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

December 14, 2012

Semantic Technology ROI: Article of Faith? or Benchmarks for 1.28% of the web?

Filed under: Benchmarks,Marketing,Performance,RDFa,Semantic Web — Patrick Durusau @ 3:58 pm

Orri Erling, in LDBC: A Socio-technical Perspective, writes in part:

I had a conversation with Michael at a DERI meeting a couple of years ago about measuring the total cost of technology adoption, thus including socio-technical aspects such as acceptance by users, learning curves of various stakeholders, whether in fact one could demonstrate an overall gain in productivity arising from semantic technologies. [in my words, paraphrased]

“Can one measure the effectiveness of different approaches to data integration?” asked I.

“Of course one can,” answered Michael, “this only involves carrying out the same task with two different technologies, two different teams and then doing a double blind test with users. However, this never happens. Nobody does this because doing the task even once in a large organization is enormously costly and nobody will even seriously consider doubling the expense.”

LDBC does in fact intend to address technical aspects of data integration, i.e., schema conversion, entity resolution, and the like. Addressing the sociotechnical aspects of this (whether one should integrate in the first place, whether the integration result adds value, whether it violates privacy or security concerns, whether users will understand the result, what the learning curves are, etc.) is simply too diverse and so totally domain dependent that a general purpose metric cannot be developed, at least not in the time and budget constraints of the project. Further, adding a large human element in the experimental setting (e.g., how skilled the developers are, how well the stakeholders can explain their needs, how often these needs change, etc.) will lead to experiments that are so expensive to carry out and whose results will have so many unquantifiable factors that these will constitute an insuperable barrier to adoption.

The need for parallel systems to judge the benefits of a new technology is a straw man. And one that is easy to dispel.

For example, if your company provides technical support, you are tracking metrics on how quickly your staff can answer questions. And probably customer satisfaction with your technical support.

Both are common metrics in use today.

Assume the suggestion that linked data to improve technical support for your products. You begin with a pilot project to measure the benefit from the suggested change.

If the length of support calls goes down or customer customer satisfaction goes up, or both, change to linked data. If not, don’t.

Naming a technology as “semantic” doesn’t change how you measure the benefits of a change in process.

LDBC will find purely machine based performance measures easier to produce than answering more difficult socio-technical issues.

But of what value are great benchmarks for a technology that no one wants to use?

See my comments under: Web Data Commons (2012) – [RDFa at 1.28% of 40.5 million websites]. Benchmarks for 1.28% of the web?

December 12, 2012

“Entitlement” Topic Map?

Filed under: Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 5:14 pm

One “hot” topic of discussion in the United States has been tax and “entitlement” reform.

Asking because I don’t know: Is anyone working on an “entitlement” topic map?

And because I wanted to make some suggestions on what falls within the definition of an “entitlement” from the government:

  • Payment of agricultural subsidies to non-family agribusinesses.
  • Copyright (limiting it to a reasonable term, say seven years, total, would encourage authors to be more productive and to limit the growth of parasitic families)
  • Patents (making patents apply to non-software inventions only would improve the bottom line at most software companies, particularly the larger ones. Reducing the footprint of their legal cost centers)
  • Criminal enforcement of copyright (let the people making money pay for their own protection racket)
  • Distribution of genetically modified seed to assist Monsanto and similar actors.

And that’s just off the top of my head. There are thousands of others.

I suppose you should include Social Security, Medicare and similar programs.

But if and only if all government “entitlements” are on the table.

Maybe someone already has a list of various Federal “entitlements.” Give a shout if you see it.

December 8, 2012

Four Organizational Personas Of Disruptive Tech Adoption

Filed under: Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 2:27 pm

Monday’s Musings: Understand The Four Organizational Personas Of Disruptive Tech Adoption by R “Ray” Wang.

From the post:

Rapid innovation, flexible deployment options, and easy consumption models create favorable conditions for the proliferation of disruptive technology. In fact, convergence in the five pillars of enterprise disruption (i.e. social, mobile, cloud, big data, and unified communications), has led to new innovations and opportunities to apply disruptive technologies to new business models. New business models abound at the intersection of cloud and big data, social and mobile, social and unified communications, and cloud and mobile.

Unfortunately, most organizations are awash with discovering, evaluating, and consuming disruptive technologies. Despite IT budgets going down from 3 to 5% year over year, technology spending is up 18 to 20%. Why? Amidst constrained budgets, resources, and time limits, executives are willing to invest in disruptive technology to improve business outcomes. Consequently, successful adoption is the key challenge in consuming this torrent of innovation. This rapid pace of change and inability to consume innovation detract organizations from the realization of business value.

“Ray” writes the analysis of organizational personas from the perspective of someone within an organization who is pushing for adoption of a disruptive technology. The insights are quite useful for anyone with that perspective.

Have you used organizational personas to target adopters of disruptive technologies?

It is a low percentage shot to pitch a disruptive technology to a known “laggard.”

Is history of organizations useful? Thinking “market leaders” who created/adopted a disruptive technology, could over time become cautious adopters or even laggards.

You can supply your own examples of current “market leaders” who are shaving algorithms but not doing anything fundamentally new or disruptive.

Suggestions/comments?

December 7, 2012

Fiscal Cliff + OMB or Fool Me Once/Twice

Filed under: Government,Government Data,Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 12:00 pm

Call it a fiscal “cliff,” “slope,” “curb,” “bump,” or whatever, it is all the rage in U.S. news programming.

Two things are clear:

First, tax and fiscal policy are important for government services, the economy and citizens.

Second, the American people are being kept in near total darkness about what may, could or should be done in tax and fiscal policy.

House Speaker Boehner’s “proposal” to close some tax loopholes, some day by some amount is too vacuous to merit further comment.

President Obama has been clear on wanting an increase in taxes for income over $250,000, but there clarity from the Obama administration stops.

The Office of Management and Budget issued OMB Report Pursuant to the Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012 (P. L. 112–155) as a PDF file. Meaning no one could easily evaluate its contents.

Especially:

Appendix A. Preliminary Estimates of Sequestrable and Exempt Budgetary Resources and Reduction in Sequestrable Budgetary Resources by OMB Account – FY 2013

and,

Appendix B. Preliminary Sequestrable / Exempt Classification by OMB Account and Type of Budgetary Resource

I converted Appendix A in to a comma separated data file, with a short commentary to alert the reader to issues in the data file. (OMB-Sequestration-Data-Appendix-A.zip)

For example:

  • Meaning and application of “offsets” varies throughout Appendix A of the OMB report.
  • The OMB report manages to multiple 0 by 7.6 percent for a result of $91 million.
  • Appendix B has a different ordering of the accounts than Appendix A and uses different identifiers.

Whatever the intent of the report’s authors, it fails to provide meaningful information on the sequestration issue.

Contact the White House, your Senator or Representative.

Demand all proposals be accompanied by machine readable spreadsheets with details.

Demand your favorite news outlet carry no reports without data from any side in this debate. (Being ignored is the most powerful weapon against the White House, Congress and various federal agencies.)

Lobbyists, OMB, member of congress, all have those files. The public is the only side without the details.

Topic maps can map points of clarity as well as obscurity, assuming you have the files for mapping.

December 5, 2012

Army intelligence awards $149 million IT contract to SAIC [Example of Insanity]

Filed under: Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 5:51 pm

Army intelligence awards $149 million IT contract to SAIC

I assume you have heard Einstein’s definition of insanity?

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

You may remember SAIC for soaking the FBI for $170 million on the Virtual Case File project.

A somewhat older piece covers SAIC up until 2008.

Or another report of:

Found sufficient evidence that the company acted with reckless disregard or deliberate ignorance;

So, the Army is expecting some result other than failure from SAIC.

I mention this to suggest a topic map application that has a link labeled “Failures, Fraud, Other Crimes of Contractor’s Name” displayed on the contract award page.

Does raise a time line issue since it would be unfair to list failures, frauds and other crimes that occurred after the contract award.

Suggestions?

November 18, 2012

Level Up: Study Reveals Keys to Gamer Loyalty [Tips For TM Interfaces]

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Marketing,Usability,Users — Patrick Durusau @ 11:24 am

Level Up: Study Reveals Keys to Gamer Loyalty

For topic maps that aspire to be common meeting places, there are a number of lessons in this study. The study is forthcoming but quoting from the news coverage:

One strategy found that giving players more control and ownership of their character increased loyalty. The second strategy showed that gamers who played cooperatively and worked with other gamers in “guilds” built loyalty and social identity.

“To build a player’s feeling of ownership towards its character, game makers should provide equal opportunities for any character to win a battle,” says Sanders. “They should also build more selective or elaborate chat rooms and guild features to help players socialize.”

In an MMORPG, players share experiences, earn rewards and interact with others in an online world that is ever-present. It’s known as a “persistent-state-world” because even when a gamer is not playing, millions of others around the globe are.

Some MMORPGs operate on a subscription model where gamers pay a monthly fee to access the game world, while others use the free-to-play model where access to the game is free but may feature advertising, additional content through a paid subscription or optional purchases of in-game items or currency.

The average MMORPG gamer spends 22 hours per week playing.

Research on loyalty has found that increasing customer retention by as little as 5 percent can increase profits by 25 to 95 percent, Sanders points out.

So, how would you like to have people paying to use your topic map site 22 hours per week?

There are challenges in adapting these strategies to a topic map context but that would be your value-add.

I first saw this at ScienceDaily.

The study will be published in the International Journal of Electronic Commerce.

That link is: http://www.ijec-web.org/. For the benefit of ScienceDaily and the University of Buffalo.

Either they were unable to find that link or are unfamiliar with the practice of placing hyperlinks in HTML texts to aid readers in locating additional resources.

November 12, 2012

Tranformation versus Addition (How Ontologies Differ from Topic Maps)

Filed under: Marketing,Ontology,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 7:50 pm

While reading An Ontological Representation of Biomedical Data Sources and Records by Michael Bada, Kevin Livingston, and Lawrence Hunter, I realized an essential difference between ontologies and topic maps.

Bada and colleagues developed:

an an OWL-based model for the representation of these database records as an intermediate solution for the integration of these data in RDF stores.

That is to say they transformed the original records into a representation in OWL.

Which then allowed them to query consistently across the records, due to the transformation into a new, uniform representation.

Contrast that to topic maps, which offer an additive solution.

Topic maps enable the creation of an entity and the addition to that entity the equivalent identifications from all 17 databases.

Any other databases that become of interest can be added to the topic map in the same way.

Another way to say the difference is that ontologies set forth “a” way to make any statement, whereas topic maps collect multiple ways to say the same thing.

Which solution works best for you will depend on your requirements, existing efforts in your field, data that you wish to use, etc.

None of those considerations involve the software being sold by a vendor, advocated by devotees or similar considerations.

Any solution should fit your needs or you should simply walk away.

November 11, 2012

Why I decided to crowdfund my research

Filed under: Crowd Sourcing,Funding,Marketing — Patrick Durusau @ 1:02 pm

Why I decided to crowdfund my research by Ethan O. Perlstein.

From the post:

For the last five years, I ran a lab in Princeton University as an independent researcher through a $1 million grant. That money ran out in September. Now my option is to apply for government grants where I have a slim chance of success. And, if unsuccessful, I have to stop research.

Over 80% of grant applications to funding agencies in the United States fail. The government is planning to make further cuts to the science budget. More disturbing is the fact that now scientists receive their first big grant at the age of 42, nearly a decade after surviving graduate school, postdoctoral fellowships and temporary faculty appointments.

That’s why I decided to experiment with the way experiments are funded. I am trying to crowdfund a basic research project. Kickstarter brought the concept of crowdfunding to my attention years ago. However, it was only in the last year that I learned about the SciFund Challenge, a “by scientists, for scientists” initiative to finance small-scale ($200 – $2,000) projects, mostly in ecology and related fields, but not much in the biomedical sciences.

Ethan researched the models use by other crowdfunded projects and this post includes pointers to that research as well as other lessons he learned along the way. Including how to visualize the network of supporters for his campaign and consequently how to reach out to new supporters.

Not for the first time, I wonder if crowdfunding would work for the production of subject specific topic maps?

That is to pick some area, a defined data set with a proposed deliverable, and then promote it for funding?

I would shy away from secret government documents unless I ran across a funder who read the Pentagon Papers from cover to cover. It’s a classic, “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

My problem, which you may share, is that I know what I like, not so good about what other people like. As in other people willing to contribute money.

Suggestions as to sources on what “other” people like?

Twitter trends? News programs? Movie/music reviews?

The next big question: How can topic maps increase their enjoyment of X?

I first saw news of Ethan O. Perlstein in a tweet by Duncan Hall.

November 10, 2012

Fantasy Analytics

Filed under: Analytics,Data Analysis,Marketing,Users — Patrick Durusau @ 12:52 pm

Fantasy Analytics by Jeff Jonas.

From the post:

Sometimes it just amazes me what people think is computable given their actual observation space. At times you have to look them in the eye and tell them they are living in fantasyland.

Jeff’s post will have you rolling on the floor!

Except that you can think of several industry and government IT projects that would fit seamlessly into his narrative.

The TSA doesn’t need “bomb” written on the outside of your carry-on luggage. They have “observers” who are watching passengers to identify terrorists. Their score so far? 0.

Which means really clever terrorists are eluding these brooding “observers.”

The explanation could not be after spending $millions on training, salaries, etc., that the concept of observers spotting terrorists is absurd.

They might recognize a suicide vest but most TSA employees can do that.

I am printing out Jeff’s post to keep on my desk.

To share with clients who are asking for absurd things.

If they don’t “get it,” I can thank them for their time and move on to more intelligent clients.

Who will complain less about being specific, appreciate the results and be good references for future business.

I first saw this in a tweet by Jeffrey Carr.

November 4, 2012

Paying for What Was Free: Lessons from the New York Times Paywall

Filed under: Marketing,News,Publishing — Patrick Durusau @ 3:26 pm

Paying for What Was Free: Lessons from the New York Times Paywall

From the post:

In a national online longitudinal survey, participants reported their attitudes and behaviors in response to the recently implemented metered paywall by the New York Times. Previously free online content now requires a digital subscription to access beyond a small free monthly allotment. Participants were surveyed shortly after the paywall was announced and again 11 weeks after it was implemented to understand how they would react and adapt to this change. Most readers planned not to pay and ultimately did not. Instead, they devalued the newspaper, visited its Web site less frequently, and used loopholes, particularly those who thought the paywall would lead to inequality. Results of an experimental justification manipulation revealed that framing the paywall in terms of financial necessity moderately increased support and willingness to pay. Framing the paywall in terms of a profit motive proved to be a noncompelling justification, sharply decreasing both support and willingness to pay. Results suggest that people react negatively to paying for previously free content, but change can be facilitated with compelling justifications that emphasize fairness.

The original article: Jonathan E. Cook and Shahzeen Z. Attari. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. -Not available-, ahead of print. doi:10.1089/cyber.2012.0251

Another data point in the struggle to find a viable model for delivery of online content.

The difficulty with “free” content, followed by discovering you still need to pay expenses for that content, is that consumers, when charged, gain nothing over when the content was free. They are losers in that proposition.

I mention this because topic maps that provide content over the web face the same economic challenges as other online content providers.

A model that I haven’t seen (you may have so sing out) is one that offers the content for free, but the links to other materials, the research adds value to the content, are dead links without subscription. True, someone could track down each and every reference but if you are using the content as part of your job, do you really want to do that?

The full and complete content is simply made available. To anyone who want a copy. After all, the wider the circulation of the content, the more free advertising you are getting for your publication.

Delivery of PDF files with citations, sans links, for non-subscribers is perhaps one line of XSL-FO code. It satisfies the question of “access” and yet leaves publishers a new area to fill with features and value-added content.

Take for example, less than full article level linking. If I wanted to read another thirty pages to find a citation was just boiler-plate, I hardly need a citation network do I? Of course value-added content isn’t found directly under the lamp post, but requires some imagination.

October 23, 2012

[T]he [God]father of Google Glass?

Filed under: BigData,Marketing,Privacy — Patrick Durusau @ 9:32 am

The original title is 3 Big Data Insights from the Grandfather of Google Glass. The post describes MIT Media Lab Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland as the “Grandfather of Google Glass.”

Let’s review Pentland’s three points to see if my title is more appropriate:

1) Big Data is about people.

SP: Big Data is principally about people, it’s not about RFID tags and things like that. So that immediately raises questions about privacy and data ownership.

I mean, this looks like a nightmare scenario unless there’s something that means that people are more in charge of their data and it’s not something that can be used to spy on them. Fortunately as a consequence of this discussion group at the World Economic Forum, we now have the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights which says you control data about you. It’s not the phone company, it’s not the ad company. And interestingly what that does is it means that the data is more available because it’s more legitimate. People feel safer about using it.

I feel so much better knowing about the “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights.” Don’t you?

With secret courts, imprisonment without formal charges, government sanctioned murder, torture, in the United States or at its behest, my data won’t be used against me.

You might want to read Leon Panetta Plays Chicken Little before you decide that the current administration, with its Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights has much concern for your privacy.

2) Cell phones are one of the biggest sources of Big Data. Smart phones are becoming universal remote controls.
….
Not so much in this country but in other parts of the world, your phone is the way you interface through the entire world. And so it’s also a window into what your choices are and what you do.

Having a single interface makes gathering intelligence a lot easier than hiring spies and collaborators.

Surveillance is cheaper in bulk quantities.

3) Big Data will be about moving past averages to understanding patterns at the individual level. Doing so will allow us to build a Periodic Table of human behavior.

SP: We’re moving past this sort of Enlightenment way of thinking in terms of markets and competition and big averages and asking, how can we make the information environment at the human level, at the individual level, work for everybody?

I see no signs of a lack of thinking in terms of markets and competition. Are Apple and Google competing? Are Microsoft and IBM competing? Are the various information gateways competing?

It is certainly that case that any of the aforementioned and others, would like to have everyone as a consumer.

Equality as a consumer for information service providers isn’t that interesting to me.

You?

The universal surveillance that Pentland foresees does offer opportunities for topic maps.

The testing of electronic identities tied to the universal interface, a cell phone.

For a fee, an electronic identity provider will build an electronic identity record tied to a cell phone with residential address, credit history, routine shopping entries, etc.

Topic maps can test how closely an identity matches other identities along a number of dimensions. (For seekers or hiders.)

The quoted post by: Conor Myhrvold and David Feinleib.

I first saw this at KDNuggets.

The Ultimate User Experience

Filed under: Image Recognition,Interface Research/Design,Marketing,Usability,Users — Patrick Durusau @ 4:55 am

The Ultimate User Experience by Tim R. Todish.

From the post:

Today, more people have mobile phones than have electricity or safe drinking water. In India, there are more cell phones than toilets! We all have access to incredible technology, and as designers and developers, we have the opportunity to use this pervasive technology in powerful ways that can change people’s lives.

In fact, a single individual can now create an application that can literally change the lives of people across the globe. With that in mind, I’m going to highlight some examples of designers and developers using their craft to help improve the lives of people around the world in the hope that you will be encouraged to find ways to do the same with your own skills and talents.

I may have to get a cell phone to get a better understanding of its potential when combined with topic maps.

For example, the “hot” night spots are well known in New York City. What if a distributed information network imaged guests as they arrived/left and maintained a real time map of images + locations (no names)?

That would make a nice subscription service, perhaps with faceted searching by physical characteristics.

October 21, 2012

The Last Semantic Mile

Filed under: BigData,Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 9:31 am

Unless we conquer the last semantic mile, big data will be an expensive lesson in hardware, software and missed opportunities.

Consider Sid Probstein’s take on Simplify Big Data – Or It’ll Be Useless for Sales (Lareina Yee and Jigar Patel of McKinsey & Company):

I am tempted to refer to this as using a venerable telecom term: “the last mile”. Investing in analytics to help optimize business is a good thing, but without also considering how the information will be integrated, correlated and accessed, the benefit will be severely limited. Here are some concrete steps that companies can take to improve in this regard:

  • Take inventory. Even the mere attempt at cataloging will help identify opportunities for massive productivity increases. In the world of sales, those translate directly to revenue. Cost savings can also be uncovered here. This is the role Attivio plays at a major financial services firm: receiving, versioning, analyzing and tagging data sets as they come in. End users use SQL or search queries to correlate the information at query time, and can seamlessly employ their choice of analytic tool (e.g. QlikView, Tibco Spotfire or Tableau)..
  • Push information — not data. Most end users don’t want data; they want information that helps them make a decision. Identify key people (like Maria in the article) and find out why they do the analysis they do, and move that process upstream. The day they get the analysis, not the data, will be the day they become 10x more productive. As the article concludes, it’s the key to “mask all that complexity”.
  • Think in segments. One thing I really liked about the Forbes article is that it focuses on data-driven selling. Customer service, regulatory risk, internal performance management — each of these has its own sources and methods. Understanding and organizing your inventory in this way is key to understanding where to focus.

    • (emphasis added)

    How would you use topic maps to “simplify” big data for sales? (Using their concerns and terminology is recommended.)

    The block quote and inspiration from: Simplify, Simplify, Simplify. Three Key Steps to Big Data Business Value by Sid Probstein, Attivio.

    Economic Opportunities for Topic Maps

    Filed under: Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 4:49 am

    Alex Williams reports In Big Data To Drive $232 Billion In IT Spending Through 2016 that:

    Big data will drive $232 billion in spending through 2016. It will directly or indirectly drive $96 billion of worldwide IT spending in 2012, and is forecast to drive $120 billion of IT spending in 2013.

    …They draw several conclusions from their research:

    • Big data is not a distinct market. More so, data is everywhere, impacting business in any imaginable way. Its influx will force a change in products, practices and solutions. The change is so rapid that companies may have to retire early existing solutions that are not up to par.
    • In 2012, “IT spending driven by big data functional demands will total $28 billion.”Most of that will go toward adapting existing solutions to new demands driven by machine data, social data and the unpredictable velocity that comes with it.
    • Making big data something that has a functional use will drive $4.3 billion in software sales in 2012. The balance will go toward IT services such as outside experts and internal staff.
    • New spending will go toward social media, social network analysis and content analytics with up to 45% of new spending each year.
    • It will cost a significant amount in services to support big data efforts — as much as 20 times higher relative to software purchases. Peopel with the right skill sets are rare and in high demand.

    All of that sounds like music to my topic map ears:

    • “…not a distinct market.” Not surprising, people want their data to make sense, including with other data. Translates into almost limitless potential application areas for topic maps. At least the ones that can pay the freight
    • “…adapting existing solutions to new demands…” Going to be hard without understanding the semantics of data and the existing solutions.
    • “…[m]aking big data something that has a function use…” One of my favorites. Simply having big data isn’t enough.
    • “New spending will go toward social media…” Easier to make the case that same string != same semantic in social media.

      (Apologies to those with the “same string = same semantic” business models. You can fool some of the people some of the time….)

    • “…services…as much as 20 times higher relative to software purchase.” Twenty? A little on the low side but I would say its a good starting point for discussion of professional semantic services.

    You?

    October 19, 2012

    Focusing on the Reader: Engagement Trumps Satisfaction

    Filed under: Marketing,Usability,Users — Patrick Durusau @ 3:31 pm

    Focusing on the Reader: Engagement Trumps Satisfaction by Rachel Davis Mersey, Edward C. Malthouse and Bobby J. Calder. (Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly published online 5 September 2012 DOI: 10.1177/1077699012455391)

    Abstract:

    Satisfaction is commonly monitored by news organizations because it is an antecedent to readership. In fact, countless studies have shown the satisfaction–readership relationship to be true. Still, an essential question remains: Is satisfaction the only, or even the critical, thing to focus on with readership? This research indicates that the answer is no. Two other related constructs, reader experiences and engagement, affect reader behavior even more than does satisfaction. The discussion provides examples of how to increase engagement and calls for experimental research to understand how news organizations can positively affect engagement and thereby readership.

    In the course of the paper, the authors discuss which definition of “engagement” they will be using:

    In both arenas, marketing and journalism, the term engagement has been readily used, and often misused—both causing confusion about the definition of the word and affecting the usefulness of the concept in research and in practice. The disagreement regarding the nature of the role of television in civic engagement, whether the influence of television be positive or negative, is an example of how differing definitions, and specifically how the construct of engagement is operationalized, can create different results even in high-quality research.11 So while researchers tend to rely on mathematically reliable multi-item measures of engagement, as in work by Livingstone and Markham, we cannot be assured that engagement is similarly defined in each body of research.12

    An opportunity for topic maps that I won’t discuss right now.

    Earlier the authors note:

    If content, however distributed, fails to attract readers/users, no business model can ultimately be successful.

    That seems particularly relevant to semantic technologies.

    I won’t spoil the conclusion for you but the social aspects of using the information in day to day interaction play an unexpected large role in engagement.

    Will successful topic map application designers ask users how they use information to interact with others?

    Then foster that use by design of the topic map interface and/or its content?

    October 18, 2012

    Waste Book 2012 [ > 1,000 Footnote Islands ]

    Filed under: Government,Government Data,Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 10:43 am

    Waste Book 2012 by Sen. Tom Coburn, M.D. (PDF file)

    Senator Coburn, is a government pork/waste gadfly in the United States Senate.

    Often humorous descriptions call attention to many programs or policies that appear to be pure waste.

    I say “appear to be pure waste” because Senator Coburn’s reports are islands of commentary, in a sea crowded with such islands.

    There is no opportunity to “connect the dots” with additional information, such as rebuttals, changes in agency policy or practices, or even the personnel responsible for the alleged waste.

    Imagine a football (U.S. or European) stadium where every fan has a bull horn and is shouting their description of each play. That is the current status of reporting about issues in the U.S. federal government.

    Senator Coburn’s latest report may be described in several thousand news publications, but other than its being issued, that group of shouts should be reduced to 1. The rest are just duplicative noise.

    The Waste Book tries to do better than conservative talk radio or its imagined “liberal” press foe. The Waste Book cites sources for the claims that it makes. Over 1,000 footnote islands.

    “Islands” because like the Waste Book, it isn’t easy to connect them with other information. Or to debate those connections.

    Every increase in connection difficulty increases the likelihood of non-verficiation/validation. That is, you will just take their word for it.

    The people who possess information realize that.

    Why do you think government reports appear as nearly useless PDF files? Or why media stories, even online, are leaden lumps of information, that quickly sink in the sea of media shouting.

    Identifiable someones, want you to “take their word” for any number of things.

    They are counting your job, family and life in general leaving too little time for any other answer.

    How would you like to disappoint them?

    (More to follow on capturing information traffic between footnote “islands” and how to leverage it for yourself and others.)

    October 14, 2012

    “Microsoft Dynamics CRM Compatible” On the Outside?

    Filed under: Marketing,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 4:22 pm

    Sonoma Partners Releases Universal Search for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

    From the post:

    Sonoma Partners, a leading Microsoft Dynamics CRM consultancy with expertise in enterprise mobility, announced today the release of Universal Search, a free add-on tool for Dynamics CRM that provides enhanced search functionality and increased productivity.

    Universal Search allows Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 users to view search results from multiple entities by executing a single search. Without this tool, Microsoft Dynamics CRM users have been limited to searching from within one entity at a time. With Universal Search, fields can be returned across multiple entities, including accounts, leads and opportunities.

    With Universal Search, Microsoft Dynamics CRM administrators can configure which entities are searched, which attributes to search by and what information is displayed. The tool is conveniently located in the ribbon of Microsoft Dynamics 2011 and is available to users at any time within the system.

    “We developed Universal Search to create a convenient way for Microsoft Dynamics CRM users to greatly streamline the experience of searching for records, even if they don’t know what type of record it is,” said Mike Snyder, principal of Sonoma Partners. “With this free add-on, we hope to enable Dynamics CRM users to utilize their on-premise or online deployment to the fullest.”

    Universal Search from Sonoma Partners is available for Microsoft Dynamics 2011 on-premise and online deployments….

    Rather amazing that something so basic as searching across entities should come as an add-on, even a free one.

    Should give you an idea of the gap between common search capability and what you can provide using topic maps.

    And in cases like this one, you only have to improve an existing product. That is being marketed by someone else.

    I first saw this at Beyond Search.

    October 12, 2012

    Ten Reasons Users Won’t Use Your Topic Map

    Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Marketing,Usability — Patrick Durusau @ 1:28 pm

    Ian Nicholson’s analysis of why business intelligence applications aren’t used equally applies to topic maps and topic map applications.

    From: Ten Reasons Your Users Won’t Use Your Business Intelligence Solution.

    • Project Stalled or Went Over Deadline/Budget
    • The Numbers Cannot Be Trusted
    • Reports Take Too Long To Run
    • Requirements Have Changed Since The Project Began
    • The World Has Moved On After Delivery
    • Inadequate Training
    • Delivery Did Not Meet User Expectations
    • Your BI Solution is Not Available to Everyone
    • Reports Too Static – No Self-Serve Reporting
    • Users Simply Won’t Give Up Excel or Whatever It Is They Use

    Ian also offers possible solutions to these issues.

    Questions:

    Do any of the issues sound familiar?

    Do the solutions sound viable in a topic maps context?

    October 11, 2012

    IBM Redbooks

    Filed under: Books,Data,Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 2:22 pm

    IBM Redbooks

    You can look at this resource one of two ways:

    First, as a great source of technical information about mostly IBM products and related technologies.

    Second, as a starting point of IBM content for mining and navigation using a topic map.

    May not be of burning personal interest to you, but to IBM clients, consultants and customers?

    Here’s one pitch:

    How much time do you spend searching the WWW, IBM for answers to IBM software questions? In a week? In a month?

    Try (TM4IBM-Product-Name) for a week or a month. Then you do the time math.

    (I would host a little time keeping applet to “assist” with the record keeping.)

    October 9, 2012

    “The treacherous are ever distrustful…” (Gandalf to Saruman at Orthanc)

    Filed under: Business Intelligence,Marketing,Transparency — Patrick Durusau @ 12:29 pm

    Andrew Gelman’s post: Ethical standards in different data communities reminded me of this quote from The Two Towers (Lord of the Rings, Book II, J.R.R. Tolkien).

    Andrew reports on a widely repeated claim by a former associate of a habitual criminal offender enterprise that recent government statistics were “cooked” to help President Obama in his re-election campaign.

    After examining motives for “cooking” data and actual instances of data being “cooked” (by the habitual criminal offender enterprise), Andrew remarks:

    One reason this interests me is the connection to ethics in the scientific literature. Jack Welch has experience in data manipulation and so, when he sees a number he doesn’t like, he suspects it’s been manipulated.

    The problem is that anyone searching for this accusation or further information about the former associate or the habitual criminal offender enterprise, is unlike to encounter GE: Decades of Misdeeds and Wrongdoing.

    Everywhere the GE stock ticker appears, there should be a link to: GE Corporate Criminal History. With links to the original documents, including pleas, fines, individuals, etc. Under whatever name or guise the activity was conducted.

    This isn’t an anti-corruption rant. People in other criminal offender enterprises should be able to judge for themselves the trustworthiness of their individual counter-parts in other enterprises.

    Although, someone willing to cheat the government is certainly ready to cheat you.

    Topic maps can deliver that level of transparency.

    Or not, if you the sort with a “cheating heart.”

    A Good Example of Semantic Inconsistency [C-Suite Appropriate]

    Filed under: Marketing,Semantic Diversity,Semantic Inconsistency,Semantics — Patrick Durusau @ 10:27 am

    A Good Example of Semantic Inconsistency by David Loshin.

    You can guide users through the intellectual minefield of Frege, Peirce, Russell, Carnap, Sowa and others to illustrate the need for topic maps, with stunning (as in daunting) graphics.

    Or, you can use David’s story:

    I was at an event a few weeks back talking about data governance, and a number of the attendees were from technology or software companies. I used the term “semantic inconsistency” and one of the attendees asked me to provide an example of what I meant.

    Since we had been discussing customers, I thought about it for a second and then asked him what his definition was of a customer. He said that a customer was someone who had paid the company money for one of their products. I then asked if anyone in the audience was on the support team, and one person raised his hand. I asked him for a definition, and he said that a customer is someone to whom they provide support.

    I then posed this scenario: the company issued a 30-day evaluation license to a prospect with full support privileges. Since the prospect had not paid any money for the product, according to the first definition that individual was not a customer. However, since that individual was provided full support privileges, according to the second definition that individual was a customer.

    Within each silo, the associated definition is sound, but the underlying data sets are not compatible. An attempt to extract the two customer lists and merge them together into a single list will lead to inconsistent results. This may be even worse if separate agreements dictate how long a purchaser is granted full support privileges – this may lead to many inconsistencies across those two data sets.

    Illustrating “semantic inconsistency,” one story at a time.

    What’s your 250 – 300 word semantic inconsistency story?

    PS: David also points to webinar that will be of interest. Visit his post.

    October 6, 2012

    It takes time: A remarkable example of delayed recognition

    Filed under: Marketing,Peirce,Statistics — Patrick Durusau @ 6:27 pm

    It takes time: A remarkable example of delayed recognition by Ben Van Calster. (Van Calster, B. (2012), It takes time: A remarkable example of delayed recognition. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.. doi: 10.1002/asi.22732)

    Abstract:

    The way in which scientific publications are picked up by the research community can vary. Some articles become instantly cited, whereas others go unnoticed for some time before they are discovered or rediscovered. Papers with delayed recognition have also been labeled “sleeping beauties.” I briefly discuss an extreme case of a sleeping beauty. Peirce’s short note in Science in 1884 shows a remarkable increase in citations since around 2000. The note received less than 1 citation per year in the decades prior to 2000, 3.5 citations per year in the 2000s, and 10.4 in the 2010s. This increase was seen in several domains, most notably meteorology, medical prediction research, and economics. The paper outlines formulas to evaluate a binary prediction system for a binary outcome. This citation increase in various domains may be attributed to a widespread, growing research focus on mathematical prediction systems and the evaluation thereof. Several recently suggested evaluation measures essentially reinvented or extended Peirce’s 120-year-old ideas.

    I would call your attention to the last line of the abstract:

    Several recently suggested evaluation measures essentially reinvented or extended Peirce’s 120-year-old ideas.

    I take that to mean with better curation of ideas, perhaps we would invent different ideas?

    The paper ends:

    To conclude, the simple ideas presented in Peirce’s note have been reinvented and rediscovered several decades or even more than a century later. It is fascinating that we arrive at ideas presented more than a century ago, and that Peirce’s ideas on the evaluation of predictions have come to the surface regularly across time and discipline. A saying, attributed to Ivan Pavlov, goes: “If you want new ideas, read old books.”

    What old books are you going to read this weekend?

    PS: Just curious. What search terms would you use, other than the author’s name and article title, to insure that you could find this article again? What about information across the various fields cited in the article to find related information?

    Perseus Gives Big Humanities Data Wings

    Filed under: Humanities,Marketing,Semantics — Patrick Durusau @ 1:23 pm

    Perseus Gives Big Humanities Data Wings by Ian Armas Foster.

    From the post:

    “How do we think about the human record when our brains are not capable of processing all the data in isolation?” asked Professor Gregory Crane of students in a lecture hall at the University of Kansas.

    But when he posed this question, Crane wasn’t referencing modern big data to a bunch of computer science majors. Rather, he was discussing data from ancient texts with a group of those studying the humanities (and one computer science major).

    Crane, a professor of classics, adjunct professor of computer science, and chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship at Tufts University, spoke about the efforts of the Perseus Project, a project whose goals include storing and analyzing ancient texts with an eye toward building a global humanities model.

    (video omitted)

    The next step in humanities is to create that Crane calls “a dialogue among civilizations.” With regard to the study of humanities, it is to connect those studying classical Greek with those studying classical Latin, Arabic, and even Chinese. Like physicists want to model the universe, Crane wants to model the progression of intelligence and art on a global scale throughout human history.

    … (a bit later)

    Surprisingly, the biggest barrier is not actually the amount of space occupied by the data of the ancient texts, but rather the language barriers. Currently, the Perseus Project covers over a trillion words, but those words are split up into 400 languages. To give a specific example, Crane presented a 12th century Arabic document. It was pristine and easily readable—to anyone who can read ancient Arabic.

    Substitute “semantic” for “language” in “language barriers” and I think the comment is right on the mark.

    Assuming that you could read the “12th century Arabic document” and understand its semantics, where would you record your reading to pass it along to others?

    Say you spot the name of a well known 12th figure. Must every reader duplicate your feat of reading and understanding the document to make that same discovery?

    Or can we preserve your “discovery” for other readers?

    Topic maps anyone?

    October 3, 2012

    Every Lost episode visualized and recreated

    Filed under: Entertainment,Marketing — Patrick Durusau @ 8:43 pm

    Every Lost episode visualized and recreated by Nathan Yau.

    From the post:

    Santiago Ortiz visualized every episode of the show in the interactive Lostalgic. It’s a set a four views that shows character occurrences and relationships and the lines they said during various parts of each episode.

    The first view, shown above, is a bar chart vertically arranged by time, where each row represents an act. A profile picture is shown whenever the corresponding character says something. The next two views, the network graph and co-occurrence matrix show interactions between characters, and finally, if you want to relive it all over again, you can choose the reenactment, and the animation will cycle through the characters and scripts.

    I have a confession to make before going any further: I have never seen an espisode of “Lost.” You have been warned.

    Despite my ignorance of the show, this appears to be a truly amazing project.

    I am sure there are fans of other TV shows who would volunteer to do something similar for their favorite show.

    Of course, I would like to see them use topic maps, if for no other reason than to enable decentralized work flow and diverse semantic viewpoints of the same content.

    Can you imagine an American Bandstand project on Github?

    What TV series would you spend this sort of time on?

    September 30, 2012

    T-Shirt Ideas for the Hadoop Team

    Filed under: Humor,Marketing — Patrick Durusau @ 8:50 pm

    T-Shirt Ideas for the Hadoop Team

    Start the week with smile!

    Now suggest t-shirt ideas for topic maps!

    Moments that Matter … Moments that Don’t

    Filed under: Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 8:10 pm

    Moments that Matter … Moments that Don’t by Doug Klein.

    Another marketing jewel for the topic map crowd.

    Doug writes (in part):

    What’s needed is a new approach engineered around what the customer wants to hear from us, not what we want to say to them.

    I could personally fill a tome or two with stuff that I want to say about topic maps and/or using topic maps, that doesn’t have much (anything?) to do with what customers want to hear about.

    What about you?

    Here are Doug’s take aways:

    So what can we take away from all of this?

    1. Commit to learning why customers buy. It is critical for successful experience planning and innovation to update our traditional purchase behavior knowledge with insights into new channel-device integrations.
    2. Revisit how customers shop today. Really understanding how customers interact with your brand across the media and device landscape, both online and offline, results in understanding the “moments that matter” to your customers, and the ones that don’t.
    3. Focus on “attracting” customers, not acquiring them. Resist the temptation to overwhelm your customers by trying to be everywhere at all times and you will have a better chance at creating meaningful relationships at key buying moments.
    4. Understand that the traditional marketing funnel is dead. Customers control more of the decision cycle and are spending more time researching on their own. As a result, programs and properties need to be retooled with information in key channels like search, social, and CRM to answer customer questions before they have to ask.
    5. Be an environmentalist. As digital professionals, we need to stop polluting the airwaves. We must prioritize, focus, and do the few things that really matter to customers exceptionally well, instead of scrambling to do too many things only moderately well. In the end, a focused approached is a win-win for brands, their customers, and the entire community of experience designers and marketers.

    Here is my fractured version for topic maps:

    So what can we take away from all of this?

    1. Commit to learning why customers buy. Learn the price points for enhanced information. At what point will customers pay for better information and/or information services?
    2. Revisit how customers shop today. In our case, where do they look for information? What makes it valuable to them?
    3. Focus on “attracting” customers, not acquiring them. Some things are better done with a pencil and note card. Others with a relational database. Push topic maps where they will make the most difference to your customer.
    4. Understand that the traditional marketing funnel is dead. Not only broaden marketing channels but I would suggest powering marketing channels with topic maps.
    5. Be an environmentalist. Read from above. I can’t add anything to it.

    What moments are you going to focus on?

    September 29, 2012

    Visual Clues: A Brain “feature,” not a “bug”

    Filed under: Identification,Identifiers,Image Processing,Image Recognition,Marketing,Subject Identifiers,Subject Identity — Patrick Durusau @ 12:55 pm

    You will read in When Your Eyes Tell Your Hands What to Think: You’re Far Less in Control of Your Brain Than You Think that:

    You’ve probably never given much thought to the fact that picking up your cup of morning coffee presents your brain with a set of complex decisions. You need to decide how to aim your hand, grasp the handle and raise the cup to your mouth, all without spilling the contents on your lap.

    A new Northwestern University study shows that, not only does your brain handle such complex decisions for you, it also hides information from you about how those decisions are made.

    “Our study gives a salient example,” said Yangqing ‘Lucie’ Xu, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northwestern. “When you pick up an object, your brain automatically decides how to control your muscles based on what your eyes provide about the object’s shape. When you pick up a mug by the handle with your right hand, you need to add a clockwise twist to your grip to compensate for the extra weight that you see on the left side of the mug.

    “We showed that the use of this visual information is so powerful and automatic that we cannot turn it off. When people see an object weighted in one direction, they actually can’t help but ‘feel’ the weight in that direction, even when they know that we’re tricking them,” Xu said. (emphasis added)

    I never quite trusted my brain and now I have proof that it is untrustworthy. Hiding stuff indeed! 😉

    But that’s the trick of subject identification/identity isn’t it?

    That our brains “recognize” all manner of subjects without any effort on our part.

    Another part of the effortless features of our brains. But it hides the information we need to integrate information stores from ourselves and others.

    Or rather, making it more work than we are usually willing to devote to digging it out.

    When called upon to be “explicit” about subject identification, or even worse, to imagine how other people identify subjects, we prefer to stay at home consuming passive entertainment.

    Two quick points:

    First, need to think about how to incorporate this “feature” into delivery interfaces for users.

    Second, what subjects would users pay others to mine/collate/identify for them? (Delivery being a separate issue.)

    September 28, 2012

    Are Topic Maps Making Your Life Simpler?

    Filed under: Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 9:06 am

    Megan Geyer in Attributes of Innovation dives into the details behind the call:

    “Be innovative!”

    You may have heard this from your boss or colleagues. Everyone wants to be ahead of the curve and lead their industry—to set an example for others to follow. In the digital sphere, customer- and service-oriented products are in the midst of a great many innovations right now, with the emergence of elements like cloud computing, tablets, mobile location services, and social media integration. Now is a fertile time for innovation. But what does it take to be innovative? What does an innovative product look like?

    There are attributes that materialize differently depending on the product or service, but they are attributes that all innovations have in common. When these attributes of innovation are combined, the resulting product or service often exceeds the expectations of current user experiences and pushes the field of UX design forward. In particular scenarios such as enterprise IT or the public sector, these common attributes can seem daunting. They can sometimes even seem irrelevant. But in successful and innovative ideas, they are always present. (emphasis added)

    All of the points she makes are relevant to topic maps but none more than:

    Innovation is Simple

    Think about some of the most innovative ideas and products you’ve seen in the last 20 years. What’s a common factor they all share? They make your life easier. They do not add complexity or confusion. They simplify things, make things more accessible, or bring comfort to your life. You may have to spend some time learning to use the new product or service. It may take a while for it to become ingrained in your everyday life. But when you use it, the innovation makes your life easier. (emphasis added)

    Ask yourself: Are topic maps making your life simpler?

    If you answer is no, that signals a problem that needs to be addressed in marketing topic maps. (The same argument applies to RDF, which after $billion in funding, puff pieces in SciAM, etc., is still struggling.)

    My answer to: “What can I do with topic maps?” of “Anything that you want.” is about as helpful as a poke with a sharp stick.

    Users aren’t interested in doing “anything” or even “everything.” They have a particular “something” they want to do.

    Promoting topic maps requires finding “somethings” with have value for users.

    Let the “somethings” be what sells topic maps.

    September 16, 2012

    In Defense of the Power of Paper [Geography of Arguments/Information]

    Filed under: Geography,Mapping,Maps,Marketing — Patrick Durusau @ 10:33 am

    In her recent editorial, In Defense of the Power of Paper, Phyllis Korkk quotes Richard H. R. Harper saying:

    Reading a long document on paper rather than on a computer screen helps people “better understand the geography of the argument contained within,” said Richard H. R. Harper, a principal researcher for Microsoft in Cambridge, England, and co-author with Abigail J. Sellen of “The Myth of the Paperless Office,” published in 2001.

    Today’s workers are often navigating through multiple objects in complex ways and creating new documents as well, Mr. Harper said. Using more than one computer screen can be helpful for all this cognitive juggling. But when workers are going back and forth between points in a longer document, it can be more efficient to read on paper, he said. (emphasis added)

    To “…understand the geography of the argument….”

    I rather like that.

    For all the debates about pointing, response codes, locators, identifiers, etc., on the web, all that was every at stake was document as blob.

    Our “document as blob” schemes missed:

    • Complex complex relationships between documents
    • Tracking influences on both authors and readers
    • Their continuing but changing roles in the social life of information, and
    • The geography of arguments they contain (with at least as much complexity as documents as blobs).

    Others may not be interested in the geography of arguments/information in your documents.

    What about you?

    Topic maps can help you break the “document as blob” barrier.

    With topic maps you can plot the geography of/in your documents.

    Interested?

    September 14, 2012

    Who’s Really Using Big Data [Topic Maps As Silo Bungholes]

    Filed under: BigData,Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 2:37 pm

    Who’s Really Using Big Data by Paul Barth and Randy Bean. (Harvard Business Review)

    From the post:

    We recently surveyed executives at Fortune 1000 companies and large government agencies about where they stand on Big Data: what initiatives they have planned, who’s leading the charge, and how well equipped they are to exploit the opportunities Big Data presents. We’re still digging through the data — but we did come away with three high-level takeaways.

    • First, the people we surveyed have high hopes for what they can get out of advanced analytics.
    • Second, it’s early days for most of them. They don’t yet have the capabilities they need to exploit Big Data.
    • Third, there are disconnects in the survey results — hints that the people inside individual organizations aren’t aligned on some key issues.

    The third point, disconnects, is addressed when the authors say:

    Recall that 80% of respondents agreed that Big Data initiatives would reach across multiple lines of business. That reality bumps right up against the biggest data challenge respondents identified: “integrating a wider variety of data.” This challenge appears to be more apparent to IT than to business executives. We’d guess that they’re more aware of how silo’d their companies really are, and that this is another reason that they judge the company’s capacity to transform itself using Big Data more harshly.

    I don’t know that “harshly” is the term I would use. Realistically is more accurate.

    The eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. just passed and improved intelligence sharing between U.S. intelligence agencies is still years away, if it remains on schedule. (Read’em and Weep)

    Fact: Threat of death and destruction raining out of the sky is insufficient to promote information sharing beyond intelligence silos.

    Question: What motivation are you going to use to promote information sharing beyond your silos?

    De-siloing of information means:

    1. Loss of power – X doesn’t have to ask for my report
    2. Loss of control – Y might do something with my data that makes me look bad
    3. Loss of job security – I am the only person who knows how to obtain the data

    Not to mention fear of change and a host of other nasty reactions. The ones who aren’t afraid are panting with lust for the data of others to strengthen their positions.

    Which means nearly everyone in your organization is going to start with a minimum of passive resistance to de-siloing and escalate from there.

    There are alternatives.

    Why not let people keep their silos and breach them one by one with topic map bungholes?

    What is the purpose of de-siloing of information? So we can use it with other information? Yes?

    Which means we know what information we need for some particular purpose with a defined benefit. Yes?

    In other words, making all your silos transparent is likely a waste of time, even if it could succeed.

    Breaching a data silo with a topic map bunghole means specific information for some specified benefit. Amenable to cost/benefit analysis.

    Which works better in your organization: High value, specific returns or “it could be valuable someday, we just don’t know,” diffuse returns?

    Topic maps are the first option, transparent data silos are the second. Your call.

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