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About this Blog

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: View Steve Holcombe's profile on LinkedIn

Follow @WholeChainCom™ at each of its online locations:

Entries in Traceability (24)

Saturday
Jan192013

Whole Chain Traceability: A Successful Research Funding Strategy - Part II

DateSaturday, January 19, 2013 at 11:24AM

Return to Part I

Preface

I published Part I in January 2012. Since then Oklahoma State University has announced that funding has been provided toward the formation of a National Institute for Whole Chain Traceability and Food Safety. The principal investigators are Dr. Michael Buser, Biosystems & Agricultural Engineering and Dr. Brian Adam, Agricultural Economics. This post is to correct an omission in attribution to work product provided by Pardalis Inc. which was has played (and apparently continues to play) a critical role in OSU's intended formation of the National Institute.

A Handshake Agreement

In late 2009 I approached Oklahoma State University (OSU) researchers. We (that is, the OSU researchers and Pardalis) verbally agreed to go after governmental and private "food traceability" funding which would be used to employ Pardalis' database system - engineered from Pardalis’ patents - by OSU.[1] That database system was physically taken into possession by OSU behind their firewall in January 2010. Concurrently, Pardalis introduced OSU researchers to its informal “traceability consortium” of researchers at North Dakota State University and Michigan State University, and to John Bailey at Top 10 Produce LLC, Salinas, California. Together these institutions and companies submitted a $4 million (for use over a projected 5 years) application under the USDA NIFA Specialty Crops Research Initiative (SCRI) for a coordinated agricultural project entitled A Real–Time, Item Level, Stakeholder Driven Traceability System for Fresh Produce. My work product contribution (i.e., Pardalis’ contribution) for this first funding submission is found in Objective 2: Development of a Data Repository Traceability System.[2] That work product includes a high-level, diagrammatic comparison of the product traceability initiative's one-up, one down approach to information sharing with an approach more akin to the sharing of information found within social media (using Pardalis' database system).

Prior work product of Pardalis’ that was drawn upon by me for developing Objective 2 may be found in Laying the First Plank of a Supply Chain Ownership Web in North Dakota (September 2008), International Symposium on Certification and Traceability for Food Safety and Quality (Oct 2007),  Banking on Granular Information Ownership (April 2007) and A New Information Marketplace for the Beef Industry (March 2004).

While we were waiting to hear back on the SCRI submission the opportunity to file for Oklahoma EDGE Funding arose. But what to apply for? I proposed that we assume that the SCRI funding would be successful, and that we seek additional funds for establishing a product center from the Oklahoma EDGE Fund submission. We did that and the $3.1M submission (co-authored and co-signed by me) was entitled Leveraging USDA Specialty Crops Funding to Lay the First Foundational (sic) of a Conceptual OSU Agricultural Product Traceability Center.

"The investment of EDGE funds is not necessary for the long-term success of the Pardalis/OSU collaboration; it will accelerate the success. When it comes to information technology, Oklahoma is universally regarded as a "fly-over" state. The investment of EDGE funds are essential in providing Oklahoma with the best opportunity to (a) rapidly expand the number of researchers, technicians, and support services in the area of food safety within the State of Oklahoma, (b) rapidly grow an existing, home-grown advanced technology company in Oklahoma [i.e., Pardalis Inc.], and (c) accelerate the development and deployment of an Agricultural Product Traceability Center at OSU that will be well positioned to attract $100s of millions in federal research grants and/or privately funded research."

Neither the SCRI submission nor the Oklahoma EDGE submission were successful. No reviewers' comments of any value were provided by the EDGE fund. But the USDA’s reviewers’ comments were valuable:

"The proposed project addresses a major concern of the produce industry, traceability of fresh produce. The project focuses on traceability at the item level, which is on the wish list of the industry. The proposal to explore social media systems could be used to trace items through complex supply chains .... The proposal needs to be heavily reorganized and a clear, well defined plan for the proposed research developed."[3]

Introducing and Defining "Whole Chain Traceability"

The failures of the prior funding submissions did not deter the OSU researchers and me. In the summer of 2010 we went after two significant USDA Agricultural and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) submissions, both providing an opportunity for funding of up to $25M over 5 years. This is where the contributions to the funding submissions made by me became more distinct and modular. "Food traceability" needed to be more clearly defined in our funding submissions to increase the chances of the success we had so far been missing. That's when I created and contributed new work product.[4] See Pardalis’ Facilities, Equipment and Resources letter that was attached to the AFRI STEC submission entitled Stakeholder-driven food supply safety system for a real-time detection, risk assessment, and mitigation of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli [STEC] in beef products. In the letter you’ll find the work product where I for the first time introduced and defined "whole chain traceability" by extending the CTIDs envisioned by the IFT/FDA to the more granular CTIDs envisioned by Pardalis' patents. Here's an excerpt:

"A useful explanation of the benefits of a "whole chain" produce traceability system may be made with critical traceability identifiers (CTIDs), critical tracking events (CTEs) and Nodes.[5]. Critical tracking events (CTE) are those events that must be recorded in order to allow for effective traceability of products in the supply chain. A Node refers to a point in the supply chain when an item is produced, process, shipped or sold. CTE’s can be loosely defined as a transaction. Every transaction involves a process that can be separated into a beginning, middle and end.

While important and relevant data may exist in any of the phases of a CTE transaction, the entire transaction may be uniquely identified and referenced by a code referred to as a critical tracking identifier (CTID). Now, with the emergence of biosensor development for the real-time detection of foodborne contamination, one may also envision adding associated real-time environmental sampling data from each node. The challenge is in using even top of the line "one up/one down" product traceability systems (compare CTID2 in the foregoing drawing with CTID2 in the next drawing) that, notwithstanding the use of a single CTID, are inherently limiting in the data sharing options provided to both stakeholders and government regulators. With the proposed stakeholder-driven "Whole Chain" product traceability system, in which CTID2 is essentially assigned down to the datum level, transactional and environmental sampling data may in real-time be granularly placed into the hands of supply chain partners, food safety regulators, or even retail customers.

This is a vision of "whole chain" chain (sic) sharing that goes well beyond "one up/one down" information sharing, and recognizes the need for control or "data ownership" by each [of the] stakeholders."

A similar “facilities, equipment and resources” letter from Pardalis was attached to the AFRI Norovirus submission entitled Stakeholder driven food supply safety system for a real-time detection, risk assessment, and mitigation of [norovirus] food borne contamination. And the work product from both of these letters was clearly incorporated into the all important narrative for each AFRI submission, respectively. When you do your diligence, ask to see the content in each AFRI submission under Objective 5. Development of Stakeholder-driven Traceability System. In particular ask to see Phase 2 to Objective 5 entitled Technical development and deployment of “whole chain” product traceability system. Dr. Michael Buser has copies of those submissions as he was a lead principal investigator for all of the funding submissions beginning with the SCRI submission, above.

We filed the two AFRI submissions in August and September of 2010, respectively. We found out later (in 2011) that neither of these AFRI submissions would be successful. But we felt very strongly that we were on the right track. Consequently, in October 2010 this work product is also described in detail in my technology transfer proposal to Dr. Clarence Watson, then the Associate Director of the Oklahoma Agricultural Experiment Station, entitled Proposing a National Agricultural Product Traceability Center at Oklahoma State University.[6]

Pardalis' work product relative to "whole chain traceability" was also described in detail in The Bullwhip Effect series I authored and published beginning in January 2011.

The graphical representations describing whole chain traceability (or derivatives of them) are included in a series of presentations in 2011 (made with the full knowledge and participation of OSU researchers) to companies and institutions like Syngenta [presentation], the Oklahoma State Department of Health [presentation] (with a personal introduction by Senator James Halligan), Nestle’ (when I initiated contact with Dr. Sam Saguy), Gartner (when I initiated contact with Vladimir Krasojevic, then a supply chain Research Director), GS1 (when I initiated contact with Stephen Arens, then Director of Strategic Partnerships), the OSU Food and Agricultural Products Center [presentation] (at the invitation of Director Roy Escoubas), the Association of Overseas Chinese Agricultural, Biological, and Food Engineers [presentation], the EU-funded SmartAgriFood Project (when I made contact with Dr. Sjaak Wolfert), and others.

Pardalis' work product is again described in detail in an the internal OSU provost proposal submitted in June 2011 entitled A Content-Centric Food Traceability System. While the provost proposal was unsuccessful, it is essentially a "lite" version of the USDA NIFSI proposal successfully made (finally) as described in Part I. As with the AFRI submissions, above, another Pardalis' Facilities, Resources and Equipment letter was attached to the ultimately successful USDA NIFSI submission. When you are doing your due diligence, ask to see the narrative to the USDA NIFSI submission under Objective 1. Develop a working, scalable stakeholder-driven “whole chain” agricultural commodity traceability system.[7] The work product from Pardalis' letter is clearly incorporated into the narrative of the USDA NIFSI submission. 

The same work product is included in a composite fashion in Slide 10 of my August 2011 slide presentation, A New Way of Looking at Information Sharing in Supply & Demand Chains. It was included in the technology transfer proposal I made in November 2011 to Dr. Stephen McKeever, the OSU Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer, entitled Proposing Expansion of the National Institute for Whole Chain Traceability & Food Safety Research.[8]

There's more but I'll stop there.

2012

For two years permission was granted by me for OSU to use Pardalis’ work product on a handshake. The handshake signified that with funding the technology transfer issues would be dealt with in a win/win relationship between OSU and Pardalis. That win/win attitude was well represented in the article, Tracking and Incentivizing Data Sharing: The Whole Chain Traceability Consortium, posted by Food+Tech Connect in November 2011. But in January 2012 the hand shake agreement ended. Pardalis' database system was returned.

In April 2012 Dr. McKeever responded to an email message of mine. I followed-up with this question:

"Is work product and/or copyrighted material contributed by me and/or Pardalis continuing to be used by OSU without permission or compensation to build upon the success of the narrative of the funded NIFSI project in funding submissions made subsequent to [the termination of the handshake agreement]?"

I have to-date received no reply from Dr. McKeever. I’m not attaching that communication or linking to it here but it is time-stamped Sun, April 22, 2012 4:00 pm to Dr. McKeever’s OSU email address. In doing your due diligence, maybe Dr. McKeever will share a copy with you.

In June 2012 OSU announced that it was providing funding toward the formation of a National Institute for Whole Chain Traceability and Food Safety. This announcement included no attribution of any of the efforts or work products provided by Pardalis. Furthermore, the criticality of Pardalis’ work product to the proposed formation of the National Institute was at least in one instance in 2012 included in a promotional presentation made by one of the principal investigators of the National Institute. See the Slides 12 and 13 of the presentation by Dr. Brian Adam (entitled Whole-Chain Traceability – Information Sharing from Farm to Fork and Back Again) which was apparently shown in June 2012 to the National Value Added Conference in Traverse City, Michigan. Again, the inclusion of these slides was made without attribution to, or permission by, Pardalis. In fact those two slides used by Dr. Adam were personally prepared by me in 2011 and have been either untouched or barely retouched. The essence of Pardalis’ work product in extending the CTIDs envisioned by the IFT/FDA to the more granular CTIDs envisioned by Pardalis' patents clearly remains.

Conclusion

Whatever the reasoning or justification by OSU for the omission, the point of this blog post is to correctly attribute the proposed founding of the National Institute to Pardalis’ work product. No permission or license was given by Pardalis to OSU that would justify OSU behaving as if "whole chain traceability" had never been introduced and defined by me in 2010 for our research strategy. Moreover, there was no "work for hire" agreement. And following the termination of the handshake agreement there was no permission or license given to OSU to continue to use Pardalis' work product as if it were OSU's work product. 

Due diligence advice

It is clear that the roots of the intended National Institute run deep into Pardalis’ work product but that this contribution has so far gone without attribution. And it is clear that OSU continued to use Pardalis’ work product without attribution in 2012 to promote the founding of the National Institute. If you are a researcher or company who is involved in activities connected with the National Institute, or you are considering becoming so involved, do your own due diligence investigation as to the behavior of OSU in using Pardalis’ work product without attribution. 

What about the clear connection between Pardalis' work product and Pardalis' patents? Is OSU infringing the methods of Pardalis’ patents? Attribution doesn't solve this dilemma. The burden is on OSU to show that it is not infringing. If it is using Pardalis' patents then a direct, express license is required. If you are considering licensing or using any technologies that come out of (or are provided by) the National Institute relating to the networking of immutable informational objects then, again, do your due diligence research.

Closure

At my solicitation Dr. Sam Saguy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem - along with several others[9] - graciously gave an early letter of support to the formation of the National Institute. Dr. Saguy said something that has stayed with me:

"It is worth noting that the ... founding of the Institute is truly a milestone made possible by the activities of the Whole Chain Traceability Consortium (WCTC). Unfunded, multi-institutional activities do not commonly coalesce and stay together for as long as they have with the WCTC. Keeping such a group together in advance of funding is no small challenge. The WCTC participants at Oklahoma State University, North Dakota State University, Michigan State University, the University of Arkansas, and Pardalis, Inc. have [implemented what I describe as] “sharing-is-winning” principles. Only through this open and mutual interests and sharing of resources most future hurdles will be overcome with fruitful outcome."[10]

Thank you, Dr. Saguy. I could not agree more

____________________
Endnotes

  1. This was the same database system that had been commercially deployed in late 2005 to a Texas livestock market. For more information see The Tipping Point Has Arrived: Market Incentives for Selective Sharing in Web Communications (July 2012).
  2. Background information. Not linked to or otherwise included here. If need be, you can ask Dr. Michael Buser at OSU for a copy of the SCRI submission.
  3. Email message to Dr. Deland J Myers, School of Food Systems, North Dakota State University, time-dated Tue, June 1, 2010 11:14 am from USDA\NIFA regarding Specialty Crop Research Initiative, Proposal Number: 2010-01167, Proposal Title: A Real-Time, Item Level, Stakeholder Driven Traceability System for Fresh Produce.
  4. It was at this time that I also personally solicited the participation of researchers at the University of Arkansas in the quest for funding by the “traceability consortium” then comprised at its core of Oklahoma State University, North Dakota State University, Michigan State University and Pardalis, Inc.
  5. The following picture was heavily influenced by Appendix I of the IFT/FDA Traceability in Food Systems Report, Vol. 1.
  6. See p. 4.
  7. You might also inquire as to whether the content in Objective 1 has been modified or updated from January 2012 forward to completely remove reference to Pardalis’ work product. See also the "due diligence" advice, below.
  8. See p. 3. By the way, proposing "expansion" of the National Institute was actually part and parcel of asking for more formal recognition of the National Institute by the OSU administration such as that given by OSU when it made its announcement in June 2012.
  9. See the updates to The Whole Chain Traceability Consortium (November 2011). Some or all of those letters - including Dr. Saguy's - may have been withdrawn or not used by OSU following the termination of the handshake between Pardalis and OSU.
  10. Letter dated 9 Oct 2011 to Dr. Brian Adam. Hyperlinked added.

 

 

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Friday
Jan042013

Why Google Must - And Will - Drive NextGen Social for Enterprises

DateFriday, January 4, 2013 at 10:00PM

Preface

This is our third "tipping point" publication.

The first was The Tipping Point Has Arrived: Trust and Provenance in Web Communications. We highlighted there the significance of the roadmap laid out by the Wikidata Project. It was our opinion that:

"[a]s the Wikidata Project begins to provide trust and provenance in its form of web communications, they will not just be granularizing single facts but also immutabilizing the data elements to which those facts are linked so that even the content providers of those data elements cannot change them. This is critical for trust and provenance in whole chain communications between supply chain participants who have never directly interacted."

The second post was The Tipping Point Has Arrived: Market Incentives for Selective Sharing in Web Communications. We there emphasized the emerging market-based opportunities for information sharing between enterprises and consumers:

"We know this is a big idea but in our opinion the dynamic blending of Google+ and the Google Affiliate Network could over time bring within reach a holy grail in web communications – the cracking of the data silos of enterprise class supply chains for increased sharing with consumers of what to-date has been "off limits" proprietary product information."

Introducing Common Point Social Networking

For the purposes of this post we introduce and define Common Point Social Networking:

Common point social networking provides the means and functions for the creation and versioning of immutable data elements at a single location by an end-user or a machine which data elements are accessible, linkable and otherwise usable with meta-data authorizations.

The software developers reading this post may recognize similarities with Github. Github is perhaps the canonical proxy for fixed, common point sharing adoption. Software developers publish open source software development projects, providing source code distribution and means for others to contribute changes to the source code back to a common repository. Version control provides a code level audit trail.

In July 2012 Github took a $100M venture capital investment from Andreessen Horowitz. There’s no doubt that some of this funding will be used by Github to compete in the enterprise space. But we further offer here that Google is better positioned to lead the current providers of enterprise software and cloud services in introducing a new generation of online social networks in the fertile ground between enterprises and consumers. We propose that Google so lead by introducing and/or further encouraging a roadmap of means and functions it is already backing in the Wikidata Project. We have identified an inviting space for common point social networking to serve as a bridge between Google's Knowledge Graph and the emerging GS1 standards for Key Data Elements (KDEs). 

A Sea Change in Understanding

In 2012 there was a sea change in understanding that greater access to proprietary enterprise data is necessary for creating new business models between enterprises and consumers. Yet there remains confusion on how to do so. There is much rhetorical cross-over these days between the social networking of "personal data" and "enterprise data" but enterprise data is - and will long remain - different from personal data. Again, in our opinion, enterprise data is overwhelmingly a proprietary asset that must be selectively accessed at a granular level from a fixed, common point to have any chance of being efficiently shared.

GS1 and Whole Chain Traceability

From 2010 through 2011, Pardalis Inc. catalyzed a successful research funding strategy in a series of “whole chain traceability” funding submissions seeking to employ the use of granular, immutable data elements in networked communications.[1] The computer networking aspects of this food supply chain research was based upon a granularization of critical tracking events (CTEs) with a high-level derivation of Pardalis’ patented processes for registering immutable data elements and their informational objects at a fixed location with meta-data authorizations. See Whole Chain Traceability: A Successful Research Funding Strategy. At the solicitation of co-author Holcombe, GS1 gave an early letter of support to this process, and GS1 was subsequently kept “in the loop”, too. This successful research funding strategy has from all appearances subsequently been given a favorable nod by GS1 in one of its recent publications, Achieving Whole Chain Traceability in the U.S. Food Supply Chain - How GS1 Standards make it possible. Here’s an excerpt -

"To achieve whole chain traceability, trading partners must be able to link products with locations and times through the supply chain. For this purpose, the work led by the Institute of Food Technologists described two foundational concepts: Critical Tracking Events (CTEs) and Key Data Elements (KDEs). With GS1 Standards as a foundation, communicating CTEs and KDEs is achievable."

So who is GS1, you ask? GS1 is "the international not-for-profit association dedicated to the development and implementation of global standards and solutions to improve the efficiency and visibility of supply and demand chains globally and across multiple sectors." You know that unique barcode symbology you see on the products you purchase? That barcode is standardized by GS1 and may include KDEs.

We applaud the introduction of KDEs by GS1. The inclusion of KDEs is a necessary step for moving beyond the lugubrious one-up/one-down information sharing that is overwhelmingly prevalent in today’s enterprise supply chains. Enterprises have long been comfortable with one-up/one-down pushing generic products down the chain. But it is a mode of information sharing that doesn’t fit well at all into today’s consumer demand chains that desire to pull real-time, trustworthy information. Furthermore, one-up/one-down information sharing significantly contributes to the "bullwhip effect" within supply chains that cost enterprises in a number of ways as explained in more detail in The Bullwhip Effect:

"The challenge is not one of fixing the latest privacy control issue that Facebook presents to us. Nor is the challenge fixed with an application programming interface for integrating Salesforce.com with Facebook. The challenge is in providing the software, tools and functionalities for the discovery in real-time of proprietary supply chain data that can save people's lives and, concurrently, in attracting the input of exponentially more valuable information by consumers about their personal experiences with food products (or products in general, for that matter) …."

But KDEs by themselves will not necessarily rid supply chains of the bullwhip effect. Without implementing a more social, fluid nature to the sharing of information in supply chains, KDEs may even increase the brittleness of one-up/one-down information sharing between database administrators, just more granularly so with "digital sand". For instance, industry standards for granular XML objects may be a bane … or a bon. It largely depends on the effectiveness of hierarchical administrative decision-making processes overseeing each data silo. Common point social networking holds forth a promise for implementing KDEs in a manner that overcomes the bullwhip effect.

But even with the most efficient and effective management processes, it is almost unimaginable to us that the first movement toward enterprise-consumer social networking will come from incumbent enterprise software systems. Sure, the first movement could potentially come from that direction, but we’ve just had too many experiences with enterprises and software vendors to put much faith in that actually happening. Conversely, we can much more easily imagine a first movement toward nextgen social from the "navigational search" demands of consumers. In our second tipping point blog we illustrated this point in some respect with Google Affiliate Networks. This time we are making our point with Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Navigational Search As A Business Model

Google's Knowledge Graph was announced this year as having being added to Google's search engine. Knowledge Graph is a semantic search system. Of course it’s not the only semantic search system. Bing incorporates semantic search. So do Ask.com and Wolfram Alpha. Siri provides a natural language user interface. But no matter what the semantic search engine, the search results are revealed as a list of ranked, relevant “answers” (or perhaps no answer at all because there isn’t one to give). Searching for real answers in real-time is still kind of a navigational mess either in commission or omission.

"For the semantic web to reach its full potential in the cloud, it must have access to more than just publicly available data sources. 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. Only with the empowerment of technological ‘data ownership’ in the hands of people, businesses, and governments will the Semantic Cloud make contact with a horizon of new, ‘blue ocean’ data." Cloud Computing: Billowing Toward Data Ownership - Part II.

Knowledge Graph is a "baby step" toward navigational search that provides a kind of Wikipedia "look and feel" experience designed to help users navigate more easily toward specific answers. Ever used the "I’m Feeling Lucky" button provided by Google? That button taps into Google's semantic search system to provide a navigational search resulting in a single result. This is an attempt to provide a purposeful effect instead of an exploratory effect to your search request. Yes, it's still a "hit or miss" artifice but - make no mistake - it is has been introduced for pushing forward navigational search as a business model.  Google's business intent for navigational search is to discourage you from going to other search engines for your search needs. Knowledge Graph is designed to cut short a process of discovery which may take you away from Google to a competitive search engine. This move toward navigational search is exactly why we are proposing that now is the time for common point social networking. Without common point social networking, navigational search will largely remain a clever, albeit unsatisfactory, solution for what consumers really want. What consumers want is real-time, meaningful, trustworthy information about the products they buy or are interested in buying. As Amit Singhal, Senior Vice-President of Engineering at Google, says:

"We’re proud of our first baby step - the Knowledge Graph - which will enable us to make search more intelligent, moving us closer to the "Star Trek computer" that I've always dreamt of building. Enjoy your lifelong journey of discovery, made easier by Google Search, so you can spend less time searching and more time doing what you love."

Conclusion: Whole Chain Communications from Navigational Search

So much of the information that consumers desire about the products they buy - or may buy - is currently locked up in enterprise data silos. But the realistic prospects for common point social networking means that navigationally searching for enterprise data - as a business model - is no longer an impossible challenge akin to Starfleet Academy's Kobayashi Maru. The ultimate goal for Google's navigational search is essentially that of providing not just whole chain traceability but real-time, whole chain communications for consumers via their mobile devices. The ultimate goal for GS1's standards for granular whole chain traceability is to similarly provide opportunities for real-time, navigational search.

 Google’s Knowledge Graph indeed represents the first step of a toddler. To fully develop a “Star Trek Enterprise computer” Google must drive nextgen social for enterprises by fostering the placement of common point social networking between the the bookends of navigational search and whole chain traceability. There is no other technology company better positioned or more highly motivated to do so. And we believe that it will. In backing the Wikidata Project, Google is already on a pathway to promoting common point social.

_______________________________

Authors:

 

Steve Holcombe
Pardalis Inc.

 

 

Clive Boulton
Independent Product Designer for the Enterprise Cloud
LinkedIn Profile

 

_______________

Endnotes
1. In these funding submissions co-author Holcombe introduced and defined the phrase of "whole chain traceability" in reference to his company's patents.
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Tuesday
Nov062012

Pardalis announces issuance of fourth U.S. patent

DateTuesday, November 6, 2012 at 9:21AM

November 6, 2012 — Pardalis, Inc. announced the issuance today of the following patent by the United States Patent & Trademark Office:

  • Common point authoring system for the complex sharing of hierarchically authored data objects in a distribution chain, U.S. Patent No. 8,307,000.

The issuance of this patent represents another milestone in the continued, global expansion of Pardalis' parent patent, U.S. Patent No. 6,671,696, and its continuation patents and related applications.

The Pardalis '696 patent was issued by the United States in 2003 and is entitled Informational object authoring and distribution system. Pardalis' 696 patent is the parent patent for the Common Point Authoring™ system. The prior art that Pardalis' patents have been distinguished from stretch back to the 1987 filing of Xerox's Updating local copy of shared data in a collaborative system (U.S. Patent 5,220,657), the 1995 publication of CrystalWeb--A distributed authoring environment for the World-Wide Web (Computer Networks and ISDN Systems), and the 1999 publication of DAPHNE--A tool for Distributed Web Authoring and Publishing (the American Society for Information Science).

"The underlying philosophy of the Common Point Authoring system is to provide people with as much granular control over their information and data experience as is possible," said Steve Holcombe, CEO, Pardalis Inc. "The irony is that in order to increase the flow of proprietary information in supply chains, more granular control over that information must be provided in information sharing systems of any kind. Pardalis' patents apply to authoring by either human participants, or the machines that they automatically program, of immutable informational objects describing the pedigree of uniquely identified products in supply chains."

The critical means and functions of the Common Point Authoring™ system are directed to a system in which an author can create data which is then fixed (immutable) and users can access that immutable data but cannot change it without the creator's permission. They provide for user-centric authoring and registration of uniquely identified, immutable objects for further granular publication, by the choice of each author, among networked systems. The benefits of CPA include minimal, precise disclosures of personal and product identity data to networks fragmented by information silos and concerns over 'data ownership' about products and their ingredients or components.

"There is increasing interest in the application of social networks to the enterprise," Holcombe said. "For instance the selective sharing of Google Plus is a strong step in the direction of providing more granular controls in information sharing. Salesforce.com has linked up with Facebook for targeted advertising delivery that will merge social and business-contact data. The Wikidata Project is creating a free knowledge base by first fixing data elements at a single location with authorizations that may be read and edited by humans and machines alike. All of these activities are pushing in the direction of providing more efficient market mechanisms for the sharing of proprietary information in the Cloud. The more granular the control over information, the greater the chances that information about products in global supply chains will be efficiently shared. The ramifications for global sustainability are tremendous."

Filings relevant to Pardalis' USPTO issued patents are being successfully pursued under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) in the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China (PRC), Europe, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mexico and New Zealand.

About Pardalis, Inc.

Pardalis' Common Point Authoring™ system provides an object-oriented solution for introducing trust and provenance in web communications. For more information, see Pardalis' Global IP.

AuthorSteve Holcombe | Comments Off | Reference9 References |
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Wednesday
Jul112012

The Tipping Point Has Arrived: Market Incentives for Selective Sharing in Web Communications

DateWednesday, July 11, 2012 at 10:15PM

By Steve Holcombe (@steve_holcombe) and Clive Boulton (@iC)

A Glimmer of Market Validation for Selective Sharing

In late 2005 Pardalis deployed a multi-tenant, enterprise-class SaaS to a Texas livestock market. The web-connected service provided for the selective sharing of data assets in the U.S. beef livestock supply chain.  Promising revenues were generated from a backdrop of industry incentives being provided for sourced livestock. The industry incentives themselves were driven by the specter of mandatory livestock identification promised by the USDA in the wake of the 2003 "mad cow" case.

At the livestock market thousands of calves were processed over several sessions. Small livestock producers brought their calves into the auction for weekly sales where they were RFID tagged. An affordable fee per calf was charged to the producers which included the cost of a RFID tag. The tags identifiers were automatically captured, a seller code was entered, and affidavit information was also entered as to the country of origin (USA) of each calf. Buyers paid premium prices for the tagged calves over and above untagged calves. The buyers made money over and above the affordable fee per calf.  After each sale, and at the speed of commerce, all seller, buyer and sales information was uploaded into an information tenancy in the SaaS that was controlled by the livestock market. For the first time ever in the industry, the livestock auction selectively authorized access to this information to the buyers via their own individual tenancies in the SaaS.

That any calves were processed at all was not possible without directly addressing the fear of information sharing that was held by both the calf sellers and the livestock market. The calf sellers liked that their respective identities were selectively withheld from the calf buyers. And they liked that a commercial entity they trusted – the livestock market – could stand as a kind of trustee between them and governmental regulators in case an auctioned calf later turned out to be the next ‘mad cow’. In turn the livestock market liked the selectiveness in information sharing because it did not have to share its confidential client list in an “all or nothing” manner to potential competitors on down the supply chain. At that moment in time, the immediate future of selective sharing with the SaaS looked very bright. The selective sharing design deployed by Pardalis in its SaaS fixed data elements at a single location with authorizations controlled by the tenants. Unfortunately, the model could not be continued and scaled at that time to other livestock markets. In 2006 the USDA bowed to political realities and terminated its efforts to introduce national mandatory livestock identification.

And so, too, went the regulatory-driven industry incentives. But … hold that thought.

Talking in Circles: Selective Sharing in Google+

Google+ is now 1 year old. In conjunction with Google, researchers Sanjay Kairam, Michael J. Brzozowski, David Huffaker, and Ed H. Chi have published Talking in Circles: Selective Sharing in Google+, the first empirical study of behavior in a network designed to facilitate selective sharing:

"Online social networks have become indispensable tools for information sharing, but existing ‘all-or-nothing’ models for sharing have made it difficult for users to target information to specific parts of their networks. In this paper, we study Google+, which enables users to selectively share content with specific ‘Circles’ of people. Through a combination of log analysis with surveys and interviews, we investigate how active users organize and select audiences for shared content. We find that these users frequently engaged in selective sharing, creating circles to manage content across particular life facets, ties of varying strength, and interest-based groups. Motivations to share spanned personal and informational reasons, and users frequently weighed ‘limiting’ factors (e.g. privacy, relevance, and social norms) against the desire to reach a large audience. Our work identifies implications for the design of selective sharing mechanisms in social networks."

While selective sharing may be characterized as being available on other networks (e.g. ‘Lists’ on Facebook), Google is sending signals that making the design of selective sharing controls central to the sharing model offers a great opportunity to help users manage their self-presentations to multiple audiences in the multi-tenancies we call online social networks. Or, put more simply, selective sharing multiplies opportunities for online engagement.

For the purposes of this blog post, we adopt Google’s definition of "selective sharing" to mean providing information producers with controls for overcoming both over-sharing and fear of sharing. Furthermore, we agree with Google that that the design of tools for such selective sharing controls must allow users to balance sender and receiver needs, and to adapt these controls to different types of content. So defined, we believe that almost seven years since the Texas livestock market project, a tipping point has been reached that militates in favor of selective sharing from within supply chains and on to consumers. Now, there have been a lot of things happen over the last seven years that bring us to this point (e.g., the rise of social media, CRM in the Cloud, the explosion of mobile technologies, etc.). But the tipping point we are referencing "follows the money", as they say. We believe that the tipping point toward selective sharing is to be found in the incentives provided by affiliate networks like Google Affiliate Networks.

Google Affiliate Networks

Google Affiliate networks provide a means for affiliates to monetize websites. Here’s a recent video presentation by Google, Automating the Use of Google Affiliate Links to Monetize Your Web Site:


Presented by Ali Pasha & Shaun Cox | Published 2 July 2012 | 47m 11s

The Google Affiliate Network provides incentives for affiliates to monetize their websites based upon actual sales conversions instead of indirectly based upon the number of ad clicks. These are web sites (e.g., http://www.savings.com/) where ads are the raison d'etre of the web site. High value consumers are increasingly scouring promotional, comparison, and customer loyalty sites like savings.com for deals and generally more information about products. Compare that with websites where ads are peripheral to other content (e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/) and where ad clicks are measured using Web 2.0 identity and privacy sharing models.

In our opinion the incentives of affiliate networks have huge potential for matching up with an unmet need in the Cloud for all participants - large and small - of enterprise supply chains to selectively monetize their data assets. For example, data assets pertaining to product traceability, source, sustainability, identity, authenticity, process verification and even compliance with human rights laws, among others, are there to be monetized.

Want to avoid buying blood diamonds? Go to a website that promotes human rights and click on a diamond product link that has been approved by that site. Want to purchase only “Made in USA” products? There’s not a chamber of commerce in the U.S. that won’t want to provide a link to their members’ websites who are also affiliates of an incentive network. Etc.

Unfortunately, these data assets are commonly not shared because of the complete lack of tools for selective sharing, and the fear of sharing (or understandable apathy) engendered under “all or nothing” sharing models. As published back in 1993 by the MIT Sloan School in Why Not One Big Database? Ownership Principles for Database Design: "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." Data ownership matters. And selective sharing – appropriately designed for enterprises – will match data ownership up with available incentives.

Remember that thought we asked you to hold?

In our opinion the Google Affiliate Network is already providing incentives that are a sustainable, market-driven substitute for what turned out to be unsustainable, USDA-driven incentives. We presume that Google is well aware of potential synergies between Google+ and the Google Affiliate Network. We also presume that Google is well aware that "[w]hile business-critical information is often already gathered in integrated information systems, such as ERP, CRM and SCM systems, the integration of these systems itself (as well as the integration with the abundance of other information sources) is still a major challenge."

We know this is a "big idea" but in our opinion the dynamic blending of Google+ and the Google Affiliate Network could over time bring within reach a holy grail in web communications – the cracking of the data silos of enterprise class supply chains for increased sharing with consumers of what to-date has been "off limits" proprietary product information.

A glimpse of the future may be found for example in the adoption of Google+ by Cadbury UK, but the design for selective sharing of Google+ is currently far from what it needs to attract broad enterprise usage. Sharing in Circles brings to mind Eve Maler’s blog post, Venn and the Art of Data Sharing.  That’s really cool for personal sharing (or empowering consumers as is the intent of VRM) but for enterprises Google+ will need to evolve its selective sharing functionalities. Sure, data silos of commercial supply chains are holding personal identities close to their chest (e.g., CRM customer lists) but they’re also walling off product identities with every bit as much zeal, if not more. That creates a different dynamic that, again, typical Web 2.0 "all or nothing" sharing (designed, by the way, around personal identities) does not address.

It should be specially noted, however, that Eve Maler and the User-Managed Access (UMA) group at the Kantara Initiative are providing selective sharing web protocols that place "the emphasis on user visibility into and control over access by others".  And Eve in her capacity at Forrester has more recently provided a wonderful update of her earlier blog post, this one entitled A New Venn of Access Control for the API Economy.

But in our opinion before Google+, UMA or any other companies or groups working on selective sharing can have any reasonable chance of addressing "data ownership" in enterprises and their supply chains, they will need to take a careful look at incorporating fixed data elements at a single location with authorizations. It is in regard to this point that we seek to augment the current status of selective sharing. More about that line of thinking (and activities within the WikiData Project) in our earlier “tipping point” blog post, The Tipping Has Arrived: Trust and Provenance in Web Communications.

What do you think? Share your conclusions and opinions by joining us at @WholeChainCom on LinkedIn at http://tinyurl.com/WholeChainCom.

AuthorSteve Holcombe | Comments Off | Reference11 References |
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Friday
Apr202012

Pardalis announces issuance of Canadian patent

DateFriday, April 20, 2012 at 9:51PM

April 20, 2012 — Pardalis, Inc. announced today the issuance of the following patent by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office:

  • Informational Object Authoring and Distribution System, Patent No. CA 2457936 issued February 28, 2012.

The issuance of this patent represents another milestone in the continued, global expansion of Pardalis' same-named parent patent, U.S. Patent No. 6,671,696, and its continuation patents and applications.

The Pardalis 696 Patent was issued by the United States in 2003 and is also entitled Informational object authoring and distribution system. Pardalis' 696 patent is the parent patent for the Common Point Authoring™ system.

The critical means and functions of the Common Point Authoring™ system are directed to a system in which a creator can create data which is then fixed (immutable) and users can access that immutable data but cannot change it. They provide for user-centric authoring and registration of radically identified, immutable objects for further granular publication, by the choice of each author, among networked systems. The benefits of CPA include minimal, precise disclosures of personal and product identity data to networks fragmented by information silos and concerns over 'data ownership'.

“Australia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, New Zealand and, of course, the United States are the countries that have so far issued one or more patents to Pardalis,” said Steve Holcombe, Pardalis’ CEO. “We also have high expectations for similar actions on our applications pending in Brazil, Europe and Japan.”

About Pardalis, Inc.

Pardalis' Common Point Authoring™ system provides an object-oriented solution for introducing trust and provenance in web communications. For more information, see Pardalis' Global IP.

AuthorSteve Holcombe | CommentPost a Comment |
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