bluereek

Interesting to read Palisano’s (head of IBM) comments:

“We are amassing an unimaginable amount of data in the world. In just three years, [internet] traffic is expected to total more than half a zettabyte. That’s a trillion gigabytes – or a one followed by 21 zeroes,” he tells industry, academic and political leaders.

“Where we once inferred, we now know. Where we once interpolated and extrapolated, we can now determine. The historical is giving way to the real-time and it’s not just about volume and velocity. The nature of the data we are collecting and analysing is changing, too.

“All this data is far more real-time than ever before. Most of us today, as leaders and as individuals, make decisions based on information that is backward-looking and limited in scope. That’s the best we had, but that is quickly changing.”

This just reinforces my previous blog of June 2009: here.

And this week we had the official launch in the UK of its government linked open data site.

We’ve seen the debate – back and forth – about linked open data.  We’ve seen the debate about top down v. bottom up approaches to semantics.  We’ve seen the arguments about the merits of RDF as against other frameworks.  But the volumes of data continue to increase – as does participation in social networks.

On a daily basis we see announcement about new products.  Nova Spivack tells us that the days of ‘Search’ are running out – we need ‘Help’ not ‘Search’.  We eagerly await his Twine 2.0.  We have seen significant product advancements announced this month in products such as Open Calais and Open Amplify.  One other product which caught my eye last week is Kngine.

Products such as Amplify aim to deal with the ‘tricky’ content – e.g. the ‘opinions’ implicit in content of social networks.   And this is a key element of what we are looking for: context for the content.  I am more interested in information on a particular subject when I understand the context, the perspective of the provider of the information.  I also want the richness of analysis possible through the combination of wider sources of data – including data compiled by government agencies which should be available to me.  Linked open data initiatives are required in all countries.  For Ireland – the sooner the better, if we consider ourselves a smart economy or a knowledge society.

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data dot gov dot uk is about to become a reality.  Tim Berners Lee and Nigel Schadbolt cover this off in their article, ‘Put in your postcode‘, out comes the data, in The Times 18/11/09.

The UK government is moving forward on a similar basis to the US government – in making public data available to the public.

Curious to see how far advanced we are wrt implementing something similar in Ireland – in the context of our knowledge society and smart economy.  Must make sense to make this type of information available – as argued by Tim Berners Lee in the referenced article.

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I referenced recently Tim Berners Lee’s encouragement to everyone looking to publish linked open data to use the Resource Definition Framework.  I also referenced in this blog recent work completed by the New York Times in this field.  The New York Times initiative has attracted an amount of comment in the technical community identifying the teething issues/ errors in this data as published.

Stefan Mazzocchi’s recent post, Data Smoke and Mirrors, speaks to some of the issues associated with publishing lots of linked data using RDF.  Stefan has reviewed a triplification of all the data from data.gov – and has been left somewhat bemused.  The posting itself provides some examples.

The point here is that we want to see the data published, we want to see the standards used – but it’s far from simple and publishing for the sake of publishing or triplifying for the sake of triplifying may be self defeating.  As a community we need to focus on quality and the end user of the data.

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No doubt about it – linked data seems to be where it ia and will be for some time.  CEOs traditionally have one eye on the external and one eye on the internal – relying on COOs, CFOs etc to drive the inside efficiently while they figure out the positioning, the alliances, the competitive advantage.  Most of the CIO work has been focused on providing the systems to enable the COO, CFO, etc run the organisation efficiently.

The CEO needs linked data.  She needs to be able to compare and contrast using external data, preferably in conjunction with internal data.  That’s all about linked data – in spite of the data being held in completely different structures. (Enter semantics, tags, RDF, etc).

Have spent a lot of time in the last 18 months working with companies figuring out their document management strategies for the first time – down to detailed taxonomies.  Now, in the context of linked data and semantic web am looking at ontologies.  Without doubt thinking through the ontology questions forces people to figure out processes, relationships and different types of structures.  Seems to me now that the linked data and the document management imperatives are not separate – rather they require a more holistic approach to the analysis and design.

I would expect linked data, content management, mashups, collaboration – all to become part of the same thinking and solutions.  Indeed wikis and blogs are part of this – as they challenge the traditional role of wordprocessing type documents – through providing greater interactivity/ collaboration.  Even developments such as wiki enabled web based training soltions (cf DERI and pergamon) are further examples of this merging of tools, environment and solutions.

So you may come at this from a collaboration and document management perspective or from a BI and data useability/ refereneabililty perspective.  But much of the thinking and problem solving are common, interlinked and overlap.

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