Teblog

Just semantics? Or is it here?

The semantic web is one of those things that has been much talked about, especially in propellor-head circles, for several years. It leaves most outsiders a bit cold. They actually don't care about triples, RDF or SPARQL. They care about whether it will make a difference to their businesses.

Well, after a circuitous journey which took in two reports (here and here*), two related podcasts (here and here) and a series of instant messages with, my semantic everything guru, Dr Paul Miller, I decided that one of the reports was fairly grounded and quite useful. It's the (asterisked) one by David Provost, an analyst whose mid-life MIT SM thesis was called 'Hurdles in the Business Case for Semantic Web'.

Since then, he's sustained his interest in the subject and recently produced the report (free to download) called On The Cusp: A Global Review Of The Semantic Web Industry. It starts with a plain English run down of the semantic web world and finishes with a look at 17 semantic technology vendors and, in many cases, their clients. He started out by inviting 25 companies that he figured were doing real stuff, but eight either refused or didn't respond to his invite.

The resulting document verges on the gushing but, if you ignore that, it contains much of interest. It is strictly business-focused and it tries to steer clear of all but the most essential jargon.

A lot of the software described has been around for donkey's years but it is finding its vocation in the semantic web world. Natural Language Recognition, for example, is a core requirement for 'reading' and interpreting documents and turning the findings into the metadata which is at the heart of the computer's ability to understand content and context.

Databases with extensible schemas are another key element. This is necessary because the world is always changing, we can't predefine everything in advance.

The vendors vary in what they offer, from the narrowness of USA database company Franz, to the breadth of German company ontoprise GmbH. I quite like the sound of thought-sharing company Primal Fusion - but that's still in alpha so I couldn't check it out. I did look at Thomson Reuters' Calais however, but wasn't totally gripped by the results. It reminded me of speech recognition: no matter how good, it takes a while to get used to you. I rarely add Ltd or Inc to company names, so when I pushed some of my work through for automatic creation of metadata, some key elements, like company names, were not spotted.

It is, as the author points out, early days but enough is going on to suggest that we're going to see increasing use of semantic activity to improve performance for the benefit of organisations and their customers.

If this is unfamiliar territory to you, then the report will start you off, regardless of whether you're a business person or a propellor-head.

I would also recommend keeping a close eye on what Dr Paul Miller is up to. He seems to know everyone and everything that's going on in the semantic space, web or otherwise.

How to tackle green apathy

Coming back from a holiday, loaded with the usual environmental guilt, I found a 14-page (free) report on my digital door mat from EcoAlign. Called Visibility, Ambivalence and Trust: Cultural Stumbling Blocks to Greater Household Efficiency, it was written by Dr Pippa Chevenix Trench, a natural scientist from Oxford University with a PhD in biological anthropology. It seemed to me that this could be an interesting take on why people (like me) still act in defiance of the environmental movement.

And, do you know what? To play a part in our society, you can't actually get through life without impacting the planet to some extent. Try turning up at a business meeting wearing rabbit skins or bring a bottle of home-made wine to a dinner party. You get my drift.

Environmentalists want to change us into socially-motivated consumers. According to Dr Trench, they focus on, "regulatory mandates or actions and a campaign of information and education." The assumption is that consumers will see the light and alter their behaviour. But, certainly in the USA, this alienates as many people as it encourages. Dr Trench points out, "this backlash is a predictable response within a culture that values freedom of choice and independence."

But something has to change, somehow. And the only way to bring this about is to understand what drives consumers in the first place. The report looks at three principal areas: visibility; ambivalence and trust.

On visibility: if we turn down our thermostats, drive more fuel efficiently, lag our lofts or put in an energy-efficient fridge, no-one notices. If we buy a hybrid car (no matter how questionable the environmental economics IMHO), people notice and may be influenced. They might not notice that you drive your hybrid more miles because you can for the same amount of fuel - green life is full of these 'rebound' paradoxes. Visibility is an important, but usually unacknowledged, driver. (Look at my bungalow. Look at my old car. Look at me walking to the station. Smug. Moi? Maybe. But I shouldn't be.)

On ambivalence: it's incredibly difficult, without guidance, to decide what balance of purchases and actions are for the best. Here's another bit straight from the report:

"Many believe that the popularity of recycling as a green behavior is that it in some way justifies greater levels of consumption, since consumers are not faced with highly visible accumulated goods. The culture of accumulation, while deeply individualistic is also intergenerational, with each generation aspiring to ensure their offspring will have all the opportunities that they had, and more, to achieve the American Dream."

Accordingly, in order to justify our consumption practices, we each construct a baseline of 'needs' appropriate to the social context in which we live. Then we can continue relatively complacently. But that completely dodges the issue.

The trust element relates to who's advocating what measures. Taking energy companies as a prime example, if they suggest measures for cutting energy use, they're less likely to be adopted than if a government agency suggested the same measures. During the last major energy crunch the figures were government 17 percent adoption, energy companies zero.

The report acknowledges that many countries are ahead of the USA in terms of environmental awareness. But, wherever there's resistance, social belonging and culture are the places to start working. As Dr Trench says, "start from a basis that the current culture is something to be worked with and understood, rather than repressed and denied."

As ever with these reports, it finishes with a call for more research. It suggests that "focus groups may be identified through membership of institutions such as churches, schools, universities, mosques, etc." And, while this is a good idea, especially for studying the spread of influence, I'd be inclined to look inside companies as well. Judging from what I've seen in organisations such as Hewlett Packard, IBM, Kyocera, Microsoft and Sun, companies contain social groupings among which the environmental word is being increasingly well articulated and shared.

Interesting report. It'll give you a lot more food for thought than I've provided here.

Social software and a troubled bank

Wachovia Bank is in the process of being largely gobbled up by Citigroup (Update 6 Oct: or completely consumed by Wells Fargo). It was losing money hand over fist already this year and the more recent firestorm in the financial world brought it to its knees. It will take a while to sort things out and, then, who knows what will happen in terms of consolidation and job losses?

Earlier this month, I was listening to the company's eBusiness Director extolling the virtues of its internal collaborative software suite, called Pulse. At the time, I wanted to write about it but, having checked the bank's financials, decided it could have disappeared within hours or days of the story being published. Slightly bad news for me, terrible news for the company. Anyway, here we are at a new beginning, and here's the tale...

Pete Fields is a grey-haired, smart (in both senses), business professional, the last sort of person you'd expect to see presenting at the Office 2.0 conference. He talked enthusiastically of the underpinning reasons for Pulse and surprised many at the conference by explaining that it was built atop Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Like GE, mentioned in a recent post, Wachovia had decided on a DIY approach.

The primary drivers for Pulse were: 1) to enable staff to work more effectively across time and distance; 2) to better connect and engage employees; 3) to mitigate the impact of a maturing workforce; and, 4) to engage the generation Y worker. I bet there's a lot of 2) going on at the moment. And, I'd also guess that thoughts are currently quite far away from 4).

But, regardless of the current state of the company, Fields' insights are still interesting, not least the graph that showed the consequences of an ageing work population over the years 2000 to 2010. It showed clearly how the working population is increasing from the age of 45 and decreasing in the 35-44 bracket. The 55-64 age group is rising over 50 percent. And these people, plus the over 65s, will be leaving and taking their knowledge with them. (Assuming they can afford to.)

The diminuation of collective knowledge is one of the reasons so-called knowledge management (KM) became so popular, before people realised that the two words contradicted each other. Organisations thought they could use software to systematically squeeze knowledge out of people and file it away for future use. After many false starts, no-one would claim success. Lots of success with information but the stuff between people's ears was altogether more difficult. However, the advent of social computing (choose your own term) has brought the KM dream closer than it ever was when the knowledge managers were strutting their stuff.

Nowadays, if your organisation supports them, you can tap into wikis, blogs, bulletin boards, Q&A databases and the like. And if you're not happy, you can dive into the people pages and ping an expert. Within a short time you can get authoritative answers, in context and, because it's done electronically, the trail is saved for others. We all know there's a lot of nonsense 'out there' in the wider web but, in a corporate context, people don't file anonymously and they generally avoid posting inaccurate stuff that would reflect badly on them.

So, given the demographics, what did Wachovia do to capture knowledge without making people feel they were being exploited? It created an internal Wikipedia. Called Wachovia Wisdom and subtitled 'the encyclopedia by employees for employees', it struck the right note. It started, innocuously enough, as an acronym wiki. This wasn't the corporation squeezing you, it was you sharing what you knew with your colleagues. Smart move.

The project as a whole was never a skunk works. It was driven by business requirements and implemented in three phases. The first was establishing the platform, the second was about supporting team working and social capital and the third was about individuals.

To give a flavour of what's going on: the system supports 6000 web conferences a month, each one saving the company an estimated $214; several executives gave up five percent of their travel budget to the project; and, around 100,000 instant messaging sessions take place daily.

Of course, there's much more to the Wachovia implementation than this. You can watch Fields' Office 2.0 presentation online and you can download a slide deck (from an earlier conference)  that shows quite a bit of the system in action. You can even follow his personal progress on Twitter where he's, not surprisingly, petefields.