The Internet makes things transparent. Within the context of web 2.0 information collection for customers has become particularly easy. Statements about the quality of products or the behavior of companies reach customers much faster nowadays. Users publish their opinions about a company’s products and services in the Internet for everyone to read. This on the one hand gives companies the opportunity to react faster to customer wishes. But it also means that internal company data get distributed much faster. And the flip side is that external events will have a direct influence on the company’s own turnover and cost situation. One example here was the collapse in the revenues of toy producers from China as soon as it became known that the paints used by them contained an increased amount of lead, or the image damage faced by companies as a result of corruption rumors. As a result the early collection and processing of, and fast reaction to, customer opinions and social trends is becoming a critical success factor for companies. 

The information value chain shows how costs can be reduced  

Whereby the key elements of web 2.0 are to be found in networking and thus information collection, web 3.0 technologies improve the quality and the relevant volume of data available, and increase the transparency of the information provision. These technologies include the W3C standards RDF(S), OWL and Sparql. These so-called semantic technologies make the exchange of information between computers easier. In order to systematically analyze the effects of web 3.0 technologies on the company’s value chain we first have to describe the information value chain and then compare this to a company’s traditional value activities. 

Six activities can be identified between the creation of information and its use: creation, saving, aggregation, integration, evaluation and use. Information can be created through the input of accounting receipts for example, or through the writing of blogs, or through the automatic measurement of environmental data using sensors. Web 3.0 technologies make it possible to attach so-called meta-information to each item of information in order to make this information machine readable. The simple text written by a blogger on a web site is thus no longer just a jumble of letters for the computer, but takes on meaning. The computer can thus differentiate between a text which is a declaration of love, and one where a customer is complaining about a particular company’s product.