As a guy who loves to do things in spreadsheets, often using lookup-functions, pivot-tables and auto-filter to integrate data and get to what I need, I still don’t consider myself to be particularly high on the technical curve. By this, I mean that I’m comfortable working up to my elbows in the data - but I leave abstracting it out into enterprise systems to the “IT folks”.
Considering the semantic spreadsheet capabilities described here on this ReadWriteWeb post, and the related comments, I think the real value lies not so much with the spreadsheet user (which seem to be the assumed target), but with the enterprises for which the spreadsheet-ers (if that’s a word) are working.
As was noted in the post and comments, people who aren’t capable of leveraging the serious capabilities of Excel itself won’t likely be able to navigate the system described here. At the same time, those who can could likely achieve what they need through Excel functionality. More skill than that, and you’re talking about “real IT people” who could perform the work in databases.
The value proposition seems more centered around enterprises being able to allow their “non-technical” people to work in environments they can easily handle (i.e. spreadsheets), while the enterprise can reap the benefit of the collective work of the spreadsheet-ers by using the semantic capabilities to integrate the disparate datasets of their forces.
Perhaps there are other, stronger methods to accomplish this without requiring work forces to swim in less friendly waters than spreadsheets, but I leave that to the “more technically inclined”.
Image via WikipediaWacky looking title. Not perfect - but the point is to do a little analysis of Value Network Analysis. There’s a good Aleksola post up, relating to the topic - which VN Group(ie) John Maloney shared with the list today.
The post explains VNA as social and technical resources being used together (in relation to one another) to create value - whether intellectual, physical, or otherwise. It distinguishes between in- and out-facing networks, but emphasizes that “Value is created through exchange and the relationships between roles”, over systems in place to enable those interactions.
While it may seem that VNA is about mapping the pathways of social or organizational interaction, such mapping only provides a framework for analysis and discovery - revealing pathways for value.
The actual value created is through the meeting of needs of various parties to transactions or engagement situations. In this way, I think of VNA is a way to consider how the system dynamics of engagement between parties facilitates a kind of currency translation and barter - enabling each to bring to the table something that may (perhaps in combination with something brought by someone else) satisfy the needs of another - and similarly may have their own needs indirectly met.
Image by matsugoro via FlickrI talk a lot about the most interesting parts of life being where things connect - where seemingly distinct topics run into each other. Not so much that they abut, but in their doing so, they reveal or allow tendrils of overlapping elements to lap out to one another.
This past weekend, I filled-in on a team that was running 92 miles across the state of New Jersey, in the 13th annual River to Sea Relay. The day was the embodiment of connecting:
Each 7-person team came together through any number of connective threads - around family, work, geography, life, death, marriage… (one team was called “Runaway Bride” - I guess this was their idea of a bachelorette party). We were the “Village Idiots”, and while we could easily have passed for the sister team to one called “Beauty and the Beasts” (we had plural of the former and singular of the latter) I think our name served us well.
Each team handed off to their next runner with a swipe of the hand or high five (or waive across a busy road) - connecting step-by-step, and hand-off by hand-off from the western border of the state, on the Delaware river - to the beach on the eastern side of the state.
Every runner ran two of the 14 legs that comprised the course - getting back out there after having a few hours to stiffen up on their way to their second leg, while chasing and supporting their teammates. Since most of us don’t run twice in one day, each person connecting their two runs provided a unique opportunity to see how it feels and to realize that you can in fact do it.
A hundred separate teams came together around one “basic” objective (and many unique ones), and greeted each other with competitive spirit and supportive friendliness.
At interchanges, people from different teams discovered they knew each other through someone else, had gone to college together, had worked at the same place, that their daughters are in the same singing group at college - that they share another common element (and a swig of water, thank you, or directions at a turn…) besides just being a nutty runner/adventure seeker.
When you take a trip like this, as I did with these six women (yes, my wife knew - in fact she was one of them) who made up the rest of my team - a 29 hour adventure, including a road-trip, hotel stay, dinner out, sleepless night coupled with a really early morning, countless switching back and forth between chase cars, 14 back-to-back legs of running with all the interchanges and support encounters, a finish at the beach, something to re-nourish yourself at the end, and the trip home - you discover you’ve gained, (groaned), learned, (ached), enjoyed (maybe griped). I won’t repeat what I heard one runner say, because you get to say things out there knowing that they won’t be repeated - “honor among nut-jobs” and all.
Everyone worked hard - really hard, dealing with the heat, sun, each other, silence (course rules prohibited use of music players), rain (on two legs, the sky opened up), lightning… As the race director summarized, “Despite a short howling storm that raced through central Jersey at around 12:30pm ( thunder, lightning and ferocious rain ) for about 20 minutes,100 stalwart teams-of-seven successfully navigated [the] 92 mile course from Milford on the Delaware River to Manasquan at the Atlantic Ocean. Teams started [on a staggered basis] from 6:00am to 10:15am…”. The fastest team (not ours) was going at a clip of 5:18 per mile! Teams took anywhere from eight- to fifteen hours to finish the course.
People connected - with each other, with each others’ ideals, with group and individual goals, one border to another - town-by-town and county-to-county - even connecting with elements of yourself along the way.
Look for tangible examples of semantic technology being employed, and you often encounter government and life sciences projects, NLP enhanced search services (such as Hakia or Cuil), or the much written about systems such as Freebase or Twine, where the semantic aspects are related to how the information in them is connected (TrueKnowledge brings the semantics closer to the surface).
For the 2008 Semantic Technology Conference, its organizers (Semantic Universe) wanted to take a look at what is going on in terms of applying these capabilities within a few sectors. For this, I organized a panel to discuss the use of the related tools within the financial space. What follows is a summary of an article I wrote on what we learned. The full writeup is in the latest issue of Talis’ Nodalities Magazine (see Issue 3, which is full of great material).
The long and the short of the discoveries were:
- There is in fact work going on here;
- the most visible of which is in financial publishing;
- and most paradigmatic, it seems, is the potential in financial reporting
The article includes perspectives shared during the panel session, which Dr. Christian Halaschek-Wiener, CTO of Clados Management, moderated – as well as descriptions of activities from some who were not able to join us. Key in digging into the topic was consideration of different realms within “finance”, and the business processes within those realms:
§ EDI/Transaction Enablement: Ioachim Drugus (SemanticSoft) EDI related work in Transaction Enablement/Management for the realm of Trading; § Credit Ratings: JR Gardner (Digitas) explained large Credit Rating Agency use of taxonomies, ontologies, RDF and OWL to enable interoperability of enterprise systems. Kendall Clark (Clark & Parsia) explained later that their Moodys had motivated and sponsored the recently released version of the Pellet reasoner. § Insurance: Jonathan Mack (Guardian Life) gave an Insurance perspective and discussed implementation within large enterprise. § Banking: David Palaitis (Citi) shared during our planning efforts that their use of RDF and ontologies for a Fixed Income group to improve the functioning of a legacy Regulatory Compliance system. Similarly, Shahin Nassiri (JP Morgan) outlined having defined a business process taxonomy, and maping applications to that taxonomy using OWL. § Identity Management: Tom Ilube (Garlik) couldn’t stay for the panel, but explained their applicability to the consumer needs in banking and finance, with identity monitoring and management built on semantic architecture. § Information Industry: Christine Connors (Dow Jones), and Tom Tague (Thomson-Reuters /Calais) shared what they and their media organizations are doing around direct delivery of financial information, with discussion of semantics for machines and people, respectively. § Information Services: Leo Keller (Netbreeze) and YY Lee (FirstRain) shared how they utilize NLP and classification capabilities to scour global content and serve up processed information in function-specific wrappers for segments of the financial community. § Financial Reporting: Eric Cohen (PriceWaterhouse Coopers) explained the potential impact that XBRL could have on the financial information landscape – from reporting and processing of financial information, to its distribution and analysis. Related to this, Elmar Drewitz (DrewITz Consulting) is working on XBRL to OWL mechanization for transformation of financial reports.
So the value propositions exposed through this effort included not just search efficiency, data integration and interoperability - but business process management, increased delivery speed, security, and user experience/usability, to name a few. Significantly, we also saw that the financial world’s leveraging of these technologies is to come not just of efforts from within, but from the providers of information services to it.
Be sure to read the full article for more detail. Hopefully this is the beginning of the conversation. Where and how else are you seeing these tools being implemented within and/or for financial purposes?
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of being guest speaker at Seton Hall, where the TLTC (Teaching, Learning and Technology Center) held a session as part of their Summer Series. Not every university has the tech research focus as does MIT, for example - so I really like that the objective of this group is to help their faculty understand and take advantage of available technology to aid in their teaching efforts.
The event was called “Web2.0 Day”, so maybe you’re wondering why they wanted to hear about the semantic web. Part of the point of the day was to clarify some of the language they may hear thrown around about the web, and (pardon the web versioning references) part was to help define and classify the memes - and of course, part was to expose faculty and staff to specific tools they may want to use.
The interesting part of putting the the talk together was in taking a subject around which most conversations are focused on its technical underpinnings, and explaining it in a way that is NON-technical. While this slide-deck doesn’t impart the spoken words during the session, viewing them might still give a decent layperson-sense of what the semantic web is/will be. See presentation below:
(use the control buttons in the window below to page through the slides)
Quick update on my “Packed for the trip…” post: We had a surprise guest with us for the panel that I co-moderated at the NY Semantic Meetup that took place this week at the Linked Data Planet conference. Dan Connolly of the W3C wasn’t able to make the conference, so Tim Berners-Lee was able to sit in and participate in what turned out to be a lively discussion.
The room was larger and more formal than our usual New York Semantic Meetup settings - with eight people on the panel, yet everyone managed to fit at the table and get their opinions heard.
We carved the session into two focuses, along the lines of enterprise oriented use on the one hand, followed by the web focused utilization on the other. This is a difficult line to walk after drawing it, as we discovered during the enterprise portion that we were dancing on the other side. One interesting point raised was the possibility of adoption of the technologies being through the -as-a-service providers, where such providers would be the ones handling the heavy lifting, and the enterprises then being more easily able to leverage the capabilities - particularly for interoperability among geographically dispersed and disparate data of their own.
Later, when focused on the web side, we kept dancing back across to enterprise issues - around both impact on business models of opening up data, while at the same time creating different opportunities by changing the value formula from data to the services.
There seemed to be general agreement that it is ok to use whatever format works best for you, proprietary or compliant, when you’re dealing with inside facing data - but that outfacing should be compliant. At the same time, from a flexibility standpoint, RDF lets you go ahead withing having to know the whole of where you’re going. Still, coders would like to see the ability to do so more easily - without having to load libraries in order to do so. There also seemed a consensus that more services need to exist to take advantage of data being out there in order to encourage more enterprises to release theirs.
Rather than re-hash the details myself, I’ll point you to a good blow-by-blow of the panel. Two other write-ups are by panelist Savas Parastatidis from Microsoft, and by my co-moderator, Hank Williams. The latter contains some great commentary and insights that go beyond what was stated in the room.
As noted earlier, there is audible sentiment from within the Semantic Community that the necessary, underlying components for the Semantic Web to become a reality are in place. Discussion of the Vision is often as a destination - so to extend the trip metaphor, having the components in place means perhaps that we’ve packed for the journey.
Image by semanticwebcompany via FlickrSome who are taking this journey have chosen vehicles, others are arguing about who is going to drive, who the passengers will be (never mind which one will have the back, middle seat). Once everyone is in and we’re pulling out of the driveway, you need to have an idea of the route that’ll be taken - with other questions in the back of our minds such as which stops we’ll make along the way, where we’ll fuel up, (what kind of fuel economy we’ll need), and where and in what setting we’ll actually settle when we get “there”.
So what are the routes (and vehicles, drivers…) to the Semantic Web and to enterprise adoption of semantic capabilities? These are some of the questions we’ll dig into this Tuesday night, when I’m one of the moderators on the panel at the Semantic Web NYC Meetup, at LinkedData Planet.
Additional details on the panel -
When/Where : June 17th, at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York
Panel Leader: Marco Neumann, New York Semantic Web Meetup
Moderators: Hank Williams, Founder/CEO, Kloudshare & Eric Hoffer, Second Integral
Panelists:
Sergey Chernyshev, CTO, Semantic Communities LLC
Dan Connolly, Research Scientist, W3
Christine Connors, Global Dir., Semantic Technology Solutions, Dow Jones
Taylor Cowan, Emerging Solutions Principal, Sabre Holdings, Travelocity
Richard Cyganiak, Reseacher, DERI and Project Leader D2RQ
Nic Fulton PhD, Chief Scientist, Reuters Media
Marc Hadfield, President and CTO, Alitora
Savas Parastastidis PhD, Architect, Technical Computing, Microsoft Research
Background: The basic concept of the Semantic Web is for information to be accessible and usable based on the meaning of that information as opposed to just matching text (vocabulary and synonyms) and hoping that the on the one hand, and versus complex data mappings and brittle proprietary approaches (such as directly coding together, or even APIs). In either case, the idea has been described as the standardization what can be expected in terms of the form of the information, and inclusion of the information’s context alongside the information itself.
We had quite an electrical display in the sky last night in Maplewood, NJ - along with some high winds and torrential downpour - for about fifteen minutes. Here are a few pictures I took around town:
(use the control buttons in the window below to page through the slides)
Before posting thoughts about my panel/forum session at this year’s Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech08), I wanted to share a bit about the conference as a whole.
First, everyone seemed to walk away with a lot – regardless of their starting point. And the atmosphere provided for as much value from interaction in the hallway as from the sessions themselves. As (walking billboard for web2.0) Daniela Barbosa points out, there was a fourth-dimension of interaction going on behind (above/between…) the scenes (via Twitter and whatnot), also mentioned by Rachel Lovinger. I even heard that one attendee passed another some aspirin in the hallway based on a “tweet” about a headache.
The hidden gems
To capture some of the hidden gems of the week – the “PURLs of wisdom” so to speak (one of which was emphasis on the need for reliability and permanence of URIs - or persistent urls), I will, in the spirit of Eric Miller’s keynote, “reuse, repurpose an remix” or at least reference some of the writings of others about the week (but will most certainly fall short of MetaWeb Jamie Taylor’s gas powered blender metaphor). There were, after all, almost 150 sessions over the five days, and over 1000 attendees - so why not leverage some collective intelligence.
As others have noted (see links throughout), the week was quite a whirlwind - the only REST encountered likely being in references to enabling interoperability through RESTful architecture. From the experienced to the newbie alike, many had expectations of “SIOC (pronounced shock) and awe”, to riff off DERI’s Semantically Interlinked Online Communities project. (I had to use that, despite my understanding that our friends at Talis have intentions for that quip). But given the concurrent announcement(s) by Yahoo regarding semantic enablement of SearchMonkey, perhaps the experience to some was more like “SIOC the ‘Monkey”. And that may be just what the doctor ordered.
Much of the discussion in the semantic space has been about technology, standards, architecture - all necessary to solidify the resources upon which to build. And all consumable by those in the know. Mind you, this level discussion needs to continue - and as was stated numerous times during the week, all the pieces are “there” and they just need to be put together in ways for effective use - i.e. “just use what you need“, to quote the Freebase/Metaweb folks. And there’s not just one formula to do so; Carla Thompson noted Tom Tague (Thomson Reuters - Clearforest - Calais) referring to the subdomains of the space as Geekery Feifdoms (also described by Mark Johnson as “talking past each other”).
At the same time - while the technical level discussions were still present and engaging - there was a quite audible drumbeat this year, emphasizing the need simplify and to focus on real issues - in business terms - to take “this stuff” and put it to use to solve actual problems. At one point, Dave McComb of Semantic Arts (co-organizer of the conference) said, instead of the usual chicken-and-egg comparison (which I’ve used myself) - now we’re on a whole chicken farm. (By this, I assume Dave meant that it doesn’t really matter which comes first, we just need to focus now on producing eggs AND chickens - and running the farm).
Dave gave a great introduction (slides) to give some context and lay a landscape upon which everyone could layer their experiences of the week that was to follow - how we got where we are, what “is” semantics, comparing it to the relational model. Bruno Pinheiro describes his intro (as does Shamod Lacoul) along with that of W3C’s Ivan Herman, who gave a state-of-the-semantic-web intro as well. Some of his key advice came later, which Rachel Lovinger includes in her closing keynote summary. Particularly relevant to this post, she picks up on Jeff Pollock’s (Oracle) comment that “If you’re describing the value of something as being about semantic technology, you probably haven’t found the real business value yet” (see his presentation).
To put a sharper point on it, and to paint a picture of what this means from the standpoint of a business-side consumer, Tom Tague mentioned that one of his customers had said: “If you have to explain it, I don’t want it.” This underscores from the street-level that mainstream leveraging of these capabilities won’t be the result of promotion of the technologies but from the solving of problems for real people - which Nick Patience picks up in his first two bullet points.
Some are on the way
As Rachel also wrote about (linked above), Tom Ilube of Garlik is focused on how, in this online world, does one manage and protect their identity. By creating tools to enable their doing so and zeroing right in on a real problem for people, Garlik is bringing them onto the semantic web without revealing, nor needing to reveal, that fact. Leo Keller of Netbreeze showed tools for finding answers to questions which come from, but are not touted on the basis of, analyzing trends in unstructured text on the web. Tom Gruber’s talk emphasized that it is not “about” a particular application or technology, but is instead about the solution being woven into life via “the interface” (see Mark Johnson’s paragraph on Stealth Company). To me, this means tapping into the activities in which people are already engaged.
The bridge
The first step toward getting “there” is recognition of a divide (in this case, from technology to needs - solutions to problems). The past few years of this conference have been a major part of opening up and inviting business-needs-minded to immerse themselves in the possibilities. From the tone of the week, it seems this phase has begun. (I’ll write about industry verticals in a subsequent post). Now, the path from here involves reaching out from both the solution/tech side and the business side, with some assistance from the middle - to conceptualize the capabilities available and imagine them in the contexts of various business needs - and with consideration of the possible business models to support both delivery and consumption of the relevant solutions. I think Greg Boutin describes this all very well in his discussion of Powerset - a good read (in particular see his third section, entitled “Marketing semantics…”). He also places an accent on that drumbeat, quoting Tom Tague as saying “Clarify and focus on simple benefits”.
Tangent, or the other side
That would be a great place to wrap up, but at the risk of going off on a tangent, I feel the need to add one last point. I’d long ago come to see that the key value for and from semantics is in context and perspective. Seems pretty simple. But those are not just subject-focused matters. Within each individual (person, department, company…) there are multiple sets of motivation to be considered, and one of the dimensions of those motivations is time. I think Heidi Nordberg captures this when she writes of the need to differentiate between focusing on “long-term interoperability modeling goals” and short term focused addressing of “specific needs”. Perhaps there’s a way to address both together.
So we also need to go beyond targeting real problems, and and beyond simplifying the solution and message. The successful models will emerge from creating scenarios which enable the aligning of motivations - the sweet spot for opportunity.
Postscript: There was much talk at the conference of there being blue ocean, or uncontested market opportunities to be tapped by use of semantic capabilities (mind you, not for semantic capabilities themselves, but the use of them). Swim further off on this tangent and consider a purple ocean strategy that Henry Story shared over dinner with a group us the last evening - and may be applicable here.
Just as there were so many important and valuable perspectives shared at the conference, so are there scattered across the web. Apologies for not picking up on them all, but in addition to those linked above, here are some additional related posts:
Image by FelipeArte via Flickr
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