Φ Pardalis Data Ownership Blog

Microsoft Office Applications as Seamless Supply Chain Tools

There is systemic supply chain problem for small businesses (defined here as 1 to 10 employees in size) that reverberates throughout our global economies. It may be seen in any product or service supply chain comprised of small businesses.

• In other words, in the 'last mile' of any and every supply chain.

Of all the product supply chains in the world the U.S. beef livestock and meat products' industry is arguably the most challenging. There are approximately 110 million cattle in the U.S. and Canadian beef supply chain. Each year, about 44 million animals are slaughtered. In the U.S. there are approximately 1 million beef cattle operations the vast majority of which are small farms and family-owned operations commonly using Microsoft Office Excel for electronically storing and managing their livestock data.

Practically none of that data is shared, and even when it is shared it's in the form of difficult to trace and authenticate paperwork, faxes, e-mails and phone calls.

One reason is that there has heretofore been no 'chain of custody' SaaS designed for small businesses. Not only that but neither Microsoft Excel nor any other components of the Microsoft Office Applications (like Outlook or Word) have yet to be designed to be supply chain traceability and authentication solutions for small businesses.

Other reasons have to do with common fear factors. Farmers and ranchers constantly wrestle with convergent 'data ownership' issues related to genetics, pharmaceuticals, food safety, traceability, authentication, government regulation, product marketability, health records, and information producer confidentiality.

• Why provide ammunition to a competitor?
• Why let the government (i.e., the USDA, FDA, IRS, etc.) know how many cattle you - as a farmer - really own?
• And why do so especially if you - as a farmer - don't see an increase on your return on investment (ROI)?

So, the small businesses of de-centralized U.S. agri-food supply chains are not providing customers or regulators with traceable, pedigree data about their crops and livestock.

• The result? Continuing U.S. food safety crises. Mad cow prions, tainted spinach, hamburger recalls, etc.

And you don't have to be guilty, either, to be ensnared. The 2008 tomato recalls found the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wrongly fingering the tomato industry for salmonella poisonings. That went on for weeks.

• What if small business users of Microsoft Office Applications could be seamlessly linked to the large and mid-sized enterprises already using ERP, CRM, SCM and other federated supply chain solutions?
• For example, what if a metadata service layer could transform Microsoft Excel into a supply chain solution for increasing ROI for small farmers who could then be paid for both their cash crop and the pedigree data identifying the history of their cash crop?
• And what if that metadata service layer also directly addressed the ‘data ownership’ fears prevalent among U.S. farmers that their data will be wrongly used by regulators or unfairly exploited by competitors?

Pardalis’ Metadata Service Platform

Pardalis’ metadata service platform helps draw small businesses into the emerging ‘Cloud’. With Microsoft technology (Windows server, SQL server, .Net, Excel-like UI), Pardalis has engineered a metadata SaaS platform for small business end-users to granularly author, register and control immutable data objects. Pardalis' business rules advance the capabilities of a relational database (i.e., SQL) toward an emerging, object-oriented Cloud. But the end-users merely see it as an affordable service for ‘banking’, porting and controlling access to their data products using a SaaS-anized Excel-like user-interface.

Early Market Validation

Pardalis’ platform is being deployed by CalfAID, a USDA process verified RFID cattle tracking program using ISO 9000 series standards for documented quality management systems. CalfAID is owned by the small farmers comprising the North Dakota Beef Cattle Improvement Association, and administered by North Dakota State University for:

• Linking small beef producers, feedlots, processors and restaurants with consumers,
• Bringing ultra-high frequency, RFID tags to commercial viability,
• Protecting livestock producers, food system industries, veterinary health, and consumer health from accidental or intentional disease outbreaks, and
• Overcoming the ‘scary picture’ of RFID tracking by empowering small farmers with direct, granular, data portability control over their identities and pedigree data.

The Value of Microsoft Office Applications As Seamless Supply Chain Tools

The vertical value of pedigree data gathered from agri-food supply chains, using Microsoft Office Applications communicating through a Pardalis metadata service layer, can now be monetized:

• Consumers retrieving deep search results (permission being granted by a data owner)  to determine food history, quality and safety,
• Retailers promoting consumer loyalty with pedigree-driven purchase orders directly communicated back through the metadata service layer to small business farmers,
• Farmers discovering a new profit center - pedigree data about their cash crops,
• RFID product vendors selling outside of federated supply chains and into the ’last mile’, and
• Regulators receiving more and better data for rapidly responding to food health crises.

Horizontally Monetizing SaaS in the Cloud with Data Ownership

Challenges related to data chain of custody are not limited to agri-food. There are approximately 500 million world-wide end-users of Microsoft Office Applications. So, what would be the definition of 'data ownership' that might horizontally pull these end-users into SaaS-anized versions of their Office Applications residing in the Cloud?

• That is, into the 'software plus services' versions of Office Applications as envisioned by Steve Ballmer for Windows Azure?

Empower the end-users with SaaS tools for tracing access to their data objects one-step, two steps, three-steps, etc. after the initial share. They'll know what data ownership is when they see it. The result? The Cloud becomes inflated sooner rather than later with traceable, trustworthy, authenticated data that would otherwise go missing from the invisible hand of informational capitalism.

• That is, sail past the siren-songs of abstract, privacy laws that small businesses don't trust anyway, and capacitate those small business with real, hands-on functionalities that they viscerally recognize as data ownership.

And then watch those small businesses grease the wheels for monetizing SaaS in the Cloud.

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.

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.

My brother, Scot, and I traveled to North Dakota last week for meetings in Dickinson, N.D. (in southwest North Dakota) and Fargo, N.D. (southeastern North Dakota on the border with sister city, Moorhead, MN). Leaving Oklahoma we traveled north through Kansas, spent the night in North Platte, Nebraska. The next day took us by the Black Hills of South Dakota and Mt. Rushmore. If you have never been there, it's definitely worth the stop. I hadn't realized that the four President's gazed out of the Black Hills toward the east and a vast sea of prairie. We also drove on some beautiful, shoulderless 'blue' highways like that of Highway 85 between Belle Fourche, S.D. and Belfield, N.D. If you love the movie Dances with Wolves, you'll love this stretch of scenery. Lots and lots of pronghorn antelope, too. And Redig, S.D. really is one of those 'towns' with one house sitting on a rail straight road stretching endlessly into the distance. No kidding.

But, I digress.

For those of you who think you are unfamiliar with complex supply chains, allow me to jog your memory because you actually know more than you think you do. Spinach. Lead painted toys. Mad cows. Tomatoes. Jalapeno peppers. Hamburger. What do they all have in common? They are products that originate at the frayed ends of lengthy (even international) supply chains beset by many, many fears related to information sharing. And they are products that have been deemed poisonous (lead paint) or unhealthy (contaminated with e. coli, the prions that apparently cause BSE, or salmonella). Actually, the tomato industry got hammered this summer and they weren't even at fault. But take a look at some of the wonderful, free advertising the tomato industry received before the FDA called off the dogs.

What is the value of immediately accessible, credible, supply chain information? If it incontrovertibly points to you and your business as the culprit in a food disease crisis, for instance, then, yes, you are limiting your options. But if your company uses best practices in its crop management and limits its risks in advance, the value of credible information at your fingertips in a disease crisis is to immediately distinguish your company from (a) the actual culprits, and (b) all other companies who perform best crop management practices just like you but can't provide credible information for months. In fact the damage is not measured in months but in hours. Unfortunately, within hours the damage to reputation has been seeded into the minds of wholesale buyers and retail consumers. And without your ability to immediately provide exonerating information, the government regulators are going to 'play it safe' and cast a broad net that unfortunately ropes in a lot of innocent parties.

Information is like a sword. Unfortunately, if you don't firmly grab the sword and make it cut for you, in a crisis the sword will be out of your hands and you will potentially be sliced to death in the name of 'public health'.

The Dickinson Research Extension Center of North Dakota State University (NDSU DREC) is the first land grant extension center, and perhaps still the only one, to operate a beef livestock age and source verification program sanctioned by the USDA. It's called the CalfAID USDA PVP (i.e., process verified program employing RFID ear tags) and it's managed by NDSU DREC for the real cattlemen of the North Dakota Beef Cattle Improvement Association. The Agro-Security Resource Center at Dickinson State University also makes a significant contribution. It's partly research driven (with Congressional funding) and partly market-driven. It's market-driven in that those real livestock producers pay a fee per animal out of their pockets with the expectation that they will receive greater dollars (i.e., premiums) later on that the market pays for credible information about those calves. The CalfAID PVP exists to keep the calves connected with their age (i.e., birthdate) and source (i.e., origin) as each calf winds its way along an otherwise 'information dysfunctional' supply chain.

How dysfunctional is the information sharing? The U.S. has a national herd of about 100 million cattle. There's about a million cattle operations of one sort or the other. The vast majority of calf producers don't know where their calves eventually end up being slaughtered. Most packers don't know from what ranch or farm the animals they slaughter originated from. It's pretty much the same as it was in the 19th century. Most products (i.e., the livestock) are pushed one-step at a time as 'as is' commodities along a supply chain in which each segment only sees one step back, and one step forward. It's kind of like standing in a bucket line helping to pass along that bucket of water to put out a fire. You know who is passing you the bucket, and you know to whom you are passing it on. But in the beef industry, chances are you don't know where the fire is or even where the water is coming from.

In order to set the stage for scaling out from tracking thousands of cattle to tracking potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of cattle, NDSU DREC has adopted a web service for their supply chain that empowers livestock producers to do with their cattle data what the following jazzy video envisions for social networks.


DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo

The web service, patented and engineered by Pardalis, is called a 'data bank' and it's a proprietary system coded in .NET with SQL server architecture on the back-end. It's not an open-source system. Not that I have anything against open-source and the strong stance that DataPortability.org has taken in its favor. In fact, I would be very interested to see an adjacent Linux system similarly funded and architected from Pardalis' IP as a data bank for the social networking space. It's just that in the real world of fragmented product supply chains (like the beef/meat supply chain) the phrase 'open-source' is a deal killer for too many of the end-users.

• Imagine being told that your monetary bank is an 'open source' bank, for instance. That might make you a little squeamish, right? Now try telling livestock producers that their new-fangled livestock data bank is 'open source'. That would be akin to telling them that that bank is operated by the IRS. I'm not kidding. Fear of the IRS - or 'the government' - knowing how many cattle a producer owns is of high concern across the country. In other words, a deal killer for even getting them to start using the data bank.

Common Point Authoring ModelSo how exactly does the 'data bank' work. To the right is the information model for the Common Point Authoring system (CPA) - that's the name that Pardalis has used in its most recent patents. You can also compare this image with other views, images and information about the CPA system to be found elsewhere in this blog site. Within the CPA system data cannot be changed once set (i.e., registered) so that the data can be used for verification and certification. Or, put another way, Pardalis has transformed the traditional application of immutable objects beyond run-time efficiencies, and empowered end-users with tools for granularly authoring, registering, controlling, and sharing these immutable objects.

The end-users 'own' and directly control sharing rights over what they author and register (or automatically collect and register), they just can't change it once it's authored. It becomes a part of a permanent, trustworthy record of the bank albeit controlled by the author. Other data bank account holders who receive any information from another data bank account holder know that. And they can remix it with their own data, and further share it, permission being granted to do so by the original author. This all helps build confidence, data credibility and, especially, trusted communication where it did not exist before. It provides a means for supply chain participants to reap benefits not just from their traditional products, but now also from their informational products. And, yes, there's no free lunch. The government might very well be able to subpoena those electronic records in their quest to protect the public's health. But they do the same with traditional monetary banks, too, don't they?

Now there are a number of technological ways to accomplish the same thing, it's just that Pardalis' object oriented approach provides certain long term advantages in terms of scalability, efficiency and granularity in 'the Cloud' that match up extremely well to an emerging Semantic Web. And you don't have to take my word for it. See, for example, the blogged entries, Efficient monitoring of objects in object-oriented database system which interacts cooperatively with client programs and Advantages of object oriented databases over relational databases. And Pardalis’ granular information banking system provides a substantial head-start in the race toward the standardization of a metadata platform for what I call an Ownership Web.

Online encyclopedias like Metaweb's Freebase Parallax are beginning to roll out tools for semantic search and semantic visualizations of publicly accessible information. See the nifty video clip in Freebase Parallax and the Ownership Web. Others like Google, Yahoo! , and Wikipedia will follow. The intrinsic value for connecting these search engines and encyclopedias with the Ownership Web will be the opportunity to likewise empower their authenticated end-users with the same semantic tools for accessing information that people consider to be their identity, that participants to complex supply chains consider to be confidential, and that governments classify as secret.

But, again, I digress.

Here's a film clip demonstrating the the authoring and portability of immutable data objects along the beef livestock supply chain.  The interface is neither sexy nor jazzy. But it is effective. This type of look and feel makes sense for the beef livestock supply chain as Microsoft Excel is familiar to a large percentage of cattle producers (at least the ones who have moved on from pencil and paper). Currently, there's no audio because, frankly, I've provided the audio 'live' when called upon to do so. If you, too, would like a verbal walk through, drop me an e-mail. Or, in the alternative, I've scripted a written walk-through that you can download, print and follow as the clip runs its course. If you want to see a full screen version, click on the hyperlinked text below the graphic to take you to the Vimeo website.

NDSU CalfAID Data Bank Demo from Steve Holcombe on Vimeo.

In the coming months the data bank will be used not just to track the data uploaded and ported by CalfAID members, but also for helping to keep data connected with the animals from other age and source programs, and probably even for COOL compliance, too.

Once again, there's way more to the data bank than its application to the beef industry. As Dr. Kris Ringwall, Director of NDSU DREC, said in Fargo to a large vegetable growing company during a live demonstration of the data bank, "whether it's an animal or a vegetable, it's a product with a pedigree".

Well, that may be more of a paraphrase than a quote, but I know that Kris in this Presidential campaign season would nonetheless 'approve this message'.

What's Right About the Semantic Web

What’s right about the Semantic Web is that its most highly funded visionaries have envisioned beyond a Web of documents to a ‘Data Web’. Here's an example: a Web of scalably integrated data employing object registries envisioned by Metaweb Technologies’ Danny Hillis and manifested in Freebase Parallax™, a competitive platform and application to both Google and Wikipedia.

AristotleMetaweb Technologies is a San Francisco start-up developing and patenting technology for a semantic ‘Knowledge Web’ marketed as Freebase Parallax. 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. The annotations of Amazon.com are the closest example but Freebase Parallax further links the annotations so that the documents are more understandable and more findable. 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, as you will see in the video below, it is really very much a next generation competitor to both Google and Wikipedia.

The Intellectual Property Behind Freebase Parallax

Click on the thumbnail image to the left and you will see in more detail what Hillis envisions. That is, a database represented as a labeled graph, where data objects are connected by labeled links to each other and to concept nodes. For example, a concept node for a particular category contains two subcategories that are linked via labeled links "belongs-to" and "related-to" with text and picture. An entity comprises another concept that is linked via labeled links "refers-to," "picture-of," "associated-with," and "describes" with Web page, picture, audio clip, and data. For further information about this intellectual property - entitled Knowledge Web - see the blogged entry US Patent App 20050086188: Knowledge Web (Hillis, Daniel W. et al).

Freebase Parallax Incarnate

In the following video let's look at how this intellectual property for Knowledge Web is actually being engineered and applied by Metaweb Technologies in the form of Freebase Parallax.

Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.

The Semantic Web's Achilles Heel

You can hear it in the video. What Hillis and Metaweb Technologies well recognize is that as Freebase Parallax strives to become the premier knowledge source for the Web, it will need access to new, blue oceans of data. It must find a gateway into the closely-held, confidential and classified information that people consider to be their identity, that participants to complex supply chains consider to be confidential, and that governments classify as secret. That means that data ownership must be entered into the equation for the success of Freebase Parallax and the emerging Semantic Web in general.

Not that Hillis hasn't thought about data ownership. He has. You can see it in an interview conducted by his patent attorney and filed on December 21, 2001 in the provisional USPTO Patent Application 60/343,273:

Danny Hillis: "Here's another idea that's super simple. I've never seen it done. Maybe it's too simple. Let's go back to the terrorist version [of Knowledge Web]. There's a particular problem in the terrorist version that the information is, of course, highly classified .... Different people have some different needs to know about it and so on. What would be nice is if you ... asked for a piece of information. That you [want access to an] annotation that you know exists .... Let's say I've got a summary [of the annotation] that said,  'Osama bin Laden is traveling to Italy.' I'd like to know how do you know that. That's classified. Maybe I really have legitimate reasons for that. So what I'd like to do, is if I follow a link that I know exists to a classified thing, I'd like the same system that does that to automatically help me with the process of getting the clearance to access that material." [emphasis added]

What Hillis was tapping into just a few months after 9/11 is just as relevant to today's information sharing needs.

But bouncing around ideas about how we need data ownership is not the same as developing methods or designs to solve it. What Hillis non-provisionally filed, subsequent to his provisional application, was the Knowledge Web application. Because of its emphasis upon the statistical reliability of annotations, Knowledge web's IP is tailored made for the Semantic Web. But it is not designed for data ownership.

The Ownership Web

For the Semantic Web to reach its full potential, it must have access to more than just publicly available data sources. Only with the empowerment of technological data ownership in the hands of people, businesses, and governments will the Semantic Web make contact with a horizon of new, ‘blue ocean’ data.

Conceptually, the Ownership Web would be separate from the Semantic Web, though semantically connected as layer of distributed, enterprise-class web platforms residing in the Cloud.

The Ownership Web would contain diverse registries of uniquely identified data elements for the direct authoring, and further registration, of uniquely identified data objects. Using these platforms people, businesses and governments would directly host the authoring, publication, sharing, control and tracking of the movement of their data objects.

The technological construct best suited for the dynamic of networked efficiency, scalability, granularity and trustworthy ownership is the data object in the form of an immutable, granularly identified, ‘informational’ object.

A marketing construct well suited to relying upon the trustworthiness of immutable, informational objects would be the 'data bank'.

Data Banking

Traditional monetary banks meet the expectations of real people and real businesses in the real world.

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. By comparison, we live in a world that is at once awash in on-demand information courtesy of the Internet, and at the same time the Internet is strangely impotent when it comes to information ownership.

In many respects the Internet is like the Wild West because there is no information web similar to our monetary banking system. No similar integrated system exists 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.

If an analogy to the Wild West is apropos, then it is interesting to reflect upon the history of a bank like 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. As further described in Banking on Granular Information Ownership, today’s Web needs data banks that do for the on-going gold rush on information what Wells Fargo did for the Forty-niners.

Banks meet the expectations of their customers by providing them with security, yes, but also credibility, compensation, control, convenience, integration and verification. It is the dynamic, transactional combination of these that instills in customers the confidence that they continue to own their money even while it is in the hands of a third-party bank.

A data bank must do no less.

Ownership Web: What's Philosophically Needed

Where exactly is the sweet spot of data ownership?

In truth, it will probably vary depending upon what kind of data bank we are talking about. Data ownership will be one thing for personal health records, another for product supply chains, and yet another for government classified information. And that's just for starters because there will no doubt be niches within niches, each with their own interpretation of data ownership. But the philosophical essence of the Ownership Web that will cut across all of these data banks will be this:

• That information must be treated either or both as a tangible, commercial product or banked, traceable money.

The trustworthiness of information is crucial. Users will not be drawn to data banks if the information they author, store, publish and access can be modified. That means that even the authors themselves must be proscribed from modifying their information once registered with the data bank. Their information must take on the immutable characteristic of tangible, traceable property. While the Semantic Web is about the statistical reliability of data, the Ownership Web is about the reliability of data, period.

Ownership Web: What's Technologically Needed

What is technologically required is a flexible, integrated architectural framework for information object authoring and distribution. One that easily adjusts to the definition of data ownership as it is variously defined by the data banks serving each social network, information supply chain, and product supply chain. Users will interface with one or more ‘data banks’ employing this architectural framework. But the lowest common denominator will be the trusted, immutable informational objects that are authored and, where the definition of data ownership permits, controllable and traceable by each data owner one-step, two-steps, three-steps, etc. after the initial share.

Click on the thumbnail to the left for the key architectural features for such a data bank. They include a common registry of standardized data elements, a registry of immutable informational objects, a tracking/billing database and, of course, a membership database. This is the architecture for what may be called a Common Point Authoring™ system. Again, where the definition of data ownership permits, users will host their own 'accounts' within a data bank, and serve as their own 'network administrators'. What is made possible by this architectural design is a distributed Cloud of systems (i.e., data banks). The overall implementation would be based upon a massive number of user interfaces (via API’s, web browsers, etc.) interacting via the Internet between a large number of data banks overseeing their respective enterprise-class, object-oriented database systems.

Click on the thumbnail to the right for an example of an informational object and its contents as authored, registered, distributed and maintained with data bank services. Each comprises a unique identifier that designates the informational object, as well as one or more data elements (including personal identification), each of which itself is identified by a corresponding unique identifier. The informational object will also contain other data, such as ontological formatting data, permissions data, and metadata. The actual data elements that are associated with a registered (and therefore immutable) informational object would be typically stored in the Registered Data Element Database (look back at 124 in the preceding thumbnail). That is, the actual data elements and are linked via the use of pointers, which comprise the data element unique identifiers or URIs. Granular portability is built in. For more information see the blogged entry US Patent 6,671,696: Informational object authoring and distribution system (Pardalis Inc.).

The Beginning of the Ownership Web

Common Point Authoring is going live this fall in the form of a data bank for cattle producers in the upper plains. Why the livestock industry? Because well-followed commentators like Dr. Kris Ringwall, Director of the Dickinson Research Extension Center for North Dakota State University, recognize that there are now two distinct products being produced along our nation's complex agricultural supply chains: (1) a traditional product, and (2) an informational product describing the pedigree of the traditional product.

The following excerpt is from a BeefTalk article, Do We Exist Only If Someone Else Knows We Exist?, recently authored by Dr. Ringwall.

"The concept of data collection is knocking on the door of the beef industry, but the concept is not registering. In fact, there actually is a fairly large disconnect.

This is ironic because most, if not all, beef producers pride themselves on their understanding of the skills needed to master the production of beef. Today, there is another player simply called “data.”

The information associated with individual cattle is critical. Producers need to understand how livestock production is viewed ....

That distinction is not being made and the ramifications are lost revenue in the actual value of the calf and lost future opportunity. This is critical for the future of the beef business ...."

Ownership Web: Where It Will Begin

The Ownership Web will begin along complex product and service supply chains where information must be trustworthy, period. Statistical reliability is not enough. And, as I mentioned above, the Ownership Web will begin this fall along an agricultural supply chain which is among the most challenging of supply chains when it comes to information ownership. Stay tuned as the planks of the Ownership Web are nailed into place, one by one.