Visioning Beyond Data Portability

The visioning of data portability appears to be headed in the right direction.

Chris Saad is a co-founder and CEO of Faraday Media. Chris is also a co-founder and Chairperson of Dataportability.org.

On Sunday, May 18th Chris Saad blogged the following on his personal blogging site.

"I’ve heard a lot lately from executives at the highest levels at vendors that do not run large social networks. They might be more traditional media companies, telecommunication companies, device manufactures etc.

There are a few common and resounding themes from those conversations so I thought I would share them here ...."

If you go to Chris' post be sure and check out my comment (i.e., Comment #5).

Here's the link to Chris' entry, DataPortability beyond social networking.

Also, you might want to additionally check out the interview of Chris Saad in the Talking Tech blog of the Wall Street Journal on May 13th. That interview/blog is by Lee Gomes and entitled Easier Sharing is Goal of Portability Project.

Update on Monday, June 2, 2008 at 1:08PM by Steve Holcombe

Evidence of further visioning beyond data portability.

On June 1, 2008 Chris Saad said -

"There is something that ... ’social media’ observers are missing .... Sociality is only one aspect of a human being."

See My Vision for Social Media - Personal Reality.

Wal-Mart's Widening Lens of Sustainability

The following Social Innovation Conversations podcast is produced by the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Andrew Ruben & Jib Ellison
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
Lens of Sustainability
[runtime: 00:54:16, recorded 2006-12-07]

 
At the time of this audio Andy Ruben was the Vice-President for corporate strategy and sustainability at Wal-Mart. He is now head of Branding at Sam's. Jib Ellison is the founder of Blu Skye Sustainability Consulting which is characterized as Wal-Mart's sustainability partner. The conversation was moderated before Stanford MBA students.

The central theme of this audio is made by Ellison early in the conversation.

"The greatest untapped source of competitive advantage in our time - in [the United States] in particular - is found in ... radical adoption of sustainability principles into [for profit] business systems." (emphasis added)

What makes this all very interesting are representations - supported by anecdotes - by both Ellison and Rubin that Wal-Mart is shifting from its Every Day Low Price mindset toward a broader vision that they call the lens of sustainability.

Ruben and Ellison assert - and, in many respects, compellingly so - that Wal-Mart's sustainability vision is inexorable. And there seems to be a very good sense and understanding - especially by Ruben -  that Wal-Mart's sustainability vision will rely heavily upon trusted information sharing among and between the many participants of complex, international supply chains feeding into the world's largest retailer.

If so, the work of EPCglobal and the W3C will no doubt come to feel the gravitational pull of Wal-Mart's sustainability vision. The question will then be whether these consortiums will develop nimble, architectural standards supportive of data ownership by information producers, big and small. See also Dataportability, Traceability and Data Ownership elsewhere in this blog.

These are the kinds of tools that Wal-Mart will need to overcome the social, political and economic fear factors to information sharing that seem to exponentially increase each time a new fragment of participation is added to a product supply chain. 

Starting Making Sense - The Semantic Web

The Economist.com published this on April 9th. 

"SOME new ideas take wing spontaneously. Others struggle to be born. The “semantic web” is definitely in the latter category. But it may have found its midwife in Reuters, a business-information company ....

The idea is that any website can send a jumble of text and code through Calais and receive back a list of “entities” that the system has extracted—mostly people, places and companies—and, even more importantly, their relationships. It will, for instance, be able recognise a pharmaceutical company's name and, on its own initiative, cross-reference that against data on clinical trials for new drugs that are held in government databases. Alternatively, it can chew up a thousand blogs and expose trends that not even the bloggers themselves were aware of.

The system is free to use, for Reuters' objective is to create a “clearinghouse of meaning” that financial-service companies will be able to exploit as a new type of search engine. How the firm will make money has yet to emerge, though selling insights gained from applying the system's own methods for Reuters' benefit is one possibility ...."

For the full article go to Start Making Sense. 

The Funding of the Emerging Semantic Web

The dam is finally beginning to break on the funding for the emerging Semantic Web. The conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is that a more powerful, integrated Web is about to emerge, where data about information is much more structured than it is today. The $42.4M invested in Metaweb Technologies in January, 2008 was led in by Silicon Valley’s Benchmark Capital and the venerable, Wall Street investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs.

Metaweb Technologies characterizes its ‘Knowledge web’ as a massive, collaboratively-edited database (like Wikipedia) of cross-linked data. In the future, its founder, Danny Hillis, hopes to generate business revenue by providing means for the ownership of information on the Internet. However, Metaweb holds a thin intellectual property portfolio. Metaweb’s founder began globally filing patents in 2001. Before $15M was raised in March, 2006, he did not keep up the patent application fees. Only one of those patent applications (US Patent Application 20050086188) for “Knowledge web” remains. The patent fees have been paid and it will issue this spring so congratulations to Mr. Hillis are certainly in order. It’s always a happy day when a patent issues. But the Knowledge Web patent will only be enforceable within U.S. borders. And, even then, do the claims cover the authoring of structured data without the necessity of Wikepedia-like collaboration? I ask this question because a critical characteristic of ownership must certainly revolve the choice of non-collaboration.

The investment is considerable even though Metaweb is pre-revenue. But the bottom line is that it is now possible to assign a very real return on investment to Semantic Web technologies.

Update on Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 9:05AM by Steve Holcombe

Twine, another pre-revenue San Francisco start-up, may be the next, next big thing after Metaweb when it comes to the funding of the Semantic Web. Series A funding of $5M was landed in 2006. Series B funding of $15M-$20M was apparently finalized in February, 2008. Twine’s bankable founder, Nova Spivack, says Twine is more like a semantic Facebook while Metaweb is more like a semantic Wikipedia.

Twine’s business model is to provide a Facebook-like interface for the purpose of deepening data connections between networked users. Will connections be ontologically deepened between networked users without their permission? We’ll just have to see how that plays out. One would think that Twine would philosophically lean much more than Metaweb toward providing data owners with non-collaborative control over the data and information.

Twine holds four pending U.S. patent applications (US Patent Application 20040158455, US Patent Application 20040220893, US Patent Application 20040230676, and US Patent Application 20060004703).

Update on Friday, April 18, 2008 at 8:53AM by Steve Holcombe

Here's a video clip interview of Novack Spivack, CEO of both Radar Networks and Twine, made on April 4, 2008.

Learning from the Future with Nova Spivack from Maarten on Vimeo.

 
Notice in the interview that Spivack opines that the Web is moving toward becoming 'one big database' though he makes no mention of the importance of data ownership to facilitating this move.

See, by comparison, Ownership Principles for Database Design which specifically addresses the question, "Why not one big database?".

Update on Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 8:15PM by Steve Holcombe

See also Nova Spivack: Making Sense of the Semantic Web ...

 

Update on Friday, July 16, 2010 at 5:15PM by Steve Holcombe

Tweeted this today -

Google Makes Major #Semantic Web Play | #semweb #freebase #metaweb #dataweb #data #searchengine http://lnkd.in/WPi9Qi