KPCB launches $100M iFund

The following excerpt was posted last March (2008) by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers:

KPCB's iFund^TM is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. The iFund^TM is agnostic to size and stage of investment and will invest in companies building applications, services and components. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment. The iFund^TM will back innovators pursuing transformative, high-impact ideas with an eye towards building independent durable companies atop the iPhone / iPod touch platform.

For more information, and to submit an application, see http://www.kpcb.com/initiatives/ifund/index.html.

Just now getting around to it, but here's my submission on behalf of Pardalis.

Please describe the market opportunity as you see it. Include information on the unmet market need, market size estimates, and unique features of the market that are relevant to your venture.

The first information bank is operating in North Dakota for the members of the CalfAID USDA PVP program. This is a member-trusted program that keeps verifiable pedigree information connected with animals as they make their way through a complex, owner-segmented food supply chain. CalfAID recognizes that there are now two products being produced along agricultural supply chains (1) the traditional farm product, and (2) a new, informational product. Build to the Cloud from trusted institutions and groups. Measure the economic impact upon family farms who will now for the first time be compensated not just for their traditional farm products but also for their informational products. Measure the impact upon the emerging Semantic Web that without an adjacent informational banking infrastructure will have virtually no opportunity to bargain for access to information that that participants to complex supply chains consider to be confidential.

Please describe your solution. Focus on how it is unique and distinctive from other similar solutions.

People are comfortable and familiar with monetary banks. Without people willingly depositing their money into banks, there would be no banking system as we know it. Without a healthy monetary banking system our economies would be comparatively dysfunctional, and our personal lives would be critically deficient in opportunities. Imagine empowering people with data ownership similar to the trustworthy, granular control they have over depositing and spending their banked money. What is technologically required is a flexible, integrated architectural framework for information object authoring and portability. One that easily adjusts to the definition of data ownership as it is variously defined by the data banks serving each information supply chain and product supply chain. The lowest common denominator will be the trusted, immutable informational objects that are authored, controllable and traceable by each data owner one-step, two-steps, three-steps, etc. after the initial port.

Please describe your technology and any proprietary intellectual property you have developed or intend to develop. Focus on how it is unique and distinctive from other similar technologies.

Pardalis holds a significant, global portfolio intellectual property (IP) uniquely designed for virtually integrating information and product supply networks that are not otherwise vertically integrable. Pardalis holds two U.S. patents that will enforceable until at least 2021, a pending U.S. continuation patent, and now four international patents issued by Australia, China, Mexico and New Zealand. Similar patents are pending in Brazil, Canada, Europe, Hong Kong, India, and Japan. Significantly, Pardalis' parent patent has been distinguished from prior art held by IBM, Microsoft, and SAP AG, all of which generally apply to the runtime efficiencies of immutable objects. Also distinguished from Pardalis' IP has been a seminal 1993 Xerox patent pertaining to collaborative data authoring and sharing. For further information begin with the blogged entry US Patent 6,671,696: Informational object authoring and distribution system (Pardalis Inc.) at http://www.pardalis.squarespace.com.

Please describe the competitive landscape. Include details how you are different from each of the competitors named.

Here's one example. Metaweb Technologies is developing technology for a semantic ‘knowledge web' marketed as Freebase Parallax^TM. Philosophically, Freebase Parallax is a substitute for a great tutor, like Aristotle was for Alexander. Using Freebase Parallax users do not modify existing web documents but instead annotate them. Freebase Parallax links the annotations so that the documents are more understandable and more findable. In the spirit of statistical reliability, annotations are also modifiable by their authors as better information becomes available to them. Metaweb characterizes its service as an open, collaboratively-edited database (like Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) of cross-linked data but it is really very much a next generation competitor to Google. As Freebase strives to become the premier ‘knowledge web', it will need access to new, reservoirs of data. Without a new Ownership Web infrastructure, such trustworthy information will forever remain missing or incomplete.

That's the substance of my submission. FYI, the submission form did not allow entry of hyperlinks or the addition of font emphasis, as I have included above in this blog entry. Also the limit was 1,000 characters (including spaces) for each of the four descriptions, above. For a more robust submission, see and compare CNN: Got an idea to help the world? Here's $10 million.

CNN: Got an idea to help the world? Here's $10 million

The following is the introduction to a CNN article published Wednesday, 24 September 2008:

Got an idea that could change the world, or at least help a lot of people? Google wants to hear from you -- and it will pay as much as $10 million to make your idea a reality.

To help celebrate its 10th birthday, the ambitious Internet giant is launching an initiative to solicit, and bankroll, fresh ideas that it believes could have broad and beneficial impact on people's lives.

Called Project 10^100 (pronounced "10 to the 100th"), Google's initiative will seek input from the public and a panel of judges in choosing up to five winning ideas, to be announced in February ....

For the complete article, go to Got an idea to help the world? Here's $10 million. I did and then I clicked over to Project "10 to the 100th" and submitted my idea. Below is the substance of my proposal. Hyperlinks were not permitted in the submission but I've nonetheless included a few in this blog entry. Also, the numbers 1 through 7 cover identification information, etc., and are not included below.

8. Your idea's name:

Banking on Information Ownership

9. Please select a category that best describes your idea.

[selected] Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?

10. What one sentence best describes your idea?

Empower people with data ownership similar to the trustworthy, granular control they have over depositing and spending their banked money.

11. Describe your idea in more depth.

People are comfortable and familiar with monetary banks. That’s a good thing because without people willingly depositing their money into banks, there would be no banking system as we know it. In order to make profits, banks bargain and pay with money and services for access to people’s money. Without a healthy monetary banking system our economies would be comparatively dysfunctional, and our personal lives would be critically deficient in opportunities.

Imagine the opportunities going unfulfilled because there is no similar information banking system arising in the Cloud. There is no similar integrated system existing for precisely and efficiently delivering our medical records to a new physician, or for providing access to a health history of the specific animal slaughtered for that purchased steak. Nothing out there compares with how the banking system facilitates gasoline purchases. While our monetary banking system granularly processes the exact amount of the checks we write, the tools currently being used by information technology companies would imprecisely and inefficiently ‘pay’ for your $35.62 tank of gas by cleaning out your entire bank account. Got $3,434.99 in your checking account? That’s what would be ‘paid’, and then it would be left up to the gas station to give you change for $3,399.37.

Wells Fargo formed in 1852 in response to the California gold rush. Wells Fargo wasn’t just a monetary bank, it was also an express delivery company of its time for transporting gold, mail and valuables across the Wild West. While we are now accustomed to next morning, overnight delivery between the coasts, Wells Fargo captured the imagination of the nation by connecting San Francisco and the East coast with its Pony Express.

Today’s Web needs information banks that do for the on-going gold rush on information what Wells Fargo did for the Forty-niners.

12. What problem or issue does your idea address?

The monetary banking system exhibits several key characteristics:

• Security: A physically safe place to store money. Also, government regulations insure continuity of deposits when banks go bankrupt.
• Credibility: Banks handle people’s money like they say they will in order to continue maintaining and attracting deposits.
• Compensation: Again, In order to make profits, banks bargain and pay with money and convenient personal and Internet services for access to people’s money.
• Control: Customers granularly deposit their money, withdraw it or transfer it when they choose.
• Integration: Banks provide a critical component to a very complex web of communications involved in our everyday transactions. In the U.S., a strong central banking system, the Federal Reserve System, has been critical in that regard.
• Verification: By regulation and by practice, banks verify that monies deposited with them are legal tender and not counterfeit.

Today’s Web needs information banks that do the same.

13. If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?

The old adage that ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law’ well applies to many fields like that of food safety, product tracking along complex supply chains, the tracking of people’s movements or Internet clicks, or the compilation of purchasing habits. But let’s take personal health records as a bell-weather example. Everyone - the hospitals, the doctors, the insurance companies, government agencies, consumer groups - claims to speak for the patients. But who really speaks for the ‘property-less’ patients? America is in the middle of a political stalemate vis-à-vis the efficient collection, storage and sharing of medical records. Ownership begets economic change which begets political voice. A national information banking system that granularly empowers patients with technological portability and control – not just HIPAA confidentiality protections - over their own medical information would provide an opportunity for firing the imagination of patients that brings real change.

14. What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground?

The initial steps are already being made. Patents are being globally secured. The first information bank is operating in North Dakota for the members of the CalfAID USDA PVP program. This is a member-trusted program that keeps verifiable pedigree information connected with animals as they make their way through a complex food supply chain that is highly dysfunctional when it comes to information sharing. The director of CalfAID recognizes that there are now two products being produced along agricultural supply chains (1) the traditional product, in this case an animal, and (2) an informational product. The bottom line: build to the Cloud from trusted institutions and groups. TRUST COMES FIRST, THEN COMES TECHNOLOGY BUILT FOR PRESERVING AND EMPOWERING THAT TRUST. Then, imagine further that the families of the members of the CalfAID program would have interest in using the same trusted technology for porting their personal health records.

15. Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it?

There would be several measuring sticks. For instance, measure the economic impact upon family farms who will now for the first time be compensated not just for their traditional farm products but also for their informational products. For instance, measure the political impact upon people’s lives when they finally are empowered with the choice of technological control over their information properties as they have long experienced over their monetary properties. For instance, measure the impact upon the emerging Semantic Web that without an adjacent informational banking infrastructure will have virtually no opportunity to bargain for access to information that people consider to be their identity, that participants to complex supply chains consider to be confidential and that governments classify as secret. Without such a new infrastructure, such trustworthy information will forever remain missing or incomplete.

16. [skipped]

17. [skipped]

18. If you'd like to recommend a specific organization, or the ideal type of organization, to execute your plan, please do so here.

Again, build to the Cloud from trusted institutions and groups.

[end]

That concludes my submission. If you are interested in more details, see also the April, 2007 Pardalis white paper entitled Banking on Granular Information Ownership. See also, Laying the First Plank of a Supply Chain Ownership Web in North Dakota.

Update on Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 10:33AM by Steve Holcombe

See also another similar submission at KPCB launches $100M iFund.

Update on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 1:49PM by Steve Holcombe

Voting has been pushed back to March 17, 2009 because of over 100K submissions. See Project 10 to the 100th for more information.

Tim O'Reilly: Why search competition isn't the point

Tim O'Reilly is widely credited within Silicon Valley with coining the term 'Web 2.0'.

He is not a software engineer. He graduated from Harvard in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts in the classics.

From the outside looking in, the company he founded, O'Reilly Media, looks like either or both an online publisher of books and conference related materials, or as major conference producer. O'Reilly prefers to describe it as a technology transfer company, "changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators."

Photo of Tim O'Reilly by takeshi

O'Reilly maintains a blog he calls O'Reilly Radar and the other day he posted an entry he called Why search competition isn't the point. It happens to include viewpoints I share.

Shared viewpoint #1 -

• "To focus on search is to miss the big picture. Web 2.0 (or whatever the fullness of the Internet Operating System ends up being called) is far bigger than search .... The key question is what kind of platform we're collectively building. There is strong evidence that the platform that's emerging is more like Linux than it is like Windows. That is, no one player is going to own all the pieces. But that could change if someone owned enough of the pieces that everyone else became dependent on them. So I'd be much more concerned about a single player rolling up unrelated and complementary pieces of the larger internet [operating system] till they owned critical mass in multiple areas than I would be about a single player owning a best of breed application in one area or another." [bold emphasis added]
  

Shared viewpoint #2 - 

• "The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service." [bold emphasis added]
  

Shared viewpoint #3 -

• "Google's search dominance will be toppled by a disruptive innovation that changes the game, not by playing catch-up at the same game. The challenges that keep Google on their toes, innovating in search, will come from outside the current system." [bold emphasis added]
  

From my vantage point, what Tim O'Reilly is talking about is a good 'ol paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts come from 'outside of the box'. When they happen it is as if 'nobody saw it coming'. But, once they happen, 20/20 hindsight reveals that the 'writing was on the wall' well in advance of the shift.

In advance of this paradigm shift, the writing that I see on the wall is simply this:

"Data ownership matters"

 This simple premise is the raison d'etre for The Pardalis Data Ownership Blog.

Computing in the Cloud: Possession and ownership of data

The following video is provided by UChannel, a collection of public affairs lectures, panels and events from academic institutions all over the world. This video was taken at a conference held at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy on January 14, 2008. The conference was sponsored by Microsoft.

What you will see is a panel and discussion format moderated by Ed Felten, Director of the CITP. The panel members are:

1. Joel Reidenberg, Professor of Law, Fordham University
2. Timothy B. Lee, blogger at Technology Liberation Front and adjunct scholar, Cato Institute
   
3. Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center
   

Here is a paragraph descriptive of the questions addressed by the panel. 

"In cloud computing, a provider's data center holds information that would more traditionally have been stored on the end user's computer. How does this impact user privacy? To what extent do users "own" this data, and what obligations do the service providers have? What obligations should they have? Does moving the data to the provider's data center improve security or endanger it?"

The video, entitled "Computing in the Cloud: Possession and ownership of data", is useful and timely. And the panel is well constructed.

Tim Lee, who readily states that he is not a lawyer, very much serves as an apologist for the online companies who believe that "total, one-hundred percent online privacy would mean ... that there wouldn't be any online [sharing] services at all" (Video Time ~ 2:07).

The online services Lee briefly touches upon by way of example are the ubiquitous use of Web cookies for collecting a wide variety of information about usage of the Internet by online users (~5:30), Google's Gmail which employs a business model of examining contents of users' e-mail and tailoring advertising presented to users (~8:05), Facebook's News Feed service which permits users to keep track of changes to their 'friends' accounts, and Facebook's Beacon service which sends data from external websites to Facebook accounts for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements (~10:54).

Joel Reidenberg, a professor of law, believes that the distinction between government and the private sector loses its meaning when we think of computing in the cloud (~ 15:10), but that the prospect of cloud computing also reinforces the need for fair information practice standards (~16:00). He is of the opinion that as computing moves into the cloud it will be easier to regulate centralized gate-keepers by law and/or by technical standards (~23:50).

• This is my first 'take away' from this video clip in that Professor Reidenberg reinforces the need for centralized standard setting bodies as I concluded in Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership - Part IV.
  

Marc Rotenberg, also a law professor, emphasizes that without user anonymity, and without transparency provided by the online companies, there will be no privacy for users in the cloud (~29:47 - 37:20). And in doing so Rotenberg challenges Tim Lee for his statement that there cannot be complete user privacy for online companies to provide the services they provide (~33.30). This actually makes for the most interesting exchanges of the video from the 38:00 minute mark to the 44:00 minute mark. 

There is also an interesting dialogue regarding the application of the Fourth Amendment. One of the conference attendees asked the panel why there had been no mention of the Fourth Amendment in any of their presentations. Here is the response from Reidenberg at the 53:30 mark:

"Cloud computing is threatening the vitality of the Fourth Amendment ... [because] the more we see centralization of data [by private, online companies], and the more that data is used for secondary purposes, the easier it is for the government to gain access outside the kind of restraints we put on states in the Fourth Amendment."

In other words, why should the government worry about overcoming Fourth Amendment hurdles about confiscating a person's data when it can sit back and relatively easily purchase or otherwise obtain the same personal data from the big online companies? And do so even in real-time? Why, indeed.

For me, the second 'take away' from this video is found in another cogent comment by Professor Reidenberg at the 88:53 mark:

"The [online] company that ... figures out ways of ... building into [its] compliance systems ... [privacy] compliance mechanisms ... will be putting itself at a tremendous competitive advantage for attracting the services to operate in [the cloud computing environment]."

The technological data ownership discussed and described in Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership - Part IV, supra, is a privacy compliance mechanism.

For those who are interested in the legalities and government policies revolving around burgeoning data ownership issues related to software as a service, the Semantic Web and Cloud Computing, and who are motivated to sit through a 90 minute presentation, here is the video clip ....

Update on Thursday, June 5, 2008 at 12:09PM by Steve Holcombe

In the United States, and notwithstanding the impotency of the Fourth Amendment protections against government search and seizure, it is an irony that the growing centralization of the Cloud may well render it more amenable to government regulation and lawsuit liability.

"Cloud computing opens doors for privacy enhancements [driven by regulation]. It's easier to target for regulation by law or by technical configuration [the] gatekeepers. So to the extent there is a central management, they're easier to find, they're easier to regulate, and they're easier to hold liable than distributed systems."

Quoting Reidenberg at the 23:50m mark.

Data Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership - Part IV

[return to Part III]

Connecting Portability to Traceability

Let’s begin this final part with a nicely presented video interview of Tim Berners-Lee, the widely acclaimed inventor of the World Wide Web, by Technology Review.

Video: Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web
Technology Review (March, 2007)
Clicking on this link opens the video in a separate window for an 8 min 24 sec video.
Close that window when the video is complete and you'll be returned here.

 
Berners-Lee has a degree in physics from The Queen’s College, Oxford. He well expresses in the video the insight of an academic technologist preaching the benefits of the emerging Semantic Web as, essentially, one big, connected database.

For instance, Berners-Lee discusses life sciences not once but twice during this interview in the context of making more and better semantically connected information available to doctors, emergency responders and other healthcare workers. He sees this, and rightly so, as being particularly important to fight both (a) epidemics and pandemics, and (b) more persistent diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. Presumably that means access to personal health records. However, there is no mention in this interview about concerns over the ownership of information.

Here’s a more recent interview excerpt in March, 2008, initiated by interviewer Paul Miller of ZDNet, in which Berners-Lee does acknowledge data ownership fear factors.

Miller (03:21): “You talked a little bit about people's concerns … with loss of control or loss of credibility, or loss of visibility. Are those concerns justified or is it simply an outmoded way of looking at how you appear on the Web?”

Berners-Lee: “I think that both are true. In a way it is reasonable to worry in an organization … You own that data, you are worried that if it is exposed, people will start criticizing [you] ….

So, there are some organizations where if you do just sort of naively expose data, society doesn't work very well and you have to be careful to watch your backside. But, on the other hand, if that is the case, there is a problem. [T]he Semantic Web is about integration, it is like getting power when you use the data, it is giving people in the company the ability to do queries across the huge amounts of data the company has.

And if a company doesn't do that, then, it will be seriously disadvantaged competitively. If a company has got this feeling where people don't want other people in the company to know what is going on, then, it has already got a problem ….

Well actually, it would expose... all these inconsistencies. Well, in a way, you (sic) got the inconsistencies already, if it exposes them then actually it helps you. So, I think, it is important for the leadership in the company … to give kudos to the people who provided the data upon which a decision was made, even though they weren't the people who made the decision.” (emphasis added)

Elsewhere in this ZDNet interview, Berners-Lee announces that the core pieces for development of the Semantic Web are now in place (i.e., SPARQL, RDF, URI, XML, OWL, and GRDDL). But, again, what I find lacking is that these core pieces do not by themselves provide a mechanism for addressing data ownership issues.

I wish I could introduce Berners-Lee to Marshall Van Alstyne.

Actually, they may already know each other. Like Berners-Lee, Van Alstyne is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Van Alstyne is an information economist whose work in the area of data ownership I have greatly admired for some time (though I have yet to have had the pleasure of making his acquaintance).

There are other noteworthy recent papers by Van Alstyne but, since I first came across it several years ago, I have continued to be enamored with the prescience of a 1994 publication he co-authored entitled, Why Not One Big Database? Ownership Principles for Database Design. Here’s my favorite quote from that paper.

“The fundamental point of this research is that ownership matters. Any group that provides data to other parts of an organization requires compensation for being the source of that data. When it is impossible to provide an explicit contract that rewards those who create and maintain data, "ownership" will be the best way to provide incentives. Otherwise, and despite the best available technology, an organization has not chosen its best incentives and the subtle intangible costs of low effort will appear as distorted, missing, or unusable data.” (emphasis added)

Whether they know each other or not, the reason I would want to see them introduced is that I don’t hear Van Alstyne’s socio-economic themes in the voice of Berners-Lee. In fact I have checked out the online biographies provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) of the very fine team that Berners-Lee, as the head of W3C, has brought together. I find no references to academic degrees or experiential backgrounds in either sociology or economics. The W3C team is heavily laden with technologists.

And, why not? After all, the mission of the W3C is one of setting standards for the technological marvel that is the World Wide Web. One must set boundaries and bring focus to any enterprise or endeavor, and Berners-Lee has reasonably done so by directing the W3C team to connect the data that society is either already providing, albeit free of data ownership concerns (i.e., the information already available in massively populated government databases, academic databases, or other publicly accessible sources).

It’s just that I wish there was some cross-pollination going on between the W3C and the likes of Van Alstyne that was resulting, for instance, in something like author-controlled XML (A-XML) as exampled in Parts II and III, above (and, again, below).

That the W3C is not focusing on data ownership is an opportunity for the likes of Dataportability.org. Similarly, as mentioned in Part III, above, in the world of supply chains a likely candidate for a central ‘any product data bank’ would be EPCglobal, the non-profit supply chain consortium. But EPCglobal is a long way from focusing on the kind of data ownership proposed in this writing, or perhaps even envisioning as an organization that they might want to do so.

Like EPCglobal within the ecology of supply chains, Dataportability.org has seated at its table some very powerful members of the social networking ecology (i.e., Google, Plaxo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, SixApart and Microsoft). There is a critical mass in those members that provides an opportunity for an organization like Dataportability.org to become a neutral, central data bank for portable information among its members for the benefit of social networking subscribers.

For instance, for e-mail addresses desired by a Facebook subscriber to be portable to other social networking websites, Facebook would add tools to the subscriber's interface for seamless registration of the e-mail addresses with a central, portability database branded with Facebook's trademark (but in fact separately administered by Dataportability.org).  The subscriber would merely enter the chosen e-mail addresses into his or her interface, click on the 'register' button, and automatically author the following draft XML object ...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<PortabilityDictionary_DraftElements>
<emailaddr>noname01@pardalis.com</emailaddr>
<emailaddr>noname02@pardalis.com</emailaddr>
<emailaddr>noname03@pardalis.com</emailaddr>
</PortabilityDictionary_DraftElements>

... which would come to be registered in the central portability 'bank' (again, administered by Dataportability.org) as the following XML object.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<PortabilityDictionary_RegisteredElements>

<emailaddr UniquePointer =
" http://www.centralportabilitybank.org/email_IDs/21263 "/>

<emailaddr UniquePointer =
" http://www.centralportabilitybank.org/email_IDs/21264 "/>

<emailaddr UniquePointer =
" http://www.centralportabilitybank.org/email_IDs/21265 "/>

</PortabilityDictionary_RegisteredElements>

Again, as illustrated in Part III, above, this would set the stage for a viable model for Dataportability.org, as a non-profit consortium managed by the likes of Facebook, Flickr, etc., to provide more than just portability services. Now, with a centralized registry service for A-XML objects (i.e., author-controlled, informational objects) the portability service could easily be stretched into a non-collaborative data authoring and sharing service.

IP Comment: Compare and contrast the collaborative data authoring and sharing systems illustrated by Xerox's US Patent 5,220,657, Updating local copy of shared data in a collaborative system Φ and eiSolutions' US Patent 6,240,414, Method of resolving data conflicts in a shared data environment.

And, again, the 'data ownership' service would presumably be branded by each of the distributed ‘bank members’ (like Facebook, Flikr, etc.) as their own service.

What might this data ownership service entail? To instill confidence in subscribers that they ‘own’ their portable data, what could be provided to members by Facebook, Flickr, etc. as part of the data ownership service made possible by the central Dataportability.org?

For instance: 

• Each time an administrative action is taken by Dataportability.org affecting the registered data object - or a granular data element within a registered object - the subscriber could choose to be automatically notified with a fine-grained report.
  
• Each time the registered data object is shared - or data elements within the object are granularly shared - according to the permissions established by the subscriber, he or she could choose be immediately, electronically notified with a fine-grained report.
• Online, on-demand granular information traceability reports (i.e., fine-grained reports mapping out who accesses or uses a subscribers shared information)
• Catastrophe data back-up services
• etc. 

Thus could Dataportability.org light a data ownership pathway for both the W3C and EPCglobal. 

Concluding Remarks 

The fundamental point of this multi-entry blog is that data ownership matters. With it, the Semantic Web stands the best chance for reaching its full potential for the porting of records between and among social networking sites, and for the tracking and discovering of information along both information and product supply chains.

And holding that positive thought in mind, it’s time to end this writing with a little portability rock n’ roll. It's courtesy of Danny Ayers. Enjoy!

Update on Thursday, June 5, 2008 at 2:28PM by Steve Holcombe

Of relevant interest is the blog entry, Empathic Web, posted by Zach Beauvais to Nodalities on 3 June 2008 -

This concept: empathy at a distance or a digitally-connected community, made me consider the connections in the Semantic Web. The in’s and out’s of the SemWeb have been argued, discussed, debated, and explored technologically. Many blogs and sites have huge amounts of content devoted to the definitions of SPARQL and RDF. Abstractions have been published discussing the applications of this new technology. Sir Tim Berners-Lee refers to the Semantic Web as ‘The Web done right.’

But, what is being done right? Is the Semantic Web the Web done technologically right? Is it an upgrade to the existing framework or a patch to fix what was wrong? Maybe. But it makes me wonder about looking at this from a sociological or communicative perspective. The Semantic Web, technologically, is important to humanity only so far as it’s a medium for our connections.