Department of Health & Human Services has just launched an unprecedentedly ambitious release of public health information.

This ambitious, valuable project graduated into Health.Data.Gov, a full-fledged community for those who want to exploit it to help their fellow citizens while building businesses and opportunities for themselves.