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

Cisco: 50 Billion Things on the Internet by 2020 [Infographic]

Read the post for estimates up to 1 trillion by 2013 or 2015, depending upon whose speculation you are being paid to agree with.

It is an amusing infographic but more for what it doesn’t say than for what it does.

A fairly flat place that only talks about devices, cows, sensors and the like. Which is good, but surely only part of the story.

What about all the relationships between those devices? How do we identify/address them? Or their states over some time sequence?

The Cisco “Planetary Skin” sounds like an exciting project but even more so if those sensors and their data is correlated to other information.

To be sure we are in for “a really big show,” whatever number you happen to prefer.

2011 Digital Universe Study by IDC, sponsored by EMC

Textual excerpts: Extracting Value from Chaos

Multimedia: The 2011 Digital Universe Study: Extracting Value from Chaos

Lots of impressive (scary?) numbers about the expansion of the digital universe.

I rather liked the first technical call to action:

Investigate the new tools for creating metadata — the information you will need to understand which data is needed when and for what. Big data will be a fountain of big value only if it can speak to you through metadata.

And that no present metadata methodology was cited as “the” solution.

Sounds like we all have a lot of work and experimenting ahead of us.

I don’t think we are ever going to find the technology solution to any issue in the Digital Universe. Our companions are too busy inventing new issues and reinventing old ones in new guises for that to happen.

While reading one of the surveys on Big Data it occurred to me that the W3C was correct about one thing. Data without semantics isn’t going to be very useful.

Attempting to impose semantics world wide reminds me of an article by Mehar Omar Khan, Don’t Try to Arrest the Sea: An Alternative Approach for Afghanistan. I comment it to you for reading but in summary it advocates what is known in some circles as the oil-spot strategy.

That is to create safe havens that offer benefits to the local populace and use those to attract others to the same benefits.

Topic maps, unlike some semantic strategies, have the potential to be semantic oil-spots. Their semantics are driven by the group or department where they are deployed and do not require consent or agreement beyond that range.

Which means that the group or department can begin to derive benefits from their use of topic maps, resulting in benefits that are not accruing to others. This allows topic maps and their use to sell themselves, rather than being imposed from the top down. (The FBI Virtual Case File project being a well known example of top down IT planning.)

Mehar Omar Khan summarizes his strategy as:

Don’t try to arrest the sea. Create islands. Having gone well past the phase of breaking the back of Al-Qaeda and dispersing the Taliban, concentrate on ‘creating and building’ examples. Set the beacon and you’ll see that all the lost ships and boats will come ashore.

Where are you setting your next topic map beacon?

How Much Data Will Humans Create & Store This Year? [INFOGRAPHIC]

I started to create a category called scary graphic but then decided that marketing came close enough.

Use this graphic to emphasize how your client will need the ability to navigate the digital wilderness. Well, ok, their corner of the digital wilderness.

Which is a piece of sanity that seems to be missing from most presentations on data growth. Twitter/Facebook/SuperCollider data is exploding but how much of that is relevant to managing sales data at Walmart? Or HomeDepot? Or even the New York Stock Exchange?

Twitter traffic and the like makes great copy, but crunching numbers with economic significance is more likely to win and maintain contracts.

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PS: That’s not to discount the potential for tracking Twitter traffic and insider sales on stocks. But discovering the basis for lawsuits qualifies as crunching numbers with economic significance. Topic maps would be a nice way to summarize and present such information.

Dick Weisinger in Information Overload: The Data Management Challenge cites the following numbers from a data management survey:

• 36 percent of organizations say that email overload is their biggest data management problem
• 28 percent say that document and content management is their biggest issue
• 15 percent cite information access controls
• 13 percent point to compliance issues that they must deal with
• 8 percent say that social media is an area that causes them headaches

Hmmm, not even one percent (1%) said semantic integration was an issue.

Maybe they haven’t heard that semantic integration is all the rage in IT circles? Don’t they read Wired or Scientific American?

I am sure most of them do. Probably the same percentage as you would find at a semantic technology conference.

The difference is they are facing specific problems in an enterprise context. Problems for which they need solutions they can sell to their management as cost effective and doable. By yesterday. The full generality of semantic integration makes nice weekend reading but their management won’t sit long for it on the following Monday.

I am not warranting the following example is feasible or even useful but pose it as a thought experiment.

Assume management agrees email overload is a serious problem and suspects it stems from too many cc’s on posts. There are any number of ways to track such posts but let me outline a topic map solution.

First, create a topic map of the organizational structure, along with approval and informational relationships. This could become more fine grained but for purposes of illustration let’s start with those two relationships. The email addresses for the various actors are included for each person.

Second, since IT runs the SMTP servers that process all the email sent by employees, a copy of every message is stored with associations in the topic map between sender and its recipient(s).

Third, after a month, a graphical map is presented to management showing emails inside/outside of approval/informational paths, along with senders and recipients of those posts.

Fourth, I would suggest discovering what functions are being performed by the targets of large numbers of out of band posts. They maybe informal information hubs who need more formalized roles or greater responsibility. Or the approval/informational structures need revising.

Fifth, for the truly bold, the IT department can filter email to decision makers to allow only a restricted set of staff to reach them by email, thereby reducing their information load from intra- as well as inter-company email. I am sure they will be thankful to not have to setup their own email filters.

You don’t have to use “topic map,” or “semantic integration,” or other such buzz words in selling such a solution. You can insert those as appropriate in the email story at your next semantic integration conference presentation.

Kipling (author of The White Man’s Burden in 1899) would have enjoyed the “about’ page for Technology for Transparency Network, where he would find:

The Technology for Transparency Network is a research and mapping project that aims to improve understanding of the current state of online technology projects that increase transparency and accountability in Central & Eastern Europe, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the former Soviet Union.

(and then jump to the final paragraph)

For years now there has been an ongoing debate about whether the Internet is good or bad for democracy. But we have few case studies and even fewer comparative research mappings of Internet-based projects that aim to improve governance, especially in countries outside of North America and Western Europe. Hopefully the Technology for Transparency Network will lead not only to more informed debate about the Internet’s impact on democracy, but also to more participation and interest in projects that aim to empower and improve the livelihoods of citizens who were previously excluded from political participation. (emphasis added)

Governments in North American and Western Europe may be releasing more data than other governments. Such as White House visitor lists that are incomplete, don’t show who was met or why, or the substance of the conversations or agreements. The released data is like a lollipop given to distract an unruly child. It may be really big and tasty, but the adult conversation continues while it is being consumed.

For example, what about the black hole that is the US military budget? True transparency would trace from the bill in congress to each branch of the service to each contact to each subcontract and subsubcontracts and thence to every state and employer in that state, along with reports on the usefulness of that particular item or service and then back to the member of congress who introduced it (more likely written by the prime contractor) into the budget. Or doing the same for the organized fraud that is the airport screening by the TSA, that since 9/11 has not caught a single terrorist, not one.

Or even better, all the diplomatic cables from North American and Western European governments while they mis-managed the last half of the 20th century? There are plenty of folks who are still alive who might have something to say about those discussions. Oh, people might be held accountable for betraying their countries and fellow citizens? Well, that is what transparency is all about, accountability.

Topic maps can be one part of a solution to help bring transparency and accountability to governments, no matter where they are located. Even including North America and Western Europe.

In part because diverse topic maps, using multiple national languages and views of the world, can be merged while retaining the integrity of those views. Which means users of the merged topic map, can look for absences as well as intersections of interest. To empower people to make demands to fill in the missing pieces.

PS: Any governments that are about to fall. Please post all diplomatic cables to a public ftp site. The other governments let you fall so you don’t owe them anything.

Quadrennial Defense Review

Not light reading but if you are interested in the broad outlines of how U.S. defense may develop, this is one place to start.

I mention it because topic map application can compete with existing applications that are already in place or they can be the solution to problems without an installed base. Depends upon your particular strategy for promoting topic maps or topic map based services.

Another reason for reading this and similar material is to pick up the vocabulary in which needs will be expressed, so that you can pitch topic maps as solutions in terms of needs as seen by the prospective client, in this case the DoD. Pitching subject-centric processing to someone looking to:

fully implement the National Security Professional (NSP) program to improve cross-agency training, education, and professional experience opportunities.
(page 71)

isn’t likely to be successful. Subject-centric processing may be the best way to accomplish their goal, but the focus should be on achieving their goal. Once they are satisfied that is the case, maybe they will ask how it is being done. Maybe not. The important thing is for them to say: “I want more of that.”

5 Important Factors for Pricing Data in the Information (Overload) Age

Dick Cudoff, Co-founder and CEO of Infochimps, identifies five (5) factors to consider in pricing data.

Selling the results of the application of topic maps to data could follow his advice quite easily.

The recent release of QuaaxTM made me wonder how many people comfortable with the LAMP stack are aware of QuaaxTM?

There is the Topic Maps Tools page by Lars Marius Garshol, which is always the first place I look for new software, but how many non-topic map users would know to look there?

I am thinking that we need a two-fold strategy:

1) Use Lars’ lists of software to create “flyers” as it were for particular languages/platforms. (Communities that use Python are probably not interested in C++ libraries.)

2) “Distribute” those flyers when appropriate (no spamming) in discussions in other communities. With pointers back to Topic Maps Tools.

The metadata associated with the current listings makes the tools easy to find, but that is a pull information model.

I am thinking more along the lines of a push information model.

If you think about advertising, it is all based on a push information model.

Maybe there is a lesson there for the topic maps community.