Search Gets Smarter with Identifiers
From the post:
The future of computing is based on Big Data. The vast collections of information available on the web and in the cloud could help prevent the next financial crisis, or even tell you exactly when your bus is due. The key lies in giving everything – whether it’s a person, business or product – a unique identifier.
Imagine if everything you owned or used had a unique code that you could scan, and that would bring you a wealth of information. Creating a database of billions of unique identifiers could revolutionise the way we think about objects. For example, if every product that you buy can be traced through every step in the supply chain you can check whether your food has really come from an organic farm or whether your car is subject to an emergency recall.
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The difficulty with using big data is that the person or business named in one database might have a completely different name somewhere else. For example, news reports talk about Barack Obama, The US President, and The White House interchangeably. For a human being, it’s easy to know that these names all refer to the same person, but computers don’t know how to make these connections. To address the problem, Okkam has created a Global Open Naming System: essentially an index of unique entities like people, organisations and products, that lets people share data.
“We provide a very fast and effective way of discovering data about the same entities across a variety of sources. We do it very quickly,” says Paolo Bouquet. “And we do it in a way that it is incremental so you never waste the work you’ve done. Okkam’s entity naming system allows you to share the same identifiers across different projects, different companies, different data sets. You can always build on top of what you have done in the past.”
The benefits of a unique name for everything
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The community website: http://community.okkam.org/ reports 8.5+ million entities.
When the EU/CORDIS show up late for a party, it’s really late.
A multi-lingual organization like the EU, kudos on their efforts in that direction, should know uniformity of language or identifiers is only found in dystopian fiction.
I prefer the language and cultural richness of Europe over the sterile uniformity of American fast food chains. Same issue.
You?
I first saw this in a tweet by Stefano Bertolo.