AXONomics

Image by buschap via FlickrEvery now and again, you find yourself doing something that, when considered in the context of other parts of your life, can reveal interesting things about yourself or people in general.  I drew one such parallel after spending a weekend with my family hurtling through the air at Hershey Park.

For those of you who have never been there, it has 11 roller coasters - and if you’re not into them, well, you’re going to be standing around a lot waiting for your kids to come back saying “that was great”, “let’s do it again”, or something about a snack.  I’ve done lots of things that some would consider daring - including rock and ice climbing, and flying in a glider, sea kayaking, whitewater rafting… but I’ve just never been one for rides that are supposed to give you near-death experiences, because frankly, I don’t generally like feeling that close to “the edge”.

Since my wife and kids were so gleeful following each of their wild rides - especially Farenheight (pictured above) and Storm Runner, with their loops, corkscrews, and in the case of the latter, acceleration from 0 to 70 in 2 seconds - I was compelled to understand their sense of the differences from one ride to another - and how each impacted their senses.

In the back of my mind, I think I was secretly trying to ascertain which of the elements I could personally have handled - given that each person has a different sense of what “scary” is, and you cannot just rely on someone saying “it wasn’t so bad” or “you could handle that”.  Key factors which weigh differently by individual include: height, speed, drops (number, length, steepness), banks, roughness, re-direction and mis-direction… (among surely many more categorizations of the coaster-phile).

On the “handle-it” scale, I had already managed Lightning Racer, Wildcat, and Comet, and had dipped my toe into the “beyond” with SuperDooperLooper (and a few others) - and their death defying drops and loops.  To “push my research”, I finally succumbed to the pleas of my family, and (somehow) joined them on Great Bear, which added “hanging from the rail”, and “corkscrews” to my repertoire.

At the end of Great Bear though - which, by the way, I survived - I realized that I had only managed to do so by staring at a bolt - which attached the seat in front of me to the chassis holding the seats on the rails, from which we were hanging.below - for the entire ride.  A friend commented days later that the only way to do a ride like that is to give yourself over to the ride.  I fear (among obvious other things) that I did not do this.  While I can say to my 10-year-old, who finally stopped calling me a sissy,  that “I did it”, I cannot say that I experienced all it had to offer - but I survived.

The parallel I alluded to above is not related to the two tracks on each coaster - but to life in general - work, activities, people, relationships…  If you give yourself over to these experiences, you can get out of them all they have to offer, and help others do the same.   This too reminds me of the same parallel that went on in the back of my mind following a whitewater kayaking trip in the winter of 1978-79, during which a professor said to me “we need to make sure we’re moving faster than the water if we have any intentions about steering”.

If you hang on, fixing your gaze on a bolt to simply survive, you’re going to get tossed around and may not enjoy the “ride”.  In the case of the Great Bear, the truth is that the ride may never get another chance to show me its stuff.

Afterthoughts: How does this relate to some of the other things I’ve written about here?  On one hand, it isn’t supposed to.  On the other hand, it informally dives into the formalization of experience - the elements of things - in this case, the taxonomy of thrill.  I appear to have stumbled into an area known as thrill research - but I think I may leave well enough alone.

Coinage du jour: “parallel-0-gram” - a message in which a comparison or parallel is drawn or relayed.

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Image by FelipeArte via Flickr

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.

via Flickr

UPDATE to my 7/29 post on the use of semantic technology in finance:

Talis has posted issue 3 of Nodalities, which contains the full full article on the subject.

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.

Image via Wikipedia

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?

Image via Wikipedia

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:
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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.

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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:
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Update - Following the overnight drone of a generator, the sounds of chippers and chainsaws continue. Related stories:

• Storm snaps trees, crushing cars, homes
• …