Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

March 18, 2012

Knowledge Economics II

My notes about Steve Newcomb’s economic asset approach to knowledge/information integration were taking me too far afield from the conference proper.

As an economic asset, take information liberated from alphabet soup agency (ASP) #1 to be integrated with your information. Your information could be from unnamed sources, public records, your records, etc. Reliable integration requires semantic knowledge of ASP #1’s records or trial-n-error processing. Unless, of course, you have a mapping enabling reliable integration of ASP #1 information with your own.

How much is that “mapping” worth to you? Is it reusable? Or should I say, “retargetable?”

You can, as people are want to do, hire a data mining firm to go over thousands of documents (like State Department cables, which revealed the trivia nature of State Department secrets) and get a one off result. But what happens the next time? Do you do the same thing over again? And how does that fit into your prior results?

That’s really the question isn’t it? Not how do you process the current batch of information (although that can be important) but how does that integrate into your prior data? So that your current reporters will not have to duplicate all the searching your earlier reporters did to find the same information.

Perhaps they will uncover relationships that were not apparent from only one batch of leaked information. Perhaps they will purchase from the airlines their travel data to be integrated with reported sightings from their own sources. Or telephone records from carriers not based in the United States.

But data integration opportunities are not just for governments and the press.

Your organization has lots of information. Information on customers. Information on suppliers. Information on your competition. Information on what patients were taking what drugs with what results? (Would you give that information to drug companies or sell it to drug companies? I know my answer. How about yours?)

What will you answer when a shareholder asks: What is our KROI? Knowledge Return on Investment?

You have knowledge to sell. How are you going to package it up to attract buyers? (inquiries welcome)

2 Comments

  1. […] up with Steve Newcomb’s advocacy of knowledge integration mappings as economic assets. (See Knowledge Economics II) Additional details about the Minitrack may be found at: […]

    Pingback by Knowledge Economics (Grand Wailea Maui, HI 2013) « Another Word For It — March 18, 2012 @ 8:50 pm

  2. […] This data could be marketed to drug companies, trial lawyers (both sides), medical malpractice insurers, etc. This is an example of the data marketing I mentioned in Knowledge Economics II. […]

    Pingback by Drug data reveal sneaky side effects « Another Word For It — March 18, 2012 @ 8:54 pm

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