SHORT COMMUNICATION Being more human in the digital world- technology to touch all, serve all Swarnalakshmi Ravi 1,2 & T. J. Kamalanabhan 1 & Thanga Jawahar 2 Received: 11 March 2019 /Accepted: 3 April 2019 # IUPESM and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, Bthis world is a global village^. The whole world has indeed shrunk through technological advancements and intercontinental technology transfers. However, the nations are still bound together only through humanness amidst diversity and not merely through technological exchanges. We found that most of the prevailing technologies come with an inherent challenge that is tradeoff between cost and affordability. For example, a recent study by World Bank and World Health Organization on expenditure towards healthcare, education and other essentials shows an alarmingly increasing rate on expenditure thereby making affordability to get access to such benefits a critical problem to solve in general. These are also the fields where maximum technological advancements are happening today. Our paper focuses predominantly on this tradeoff especially those challenges faced by senior citizens, super senior citizens, economically marginalized sect of people and differently abled. Our work also looks at the means on how technologies could assist them to live independently and get access to some of the emerging technologies without actually knowing the intricacies. Our purpose is also to bring technology that is affordable, implementable at lower cost and that delivers higher efficiency with maximized reach in society. We hence chose this study of adoption of emerging and open source technologies such as semantics and their indispensable role in serving the society. Keywords Emerging technologies . Humanity and role of technology . Service collaboration . Technological advancement . Semantics 1 Introduction Technological advancement through innovation has brought out lot of products and services in present world. However that comes with a price to be able to afford to. There is a sizeable proportion of people who is either not in the workforce that is in the retired community or too young to enter the workforce. While the income is almost flat or void, the expenditure set to hit the sky. The statistical study by Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) shows that the average ex- pense per office visit and prescription medicine purchase for the elderly was higher in 2011 than in 2006 or 2001. The average expense for an inpatient hospital stay per day, an emergency room visit, and a dental visit was significantly higher in 2011 than 2001 [1]. Similarly, a study on global disability by World Bank and World Health Organization in- fers that the services such as education, nutrition, healthcare, welfare programs and transportation etc., could not be completely addressed and there has been huge gaps despite several programs run by the government or private charity organizations [2]. By taking into account on the rising costs of healthcare and other fields, we set to explore the fast emerg- ing open source technologies such as semantics and its capa- bilities to address these challenges at its best. Our contributions in this work include the following: & Design of an ontology for the citizen services collabora- tion platform & Design of conceptual framework for service platform re- naissance, a cost effective strategy. & Configuration Know How: portal that can accept semantic OWL file and work with semantic web services for any specific applications * Swarnalakshmi Ravi Swarna.mayu@gmail.com 1 Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai, India 2 Unit CTO- Internet of Things, Tata Consultancy Services, Chennai, India Health and Technology https://doi.org/10.1007/s12553-019-00325-4