Category Archives: Semantic Web

Identity revisited by Google: WebFinger

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Great post on TechCrunch by Michael Siegler. WebFinger from Google.

picture-1111

I have posted many times in my blog about identity and the uniqueness of the information shadow each of us leaves on the internet.

webfinger_450c

This is exactly what Google plans to do: link your e-mail address to your information shadow.

Today they think (WebFinger Google Code page) think about:

    • – public profile data
    • – pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
    • – a public key
    • – other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
    • – a URL to an avatar
    • – profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
    • – whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it’s NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
    • – or even a public declaration that the email address doesn’t have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.

But to be honest, it could be anything about your information shadow.

Update on Louis Gray Blog: somebody already developed first client.

webfinger_450a

The whole thing is just starting: http://webfingerclient-dclinton.appspot.com/ 

Curious what Dave Birch has to say about this on Digital Identity Forum or Kim Cameron on Identity Blog.

Innotribe @ Sibos – Newsflash on Opening

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Also published at:

https://www.swiftcommunity.net/blogs/blogdetail.cfm?id=1495

Within a little more than one month to go, Innotribe @ Sibos will kick-off for an exciting week of inspiring presentations, face to face discussions, interactive workshops, and special challenges – all aimed at one single goal: enabling collaborative innovation.

From now on, we’ll post regular news flashes about the details of the Innotribe program.

Today, more detailed information about the Innotribe Opening: “Beyond Web 2.0 – what will YOU create?”

We have chosen this title 1) to make the connection with last year’s Sibos Labs where the theme was Web 2.0, and 2) because we really wanted to have YOU work together to collaboratively generate and flesh-out ideas before, during and after Sibos.

The Innotribe Opening will give 4 perspectives on the future. It will set the scene for a joint journey with the audience -exploring how current and emerging trends will shape our industry and landscape. With vibrant and stunning examples our speakers will energize you to join the Innotribe, innovating and crafting the future as it emerges throughout the Sibos week.

· Innovation 2.0: It’s OPEN, not closed

Peter Hinssen (1969) (www.peterhinssen.com ) is co-founder of ACROSS Group and Managing Director of ACROSS Technology. An entrepreneur, lecturer and writer, he is also the chairman of Porthus.com and has been an Entrepreneur in Residence with McKinsey & Company. He will kick-off with a 15 min presentation on the need to innovate together with customers, partners, and the eco-system at large. Peter is a regular keynote speaker. Those who have seen him before will certainly agree with me that he is our ideal speaker to give a thundering wake-up call on this subject.

· The Future of IT: Driving Innovation across Financial Services

Bindia Hallauer is the Chief Technology Strategist for Worldwide Financial Services Sector at Microsoft Corporation, based in Redmond, Washington, USA.  In this leadership role, Bindia owns shaping Microsoft’s technology strategy in financial services industry across banking, capital markets and insurance. She owns the overall technical vision, architecture and roadmap, coordinating a single point of view for FSI solution offerings IP development and productization.

Session abstract: Bindia will talk about disruptive technology trends are shaping the future of IT.  Increasing software complexity and the shift to many-core architecture, consumer-driven IT, Petabyte storage and Petaflop processing power, and cloud computing are some of the key technology trends.  This session will focus on profound changes that the future of IT will bring to Financial Services industry.  Thought provoking ideas will be presented.

· The Shape Of Banking Architecture In 2023

Jost Hoppermann is Vice-President of Forrester Research. Jost serves Enterprise Architecture professionals, particularly around financial services. As an analyst, he is an expert on a number of global banking technology topics, including banking platforms, software infrastructure, multi-channel platforms, architecture, and application strategy planning. He also covers enterprise architecture from an organizational and process perspective on an industry neutral basis.

Session abstract: this session will summarize the key findings of a global Forrester research project focusing on potential changes in the banking and financial services space in 2023. It will show how financial services firms will interact with each other and with their customers in the future; which core competencies banks expect to need; how information technology and its successor business technology will need to help the business to differentiate from competition. While 2023 looks like a very concrete date, some banks will only need five or eight years to arrive in 2023 — to some degree — while others may have to take a 10 or 15-years-long path. Bulletized agenda:

– Business scenarios

– Customer interaction

– Business technology scenarios

– Peer advice for the future

· Innovating  Around the Customer

Cindy Murray is Global Banking and Wealth Management Ecommerce Executive at Bank Of America.

Cindy Murray is responsible for designing, building and launching new credit and treasury products across Global Corporate & Investment Banking to drive the acquisition and deepening of client relationships. Her team also leads the Ecommerce portal strategic direction and development for the bank’s corporate and commercial clients.

Session abstract: It was less than 5 short years ago when we heard the term Web 2.0 used for the very first time. If you fast forward to today, it’s clear that Web 2.0 is already morphing into Web 3.0. This session will not only highlight the basics of these technology trends, but more importantly show how they are enabling companies to “innovate around the client”. You will learn how ethnographic research can transform client needs assessments, how best to leverage clients’ discussion forums, and how the financial services industry will continue to be transformed by these new methods of client engagement.

· What’s up this week @ Innotribe ?

Kosta Peric – Head of Innovation at SWIFT, and Philippe Coullomb – Facilitator from The Value Web.

Kosta will introduce the 3 themes of this year’s Innotribe: Cloud, Crowd and Mash-up and the creativity challenge. Philippe will introduce the process and rules of engagement of the first Innotribe Sibos Lab, immediately following the opening. More about that in a next newsletter.

· Innotribe Leaders pitch their Sibos Lab

We plan 3 parallel Sibos Labs: one on Cloud, one on Crowd, and one on Mash-ups. Our Innotribe Leaders will introduce the ideas that emerged pre-Sibos on Swiftcommunity.net and will pitch their Sibos Lab as the best to attend.

Where: The opening will take place in the Innotribe Dome (located in the Sibos Labs room).

When: Monday 14 Sep 2009, from 10:30 – 12:15

To let us know if you will be coming to this event, login to www.swiftcommunity.net, go to the opening event and click I will attend button next to the event. You can also see who else is coming.

Beyond Artificial Intelligence

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Something is going on at Carnegie Mellon University. Just a couple of days ago, my friend xstof twittered about claytronics research at Carnergie.

It’s about programmable matter. Not really sure what to image ? Have a look at the following video.

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This model car is made of programmable matter !

Today the New York Times (this is not what you call the average newspaper, i can tell you) had an article about the February 2009 private Asilomar Conference. The title says: “Association’s Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures”

On reflecting about the long term, panelists will review expectations and uncertainties about the development of increasingly competent machine intelligences, including the prospect that computational systems will achieve “human-level” abilities along a variety of dimensions, or surpass human intelligence in a variety of ways. The panel will appraise societal and technical issues that would likely come to the fore with the rise of competent machine intelligence. For example, how might AI successes in multiple realms and venues lead to significant or perhaps even disruptive societal changes?

The focus groups are on:

  • Pace, Concerns, Control, Guidelines
  • Potentially Disruptive Advances: Nature and timing

  • Ethical and Legal Challenges

    • The researchers — leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California — generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.

    Also in this context, the AI lab of the Carnegie Mellon University was mentioned.

    Tom Mitchell, a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said the February meeting had changed his thinking. “I went in very optimistic about the future of A.I. and thinking that Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil were far off in their predictions,” he said. But, he added, “The meeting made me want to be more outspoken about these issues and in particular be outspoken about the vast amounts of data collected about our personal lives.”

    From killing to empathy is only a small step in the NYT article. Here is a robot showing empathy when you have diarrhea.

    image

    If you want some more serious stuff on this subject, i can really recommend the book “Beyond AI – Creating the conscience of the machine” by J.Storrs Hall, PhD.

    xhuman

    He talks about different “Kind of Minds”: Hypohumans, Diahumans, Epihumans, Hyperhumans.

    See also Ray Kurzweil.Net

    The (ir)relevance of the desktop

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    How relevant will the desktop be in the next 5 years ? I don’t know about you, but I do more an more in online tools such as hotmail, gmail, googledocs, etc

    I want to offer you 3 perspectives to this trend:

    – A business to business point of view (Salesforce)

    – A 2007 (!) vision by Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs

    – The announcement of Google Wave and OS

    I have included 3 video is this post. The first one is short (1:54), the others are longer (1 hour 20 min) and (1 hour 20 min) respectively. But i can assure you they are worth every minute.

    Let’s start with Salesforce. On 9 June 2009, I attended the free Salesforce-event “CloudTour 2009” in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

     

    This was a very, very professionally run event with very professional speakers (drilled like an army). They flew over a number of hotshots from San Francisco for this event.

    Some key facts about Salesforce:

    • 1,2 Billion $ revenue in FY 2009
    • 59,000+ customers
    • 1,5 Million users
    • 100 Million API transactions per day
    • Average response time: 300 Milliseconds
    • 3 releases per year, without any disruption for customers
    • Customers: big to small. Some examples: Solvay, VUM, Polycom, DELL, Corporate Express

    All this to say this is not Mickey Mouse business: these folks exist for 10 years. This is mature business.

    Their tag-line is: NO SOFTWARE.

    Everything runs in the cloud.

    There was a great demo on deep integration in Services Cloud of Twitter, Facebook discussions in Salesforce app, direct visibility in Google search. All in real-time.

    Another demo was about “Building an app in 30 minutes”. They built in essence an expense report app like most companies have. Built and on-line in 30 minutes: With currency conversions, linked to accounts for which the expenses are incurred, with approval workflow, access management etc. All this was point and click. Not one single line of coding.

    Peter Coffee, Director Platform Research had some strong messages about the economics of cloud. He stated that all of the following is commodity and does not add business value, and is ready to go to the cloud: Email, twitter, backup, security, virtualization, OS patches, running an Operating Centre, messaging. He also stated that SaaS, IaaS, PaaS are not relevant in itself. It’s about the apps and the business value add you create with that. And that cloud is NOT about IT budget cost reduction !

    It is about moving from “less low level people on less value tasks” to “high value level people on high value tasks”

    Your IT budget may go UP over the years, as you spent more on high value tasks

    Beware of the expectation it is easy or cheap

    When strolling through the exhibitor space, picked up a comment from a customer:

    Now that I have this, I never want to go back to on-premise. This works. Never any probs of crashes and alike or things that do not work. Unbelievable I ever accepted doing business the old way.

    Let’s have a  look at what Aza Raskin had to say about the desktop.

    “Had” because this is dated May 2007, more than 2 years ago.

    I am a big fan of Aza. See also my post on Mash-ups and Cloud and Semantic Web.

    His bio is fantastic:

    Aza is currently the Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs, where he works on crafting the future of the web. He’s led projects ranging from semantic language-based interfaces (Ubiquity), to redesigning the Firefox extension platform (Jetpack). Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; at 19, he coauthored a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; at 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Two years later, Aza founded Songza.com, a minimalist music search engine that had over a million song plays during it’s first week of operation. In another life, Aza has done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated with degrees in math and physics.

    His GoogleTalk in 2007 was titled “Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop”. On the opening picture, he looks even a bit like the very young Bill Gates ;-). Aza was born in 1984. So 25 years old now !

    And it is NOT about bashing on Microsoft. He is explaining why it does not make sense anymore to follow what has been.

    He is using some pretty powerful metaphors: the shovel analogy, “it’s not Microsoft’s fault”, Analog vs. Digital watch, “Start with the manual”.

    If you don’t have the time to view the full video, go straight to minute 21 or so. In essence most user interfaces force the user to adhere to the program hierarchy of the developer.

    He goes on with seeing natural language as a universal access to application: like you search the web, you could also search services. Basically, there are 4 “do this” commands: create, select, navigate, and transform.

    Aza will this week also speak at TEDGlobal 2009 in the Connected Consequences track. I have also invited Aza to speak at SWIFT’s Sibos 2009, in the Innotribe track for which i am the overall content owner.

    Enjoy Aza !

    The other announcement that created a twitter & blog storm on the internet was Google Wave. Just google “Google Wave” and you will see what i mean 😉

    I don’t get all the criticasters. This is really very cool stuff and it is going to change fundamentally how we think of online communication. I strongly recommend to watch every minute of this launch event video.

    On May 29, a couple of days after the announcement, i spotted a Facebook comment from a person with a quite high-level position in the Belux Microsoft organization: "Not impressed by Google Wave. More of the same in a different jacket. Ever watched conversations in Outlook 2010 ?"

    As i am an ex-Microsoft employee, and still have some friendly contacts there, i wrote him an e-mail and explained that i was soon going to write something on my blog on this and the relevance of the desktop.

    I asked to share some links to Outlook 2010 to be able to link my readers to what Microsoft has to offer in this area so that my readers can make up their own mind ? This is the answer i got: “Outlook 2010 is in Technical Preview – we cannot show outside. But if you look on the web you will find a couple of things about it.”

    So it’s “help yourself” at http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/. Oh yeah, you probably will have to pay for Office 2010. Last week, Microsoft also announced they will offer a FREE on-line version of Office as part of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2010 release.

    To close this post, a really good opinion on this in Hutch Carpenter’s blog “I’m actually not a geek”. One of his latest posts relate to SaaS and also relates to Google’s more recent announcement of the Chrome OS.

    He positions all this in the context of Clayton Christensen’s “disruptive innovation” model, and goes on:

    Which brings us to the PCs of today. They are marvels, providing a slick experience for users and able to accommodate a host of new applications. But if I were a betting man, I’d say the most common activities people do with their computers are:

    • Surf the web, engage in social media
    • Email
    • Write documents
    • Build spreadsheets
    • Create presentations
    • Consume and work with media (video, music, graphics)
    • Use web-based business apps

    Among those activities, what’s the magic of client-based computing? The media-related activities perhaps require the horsepower of a client app. But even those are getting better with web apps.

    I recently decided to switch from hotmail to gmail.

    Competition is good.

    Consumer Genetics Show

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    Found this link about the Consumer Genetics Show via a tweet from Tom Hague of the Open Calais project. Tom tweets that he never expected to see the words “Genetics”, “Consumer”, and “Show” to come together.

    Coincidently, at about the same time, i am reading the following paragraph in chapter XV – Time Warp in the book “As the future catches you” by Juan Enriquez.

    “Almost any species can be cloned today…

    “In the United States, it is illegal to use federal funds to clone humans…

    “But it is not illegal to clone a human… (except in California, Louisiana, Michigan, and Rhode Island.)

    “Nor is it illegal in Singapore, Russia, Brazil, China.

    “And if you combine desperate customers…

    “Rapidly evolving and highly decentralized technology…

    “And the moniker of “the first scientist to clone a human”…

    “The incentives are too great to stop this from happening.

    Juan Enriquez also had a great speech at TED 2009:

    I am a big believer that we will see the biggest breakthroughs and innovations on the cross-roads of ICT and Bio-engineering.

    And i would like to add one more dimension to it: the Global Brain or the Semantic Web.

    Example ?

    One of the companies mentioned in the article on the Consumer Genetics Show is 23andMe.

    image

    A customer of the Web-based service 23andMe sends in a sample of spit and receives a genome-wide analysis of nearly 600,000 genetic variations. The results include an estimate of genetic risk for various diseases, along with other personal information, such as where the customer’s ancient ancestors might have come from. Price tag ? 399$

    Sergey Brin, the billionaire co-founder of Google plans to contribute money and his DNA to a large study intended to reveal the genetic underpinnings of Parkinson’s disease. See also this article in the New Your Times dated March 2009.

    23andMe is co-founded and co-managed by Mr. Brin’s wife, Anne Wojcicki. The company offers a personal genomics service, in which it scans the DNA submitted by its customers and provides information on their health risks, ancestry and other traits. Esther Dyson is a Board member.

    Start thinking DNA and gnome in the cloud.

    “Getting a genome sequence has never been an end … just a start” -  Craig Venter

    Interactive Radio

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    Very quick link to Tagger.FM

    Tonight 13 May 2009 they do something special. There will be a concert by a band, and the audience will be able to live-tag the band during the concert.

    You can also do this tag-test at home. Send after 8pm a SMS with text “TAG BBR” to 4123 (this is a Belgian SMS number)

    Saw those guys at iMinds yesterday, and his really rocks.

    More on the iMinds event in the next days

    Wolfram/Alpha vs Google: 0-1

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    There has been a lot of fuss going on lately regarding Stephen Wolfram’s ambitious project to create a comprehensive "computational knowledge engine." called Wolfram/Alpha.

    UPDATE: Stephan Wolfram now also started a blog at http://blog.wolframalpha.com/

    The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University hosted yesterday 27 April 2009 a sneak preview of the Wolfram|Alpha system.

    This was a full 2 hours webcast, with no screenshots (at least not during the webcast), just a talking head for 2 hours and Q&A from the audience.

    I finally got hold of a screenshot via Techcrunch:

    wolfram

    There is already some good coverage on this by Larry Dignan, Editor in Chief of ZDNet, on his blog here.

    Larry summarizes well:

    “Four big pieces are behind Wolfram/Alpha:

    • Curated data: Free, licensed and feed data. Running through human and automated process to verify the data and make sure it’s “clean and curatable.” At some point, you need a human domain expert. 
    • Algorithms: Wolfram/Alpha uses a bevy of algorithms including 5 million to 6 million of mathematical code.
    • Linguistics: The goal is to interpret free-form language processing. Wolfram said Wolfram/Alpha uses various components and techniques to figure out what people are actually asking. Part of that process is filtering out fluff.  ”We’ve been pretty good at removing linguistic fluff,” said Wolfram, he said people eventually get to the point where they speak as if they were talking to an expert. “People quickly begin to just type in concepts as they come to them.”
    • Presentation: Algorithms try to pick out what’s important to the searcher. Again, Wolfram noted that human-aided algorithms are needed.

    Instead of delivering up a bunch of links, the Wolfram/Alpha search engine tries to put a narrative around a user’s question and allow them to drill down. Indeed, the result presentation features graphics and other computational features. Think part calculator, part search engine. “

    Interesting to see that Google upgraded and announced some new features during the Wolfram demo – and thereby taken all the attention away from Wolfram back to Google, and Wolfram fires back a couple of minutes/hours later. Some other coverage about this here and here and on Techcrunch.

    The webcast itself was pretty boring. After 43 min of monologue, Stephen Wolfram opens the floor for questions. And the first question was right on.

    A journalist from O’Reilly wanted to know more about the consistency of data, and whether you can trust the algorythm this much. Answer; what we are doing is creating an (or the ?) authoritative source of data. Mechanism for people to contribute data. And Wolfram to “audit” that data. Source identification is the key challenge in all this. All this makes me think of Ken Steel BSR (Basic Semantic Repository) Beacon project in the mid 90’ies, where he would be THE owner of the semantic repository that’s going to keep all tags and semantic meanings of date being carried around in XML-like tagged data.

    Then David Weinberger asked if and when this will be opened up (see also my yesterday’s post on “think big – think open”. His question was in fact 3-fold. Open through:

    1. API’s: 3 levels of API’s: presentation, underlying XML, and symbolic expressions of underlying Mathematica source data.
    2. Metadata: when they open-up, plan is to expose some of the ontology through RDF.
    3. Upload personal data to the system: intention to have a professional version of Wolfram/Alpha, subscription based.

    David Bermaste: what with questions/answers were scientists have difference in opinion, such as “Are certain classes of PCB’s human cancerogeneous ?” or in other words “who has the real truth ?”

    Who is this for ? Kids or scientists ? Answer: “To make expert knowledge available to anybody, anywhere, anytime.” Wow. That’s ambitious.

    What in case the question does not make sense ? For example “what is the 300th biggest state in Europe ?”. At this stage and in this version Wolfram/Alpha does not return you a result.

    The challenge also seems to be how you keep the info and the universes of knowledge up to date. Today this project has +/- 100 people working on it (last period maybe 250), but what army of people do you need when this really goes live big way ? Answer: it’s probably going to end up with a 1,000 people. Sounds a bit underestimated to me if you ask.

    In essence, all this is about Knowledge Management. And i know quite some companies that would be interested in throwing all their unstructured data and have an engine that can make meaning out of all that data. So the professional version may be up to something. But in it’s current state for the public in general to compete head to head with Google ? No, i don’t think so.

    I suggest you also have a look at Mendeley, a start-up (initially from Germany, but now based in London), use parse and discover patterns in university research papers, but just think how this could be applied to basically any type of information. One of their VC’s is an ex Last.fm and ex-Skype (and also a professor or even a doctor in Economics at the University of Hamburg) and it’s interesting to see how these young net-generation guys are capable of telling their story in less then 2 minutes, with monetization topic included, and still leave you with a hunger and curiosity to want to know more.

    I never got this thrill/feeling of “want to know more” during the 2 hour Wolfram webcast. I felt bored, and was asking myself all the time the question “what have i missed here ?” and a sort of compassion and respect for somebody’s lifework of the last 25-30 years.  I was also somewhat disturbed by what i consider a form of self-complacency, bit out of the ivory tower type of discourse, not really accessible for non-experts.

    This Stephen is definitely a very smart and wise man, and it’s clear he is passionate about his work and is in search of “intellectual satisfaction”, but i am afraid he won’t be up to the power and sexiness of Google and many other newcomers on this stage.

    But does this withstand what i would call the  “Jeff Jarvis’ Google Test” about new types of relationship, architecture, publicness, elegant organization, new economy and business reality, new attitude, ethics and last but not least speed ?

    Think Big – Think Open

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    My friend xstof pointed me at ThinkBigManifesto. I started this blog with “Inspire others to Dream”. It could have been “Inspire others to Think Big”. And the advertising text of ThinkBigManifesto suggests: “Big thinking is open and generous, discerning and judicious, yet not judgmental. Big thinking is not excessive, nor is it about the pursuit of excess. Rather, it is moderate.”

    Google is big. Google is about Thinking Big. But what would it take to become a Google-Killer ? “More transparency and less opaqueness, more open”, says Jeff Jarvis in his short video posting on www.bigthink.com about the Google Killer. Jeff Jarvis is quite known from his bestseller “What would Google do”.

    But how open can you go ? Whereas in the past “standards” or “protocols” were focusing only on the connectivity (how to get data from A to B) and syntactic (and sometimes semantic) standards for data standards and “messages”, today we have open standards for all layers.

    I recently found this very interesting deck by Micah Laaker from Yahoo! I have to confess that these Yahoo! folks seem to be on top of everything these days. Also have a look at Yahoo Pipes if you have the time. Especially if one starts thinking about being open in a cloud and/or SaaS type of private or public community.

    Micah basically proposes an updated set of standards for many more layers than we used to think of (with courtesy of http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/04/baychi_open.html):

    1. Open Source (PHP, Hadoop)
    2. Open Infrastructure (Amazon EC2 & S3)
    3. Open Architecture (Firefox, YQL Open Tables)
    4. Open Standards (XML, JSON)
    5. Open Ontology (Microformats, RDFa). See also my recent blog on Smart Data and the OpenCalais project.
    6. Open Access (Twitter, Yahoo! BOSS)
    7. Open Canvas (Facebook, Yahoo! Application Platform)
    8. Open Content (Google Reader, My Yahoo!)
    9. Open Mic (WordPress, YouTube)
    10. Open Forum (Digg, Yahoo! Buzz)
    11. Open Door (Get Satisfaction)
    12. Open Borders (OPML)
    13. Open Identity (OpenID, AttributeExchange); btw have you noticed that Facebook is one of the first true big players to adopt OpenID ? Not as an Identity issuer, but accepting OpenID’s issued by other big players such as Windows Live ID, Yahoo ID, Google ID

    Slide #43 gives a good overview which standards bring most value to what audience (users/developers).

    Designing your Product as a Platform

    View more presentations from Micah Laaker.

    This presentation was delivered on 14 April at BayCHI http://www.baychi.org The meeting Report by student Gregory Cabrera ends with the appropriate questions:

    • Does the system need to be open in order for users (and developers) to derive value?

    • Is creativity an important feature in the design of a platform?

    • What are the features of a successful, creative, open system platform?

    • How creative would you like your users (or developers) to be?

    • How would you inspire creativity in the development of a product or service?

    Imagine a business to business cloud. What of these or other standards would make your offering truly open ? Feel free to comment or to come up with “open” suggestions.

    Smart Data go mainstream

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    Smart Data are the promise of the Semantic Web.

    And yes, i heard the pitches from Tim-Berners Lee. But that sounded all so far away and abstract, and i could not imagine what it would give me as added value.

    But the video & site below put this into a competitive advantage context and that’s where it gets interesting.

     

    Check out the OpenCalais project: fantastic site with many interesting other links to semantic web related sites, blogs, etc. This will take me week to digest.

    And these are not some geeks putting together something. This is an initiative powered by Thomson Reuters: “The Calais initiative supports the interoperability of content and advances Thomson Reuters mission to deliver pervasive, intelligent information. It builds on the company’s investment in semantic technologies and Natural Language Processing to offer free metadata generation services, developer tools and an open standard for the generation of semantic content. It also provides publishers with an automatic connection to the Linked Data cloud and introduces a global metadata transport layer that helps them leverage content consumers like search engines to reach more downstream readers.”

    I decided to try the DocViewer at http://viewer.opencalais.com/ and i cut & pasted the full text of my recent blog on “My new desktop: touch and 3D of course” and hit the submit button:

    image

    What i get back is amazing:

    image

    The unstructured data of my blog are parsed, patterns are recognized and semantic data is added. All this can now programmatically exploited as the APIs are published.

    Imagine combining this power with drag & drop mash-up techniques such as Yahoo Pipes or similar.

    Or imagine using this to feed info from financial data reference sources into your financial planning or even trading rooms. I recently have seen a similar demo, with very powerful multilingual parsing and pattern recognition of unstructured data, but this is the first time i see something that has the potential to go mainstream very fast.

    PS: some folks ask me where i find these interesting links. Well, i spent quite some time researching on the web of course. But i also have some friendly secret sources. Friends that just share a link via Twitter or mail, and who themselves have no time or appetite to make a blog out of it. The subject for this post was kindly provided “xstof”