As enterprise supply chains and consumer demand chains have beome globalized, they continue to inefficiently share information “one-up/one-down”. Profound "bullwhip effects" in the chains cause managers to scramble with inventory shortages and consumers attempting to understand product recalls, especially food safety recalls. Add to this the increasing usage of personal mobile devices by managers and consumers seeking real-time information about products, materials and ingredient sources. The popularity of mobile devices with consumers is inexorably tugging at enterprise IT departments to shifting to apps and services. But both consumer and enterprise data is a proprietary asset that must be selectively shared to be efficiently shared.
About Steve Holcombe
Unless otherwise noted, all content on this company blog site is authored by Steve Holcombe as President & CEO of Pardalis, Inc. More profile information:
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The Internet is achieved via layered protocols. Transmitted data, flowing through these layers are enriched with metadata necessary for the correct interpretation of the data presented to users of the Web. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web says, “The Web was originally conceived as a tool for researchers who trusted one another implicitly …. We have been living with the consequences ever since ….” “[We need] to provide Web users with better ways of determining whether material on a site can be trusted ….”
Our lives have nonetheless become better as a result of Web service providers like Google and Facebook. Consumers are now conditioned to believe that they can – or should be able to - search and find information about anything, anytime. But the service providers dictate their quality of service in a one-way conversation that exploits the advantages of the Web as it exists. What may be considered trustworthy content is limited to that which is dictated by the service providers. The result is that consumers cannot find real-time, trustworthy information about much of anything.
Despite all the work in academic research there is still no industry solution that fully supports the sharing of proprietary supply chain product information between “data silos”. Industry remains in the throes of one-up/one down information sharing when what is needed is real-time “whole chain” interoperability. The Web needs to provide two-way, real-time interoperability in the content provided by information producers. Immutable objects have heretofore been traditionally used to provide more efficient data communications between networked machines, but not between information producers. Now researchers are innovatively coming up with new ways of using immutable objects in interoperable, two-way communications between information content providers.
Pardalis’ protocols for immutable informational objects make possible a value chain of two-way, interoperable sharing that makes information more available, trustworthy, and traceable. This, in turn, incentivizes increases in the quality and availability of new information leading to new business models.
Pardalis’ intellectual properties may be strategically compared to Van Jacobson’s impressive research at Xerox PARC (see the CCNx Project) that began in just the last few years. Jacobson's long-range goal is to adjust the architecture of the Internet with immutable named data. Pardalis' IP is focused on sooner commercialization opportunities for changing the Web with immutable, granular named information. But like Jacobson, we view the application of named immutable objects as an absolute prerequisite to authentication in a new world order providing more options for user-centric information sharing.
Update on Friday, April 22, 2011 at 10:14PM by
Steve Holcombe
Over the first 12 months of the Data Ownership in the Cloud group on LinkedIn, the following are the top 12 discussions as rated in descending order by the number of comments:
Scientific American has published an article authored by Nigel Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee in the October 2008 issue. Here is an interesting excerpt:
Sociology is another field to tap [within Web science]. Research is needed, for instance, to provide Web users with better ways of determining whether material on a site can be trusted. How can we determine whether we can trust the material emanating from a site? The Web was originally conceived as a tool for researchers who trusted one another implicitly; strong models of security were not built in. We have been living with the consequences ever since.
As a result, substantial research should be devoted to engineering layers of trust and provenance into Web interactions. The coming together of our digital and physical personas presents opportunities for progress, such as the integration of financial, medical, social and educational services for each of us. But it is also an opportunity for identity theft, cyberstalking and cyberbullying, and digital espionage. Web science can help enhance the good and ameliorate the bad.
Emphasis added. For an online copy of the article, go to Web Science Emerges.
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.
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
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.
In an aside to Traces of a Distant Past published in the July, 2008 issue of the Scientific American, author and Senior Editor, Gary Stix wrote:
"No matter what assurances are given, some groups will be reluctant to yield a cheek swab or blood sample. Investigators in this field may never achieve their goal of obtaining a set of samples that fully reflects every subtle gradation of human genetic diversity."
See specifically the side comment entitled Can You Spare Some DNA? at the top of page 8, below.
From: "Steve Holcombe" Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2008 12:02 PM To: editors@sciam.com Subject: For GaryStix re "Can You Spare Some DNA"
Gary,
You emphasize a very important point in this sub-article.
Would
you have interest in an article exploring the movement from a documents
web (the current web) to that of a data web (Web 3.0, semantic web)?
With
the movement toward a data web there will be greater opportunities for
'data ownership' as defined by the actual information producers. The
emergence of a data web should provide opportunities for ameliorating
resistance to the sharing of genetic bio-material by empowering those
who provide their genetic heritage with more direct, technological
oversight and control over how the derived information is used, who
uses, when they use it, etc.
I'm not saying that all American
indigenous tribes would jump on the band wagon in providing their
genetic material and information. That is, most people put their money
in banks but there will always be a few who only put their money under
their mattress, right? But there are technological means arising within
the context of a data web that are specifically designed to address
personal and societal fear factors that you well point out.
Hope to hear back from you.
Best regards,
Steve
It will be interesting to see if I receive a response from Gary Stix.
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 11:35AM 
