Sep 1, 2010

Tackling the Data-Driven Funding Challenge — a New Skill for Nonprofit Managers

Posted by Alix Vance under Experimentation, Metrics and Analytics, Research, Tools | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |
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Can you measure your mission? Many nonprofits are being asked to provide metrics of success in order to keep and attract donations and funding.

But it’s not exactly clear how to do this. According to a working paper posted in July to Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge site by faculty members Alnoor Ebrahim and V. Kasturi Rangan:

The social sector is in the midst of a search for metrics of impact. Over the past 20 years, there has been an explosion in methodologies and tools for assessing social performance and impact, but with little systematic analysis and comparison across these approaches.

When it comes to fundraising and donors, it’s no longer enough for non-profit organizations to talk about the relative value of their mission, activities, and results. Funders are comparison-shopping, and they want to know that their gifts will deliver more bang-for-the-buck if contributed to one organization versus another.

As a sign of this bottom-line orientation, foundations increasingly speak of their contribution “portfolios” using terms borrowed from the financial industry — and nonprofit staffs are under pressure to develop their analytical capacity.

According to a 2009 article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy:

The absence of common standards means that investors can’t compare the social and environmental benefits of different investment opportunities.

The Rockefeller Foundation is working with Acumen Fund, B Lab, Deloitte, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers to develop the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards taxonomy. Work has also begun on a Global Impact Investing Ratings System (GIIRS), which will look at how third-party ratings systems can be developed and aggregated under IRIS.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal underscores the need:

Many potential donors worry that charities will waste their money. Measuring the impact charities have on the problems they seek to solve—and, in some cases, deciding whether one cause is more deserving than another—has become a pressing issue for the multitrillion-dollar philanthropy industry.

Measuring social value is a highly subjective process. As Ebrahim and Rangan point out, it is not always feasible for nonprofits to gather data in every aspect of their operations. Sometimes funders and government agencies may be better positioned to evaluate impact.

Policy measurement is an area ripe for further exploration. By creating and overlaying data collected about key indicators, such as media coverage, staff activities, public opinion, and legislative decisions and/or votes, policy departments can create indicators and data-driven visualizations that inform their strategy and provide compelling evidence to Boards, funders, and individual donors.

The art of developing an impact measurement program lies in discerning what is possible and striking a balance between detailed analysis and clear presentation. Scalability and sustainability are also important considerations. Presentation requirements favor a limited number of measures, real-time access, and automated data collection and processing techniques using standardized data sources.

Owing to nonprofit disclosure requirements, a volume of nonprofit financial data is publicly available. Subscription databases like GuideStar Premium sell subscription access to downloadable data, which includes income, program expenses, fundraising expenses, administrative expenses, as well as enterprise data systems. GuideStar has also developed a nonprofit ranking system.

Simply conceiving of impact in these terms is evolutionary for many nonprofits. The learning curve and work involved can be daunting. Nevertheless, measures of impact offer significant competitive advantages in marketing and fundraising — and can give major advantages to organizations that crack the code.

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Aug 4, 2010

Leading Your Content to the Money — A New Equation for Selling Content to Consumers

Posted by Alix Vance under Business Models, Commerce, Experimentation, Marketing, Social Media, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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337/365: The Big Money
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The notion that information wants to be free is absurd when the delivery mechanism is making a fortune and the creators are getting what amounts to zilch. – Peter Osnos, “Will Google Save the News?“

In order to focus their attention on big institutional content deals, publishers have traditionally relied on third-party service providers (agents and the like) to conduct business with individual end-users. However, with institutional budgets in decline, content providers are turning their attention to consumer markets as a potential source of business growth. Asserting themselves in the consumer space will require a new type of sales and marketing acumen and visibility into consumer behavior, which recognizes and responds to the many new ways that consumers are seeking to interact with vendors and each other in online environments.

The longstanding business equation in B2B publishing has been:

Quality Content + Brand Recognition + Operational Efficiency + Institutional Usage = Market Share/Financial Success

Publishers have negotiated big deals, but have largely let consumers fend for themselves. This strategy will not fly in consumer markets, where visibility and demand are the primary drivers of revenue, and where methods for marketing to consumers have changed dramatically. The best approach for publishers wishing to enter the consumer marketplace is to take a step back, free themselves from preconceptions of what their business is about, and take a look at what is really working in the consumer Web. Only through entrepreneurial thinking will they have a shot at success in consumer content markets.

Where the Money Is and Content Should Be

Consumers tend to be more willing to spend for services that meet an interest or demand than for non-interactive content, which, according to a survey from Viximo represented only 18% of 2009 virtual commerce spending. Even media darlings like the Huffington Post have extremely modest per capita revenues because they have failed to break out of the advertising-supported model for delivering flat content. According to a recent article in Newsweek, HuffPo will generate $30 million in advertising this year from its nearly ~24 million unique monthly visitors and is only recently profitable.

By contrast, from an article in this week’s Washington Post:

More than 200 million people play social games every month. . . . The business opportunity is enormous, even though playing the games is free. Users can buy add-ons and move through game levels faster by spending a dollar here, 50 cents there on what amount to nothing more than virtual objects on a screen. Analysts predict more than $835 million in such transactions this year. . . . The games can be played across platforms — if you’re away from your computer and your wheat needs to be harvested, you can do the work on your iPhone. A simple text message tells you when it’s time.

Are publishers in denial that consumers want and will pay for better, more targeted, and more relevant services? Is this simply an unaccustomed way of thinking about customer needs at an individual level?

The new status quo is that consumers are constantly inundated with free content but are rapidly flocking to demand-based, interactive services and are making freemium purchases in that context. Content providers can meet this reality head-on by wrapping content in value-added service layers that address consumer needs and support collaboration (sounds simple). Then, the remaining challenge to anticipate and overcome is the transaction.

What It Takes for Consumers to Pay

Consumers will pay for content services only if demand-based purchasing can be made convenient and seamless enough. In Asia, micro-commerce and phone payments have been broadly implemented. Companies like Facebook, Google, Zong, TwitPay, and Flattr are making progress in this direction, and the U.S. consumer market is ripe for a ubiquitous, demand-driven micro-purchasing system (or iTunes model) that spans devices, platforms, products, and services.

Currently, this only exists in the online gaming space.

According to Flattr, whose system for monetizing online content across websites is explained in this YouTube video:

Micropayments are the Holy Grail of online exchange. Being able to pay for the content you like, even if it’s a small sum, makes a huge difference.

For further encouragement that micropayments can amount to something substantial, one can look to Zynga, which raised more than $1.5-million for relief to Haiti in January from players of their Farmville game.

Provided that micropayment capabilities continue to develop, there will be new opportunities for publishers and others to monetize content-related services online versus simply delivering flat content. This may sound like a minor distinction. In fact, there will be far-reaching business implications that require a strategic and operational re-orientation.

Despite these challenges, there is a real need for publishers to think outside their traditional roles and participate in developments in the e-commerce and virtual services sectors.

Publishers pursuing a growth curve may discover that good things come in virtual packages. Those who can’t make the conceptual leap may find themselves in the back seat of a car moving at Web-speed with consumer service companies at the wheel.

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Jul 7, 2010

The DISCLOSE Act: New Media, Old Politics, and the Fight for Public Data

Posted by Alix Vance under Controversial Topics, Experimentation, Research, Technology, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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While the notion that information wants to be free has driven many movements around government-financed data and research, it pays to remember that covert political maneuvering and paying for influence are as old as civilization. And some of these forces don’t want information to be free.

When some of the most well-funded corporations and interest groups also have a commercial stake in supporting transparency, you have all the ingredients for a real battle.

Advances in networked data technologies in the new media and research sectors have made new kinds of relational analysis possible. Tim Berners-Lee’s 2009 TED Talk centers on the creation of the web of linked data—a shadow layer that will underlie the web of content, the principal vehicle of global information exchange with which we are all familiar today.

Networked data is intrinsic to the semantic web and to data visualization, which propose alternate ways to  describe, associate meaning with, and reveal relationships between data entities. Early examples, built from publicly available government data, can be found on project pages from Open PSI (in the UK) and Sunlight Labs (in the US).

The power of analysis that can be derived from the semantic Web and visualizations of linked data relies entirely upon the accuracy and scope of the data itself—which is where the DISCLOSE Act (Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections) comes in.

Earlier this year, a controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. FEC, opened the door to allow corporations and unions to use funds to impact federal elections.  The decision is expected to create a large new stream of corporate and union money into elections, and much of it may disappear behind the veil of 501(c) vehicles with patriotic names and questionable agendas.

The DISCLOSE Act requires that these campaign related expenditures be disclosed in a timely and effective manner.

Without the DISCLOSE Act, more money will be entering the system and less will be traceable. Yet access to accurate data about political spending is absolutely essential to those seeking to reveal chains of influence that in the legislative process.

The Difference for Data Publishers

CQ Press, formerly the books division of Congressional Quarterly Inc. and now a subsidiary of SAGE, is preparing to release First Street, a political data platform for academic and professional markets scheduled to launch in Q1 2011. The project was designed to revolutionize CQ Press’ contact directories business by applying linked data technologies to surface relationships between issues, votes, people, organizations, and topics on Capitol Hill.

Through a unique combination of proprietary and public content, CQ Press has created a powerful online tool to help lobbyists and researchers quickly zero-in on connections between data points that might otherwise remain hidden. Users can cut through layers of noise and isolate significant correlates between votes and funding from corporate interests — providing a behind-the-rhetoric look at how politics in DC really work.

In the political spectrum, if comprehensive and reliable campaign finance data are made publicly available and can be prevented from being hidden behind a shell game of 501(c)s and 527s, technology platforms like First Street and those being created at Sunlight Labs have the potential to revolutionize the political process through transparency. If data are not made public, some of the important promise of these platforms will not be realizable.

Meredith McGehee, a lobbyist and consultant who has spent a portion of her career with Common Cause and who currently works with the Campaign Legal Center, indicates that, while the tools are new, the battle for honest information about political contributions and campaign ads is not:

At Common Cause, we spent years trying to draw these connections by following the money trail. We had a lot of opposition. Corporate interests did not want the public to have that level of transparency.

Several recent Supreme Court decisions, led by Citizens United, have shifted the ground when it comes to regulation of money and politics. Even as the fight now centers on disclosure, the current effort is like a jig saw puzzle. We’re fighting over just getting more pieces of information, many of which special interests are doing their utmost to keep hidden in their own pockets. It’s important to get as many pieces put together to get an accurate picture of what’s going on as millions are being spent to influence how power is apportioned and wielded in Congress and state houses across the country.

About the DISCLOSE Act

The DISCLOSE Act (H.R. 5175) has already passed in the House and has been introduced in the Senate (S. 3295) by  Senators Leahy, Feingold, and Schumer to “limit the damage done by the Supreme Court’s misguided Citizens United v. FEC decision and combat the new, unregulated corporate influence over elections.” Among its provisions is a requirement that corporations disclose the names of their top five donors to political ads. That provision is a direct response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in January in the Citizens United vs. FEC case, which overturned much of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law.

From the Campaign Legal Center, an advocacy and litigation organization in the nonpartisan ethics and campaign finance reform:

With all the kerfuffle around the DISCLOSE Act, it is important to remember why this measure is necessary in the first place. 8 in 10 Americans disapproved of the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC which opened up virtually bottomless corporate and union treasury funds for spending on political advertising. Much of the new influx of money is expected to be laundered through shady groups with patriotic names or even trade associations. The goal for many campaign finance reform opponents is complete anonymity for donors.

On June 24, following the passage of DISCLOSE in the House of Representatives, Ellen Miller, Co-Founder of the Sunlight Foundation, sent an email to supporters urging them to  join the “Public = Online Campaign” by signing a pledge (http://PublicEqualsOnline.com) to demonstrate that “people across the country care about an open, transparent government which makes all its public information available online and in real-time.”

Who Opposes DISCLOSE and Why

A broad swath of Washington special interest groups oppose the DISCLOSE legislation, claiming it is a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been the most vocal opponent of the legislation. However, when the National Rifle Association (NRA) announced its opposition, House leadership determined that they no longer had enough votes to pass the bill and created an exemption for a few long-established national organizations with more than a half million dues paying members  including the NRA, AARP, and the Sierra Club.  The so-called “NRA Amendment” has led to additional opposition from organizations to too small to qualify for the exemption and many of whom had pushed for a blanket exemption for all 501 (c)(4) organizations.

The Conflict for Big Tech

Technology and new media companies with lobbying interests may ultimately find themselves faced with competing priorities. The potential conflict for companies such as O’Reilly and UBM TechWeb, who produce the Gov 2.0 Expo, and Google, Wikipedia, Craigslist, and Omidyar Network, whose executives sit on the Sunlight Foundation Boards, is this — financial transparency is not just an ethics issue for organizations that have a stake in  creating web services that provide insight into government and political processes, it could make or break  this new class of data platforms. Money is the oil that keeps the machines running in Washington. Without financial data, which provides the ability to correlate the flow of money to the flow of influence (and action), the puzzle will be missing key pieces.

Media and tech companies stand to gain if DISCLOSE is passed because they will be the architects of an emerging class of utilities built upon data made public through the Open Government Initiative. Many are already aligned with DISCLOSE and Sunlight, which computes commercially and philosophically, due to the alignment of interests in providing free access to millions, if not billions, of data records.

Technology companies are rapidly beefing up their lobbying presence on Capitol Hill and are as susceptible as any other corporate interests to seeking access to lawmakers by virtue of their deep pockets — and to currying political favor behind the scenes. Secrecy and dollars are both primary levers in the lobbying game. DISCLOSE is where the rubber hits the road between transparency and lobbying.

Where will big technology companies — some of the biggest emerging political influencers and donors — split their interests?

Author disclosure: Alix Vance was Executive Director of the Reference Information Group at CQ Press from 2007-2009 where she led strategic development for First Street. Her husband is Director of Communications and Research at the Campaign Legal Center.

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Jun 8, 2010

Serious Games, Science Communication, and One Utopian Vision

Posted by Alix Vance under Education, Experimentation, Research, Technology, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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In 2004, Wired published an article entitled “Better Science through Gaming,” in which Kristen Philipkoski argued that the process of working with complex data sets could be improved via the adaptation of game-like technologies — and that “software for the life sciences has lagged the consumer market by 20 years.”

The focus of the piece was GeneSifter, a genome analysis software developed by a  video game programmer with a background in life sciences (updated in March 2010):

Based on the original program written by Olson, scientific director at VizX, and Jeff Kozlowski, head programmer at VizX, GeneSifter uses XML to aggregate information from public and private genome databases like the National Institutes of Health’s GenBank, Ensembl in the United Kingdom, and GeneCards in Israel.

It can shorten a project from months to hours. Some even say it’s almost as fun as a video game, at least compared with the alternatives.

Other examples of serious games for science are being pioneered by the Federation of American Scientists as part of their Learning Technologies Projects Group:

In order to help advance our research, as well as promote our vision of what we feel should be the future of learning, FAS has opted for more than a mere academic involvement in the creation of a new model for learning. We are actively involved in the creation of games and simulations that we feel represent some of the best ideas for such models.

(Links to FAS games, simulations, and related projects (which include Medulla, Immune Attack, and The Digital Human Projects) can be found here.)

Further inspiration can be drawn from educational communities that focus on experiential, multi-sensory learning. The Lab School of Washington is a leading school in Washington DC for bright, motivated students (grades 1-12) with moderate-to-severe learning disabilities.

“Lab” incorporates gestural content interactions in its curriculum and summer programs and cultivates skilled debaters, strategists, and communicators — without relying on text-focused skills. Students at Lab learn quantitative analysis and perform risk-reward assessments via simulations. They develop refined reasoning capabilities by encountering dead ends and taking calculated risks to surmount problems — repeatedly, until them become experts. Their particular requirements and mission position Lab, and others of their ilk, as incubators for interactive learning.

Even for mainstream students, gaming is a ubiquitous, informal learning vehicle. From a January piece in the New York Times, “If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online,” the average time per day spent by people ages 8-18 gaming is one hour and thirteen minutes compared to 38 minutes per day spent using print.

Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, said that with media use so ubiquitous, it was time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat”.

Over the course of the next 15 years, this community of users who experience content versus strictly reading it will comprise the community of scientists, researchers, and society members who are our customers. It may be difficult for traditionalists to make the conceptual leap from journal or book publishing to scientific simulations and instructional gaming. However, as economics and culture align, these will become part of the fabric of the industry.

Not everyone will thrive in a transformed business landscape. For centuries, scientific publishers have been scribes and disseminators of content who have translated the activity of science into a linear, replicable, two-dimensional experience. Sometimes even the most accomplished companies can’t transition outside their core specialties. (Apple, for example, is an exemplary device manufacturer and marketing company that has been comparatively ineffective in the software space. Microsoft, conversely, has excelled in software but failed to make headway in devices.)

Is it better, then, for publishers to focus on the curation and filtering of content, leaving user services development to others? Or should they be cultivating new skills that prepare them for a different future?

Related topics were discussed at the 2010 Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting, and experts recommended that publishers explore the edges of the envelope. Paraphrasing:

  • The future of scholarly publishing requires publishers to curate and filter specialized information in ways that increasingly involve provision of knowledge services versus strictly information delivery.
  • Reinvention is not accomplished by pouring content into other containers that are, upon closer inspection, glossier versions of their predecessors that pay homage to the same conventions.

If experimental evolutionary strategies will help publishers compete with start-ups and deep-pocketed technology companies (which lack publishers’ subject-matter expertise and commitment to scholarly and scientific mission), what supports are there for those wishing to invest in more radical innovation?

I have a utopian vision.

Let’s consider driving our own change by creating a self-disciplined and self-reinforcing ”flywheel” incubator (akin in its aims to Google’s famed 80/20 innovation policy) that is responsible for exploring and pioneering next-generation, extensible, specialty-content-based technology services on behalf of a scholarly publishing collective, which offers participants economies of scale and knowledge transfer. This could be a community start-up for the technology fringe, channeling the ethos that created BioOne and the model for the FAS’ LTP.

As Jim Collins observes in “How The Mighty Fall: Any Why Some Companies Never Give In“:

[D]ecline, it turns out, is largely self-inflicted, and the path to recovery lies largely within our own hands. We are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our history, or even our staggering defeats along the way. As long as we never get entirely knocked out of the game, hope always remains.

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Jun 1, 2010

Web 2.0 Next: Companies Place Bets on Consumer Relationships and Collaboration

Posted by Alix Vance under Experimentation, Metrics and Analytics, Research, Social Media, Social Role, Technology, Tools, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Since the phrase “Web 2.0” was coined, its premise has been to allow users to dynamically interact with content and to interact with each other about content.

Although more users have joined the social media parade, applications for dynamic engagement with content are probably only in pre-adolescence. But as the social community matures, new services are emerging to help businesses derive explicit practical value from the core Web 2.0 service base.

A survey of the Web 2.o Next landscape reveals two principal directions in the forthcoming evolutionary cycle — one towards value-added business service and the other supporting more fluid online collaboration by community groups and work teams.

This post provides a quick rundown of emerging businesses (in and adjacent to scholarly publishing), which are gearing up to generate better service and more collaborative utilities based on social platforms:

Leveraging Social Data

There’s a host of new services delivering value-added layers atop data from some of the most popular Web 2.0 platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. Aggregated tweets, for example, can be used to follow a global or discrete public conversation stream in real time — for purposes that range from emergency notification and reporting to gathering customer intelligence and popularity trends.

An example featured recently on ReadWriteWeb:

What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter’s 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting – the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets – it provides an understanding of the world’s conversations.

And another on RRW, Twazzup Insights:

The new analytics service is still in private alpha testing, but a couple of teaser reports on the site already show the application’s potential. Besides displaying the number of tweets and retweets about a given keyword per hour, the service also highlights the top links about this topic, as well as a list of the top influencers, as well as the most often used hashtags and other keywords in these tweets. In addition, Twazzup Insights also performs a basic sentiment analysis on these tweets.

Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Social CRM companies have set their sights on making traditional business services — in the areas of Support-Promotion-Innovation-Analytics — more efficient through the use of social communication channels. Lithium.com is a leading gaming cum social CRM enterprise that promises to help businesses identify and mobilize their superusers — the one percent of customers who have the greatest community impact — using a “fine-tuned rank and role structure to incent and drive social web behavior.”

Lithium’s solutions will identify, engage, and cater to Superuser, the 1% representing your strongest brand advocates, which will drive 40-50% of your user-generated content.

With the Lithium’s recent acquisition of Scout Labs, the company is seeking to accelerate the pace at which they can provide companies with a community view of their customer activity that is decidedly data-centric and promises better ROI through social communication.

Using  Semantics to Track Customer Preferences

Competing with Facebook’s “Like” function — and similar to Pandora — Glue collects individual users’ likes and dislikes and uses preference-based filters as an engine for recommending products and media across broader categories. Glue loads new movie,  music, and book release information and provides up-to-the moment suggestions and highlights to users, based on their previous preferences.

Glue has recently upped the ante in its competition with Facebook by adding more power to its social recommendation tool set. What’s new is the capability to gather user preferences more dynamically, while users search the Web. Glue is also providing  ‘chiclets’ on Glue-enabled websites that highlight featured terms and topics and provide semantically generated contextual information.

Social E-Reading and Publishing

Copia is a new entrant in the device-enabled (and device-agnostic) reading and discussion realm. Currently available in beta and positioned as “the first social eReading experience” Copia’s emphasis is on the life cycle of sharing written materials:

We read to learn, to discover and to entertain, passing along bits and pieces as we go. Sometimes we pass thoughts, stories or behaviors. Other times it’s the whole book, or just an excerpt. Regardless of what we pass or how, when the cycle of reading, learning and sharing begins, it keeps on going.

Many in the publishing community are already familiar with Scribd. In brief, what flickr provides for image sharing, Scribd seeks to deliver for documents — plus an ecommerce layer for paid content and contentlets (micro-content). From an article on TechCrunch:

On Scribd, you can easily turn any file — such as PDF, Word and PowerPoint — into a web document and immediately connect with passionate readers and information-seekers on our thriving community, through connected sites such as Facebook or Twitter and search engines such as Google. Scribd users have shared tens of millions of free and for-purchase documents and books ranging from vampire fan fiction to research reports and business presentations.

The big news recently from Scribd is their recent decision to migrate the platform content to the HTML5 format, which will reduce their dependence on Flash and make them friendly to a broader range of devices.

Community Project Spaces

In direct competition with Microsoft’s SharePoint, Google Wave is a cloud-based environment that provides an environment for people to discuss projects and work collaboratively with text, photos, videos, maps.

Use-case examples from the Wave blog:

  • Education: Students and professors use waves for translations, research projects, and team development efforts.
  • Creative/Design: Virtual art classes and review and critique multimedia content, including images and videos.
  • Organizations/Conferences: Track speaker sessions and help panelists collaborate.

Also appearing in the collaborative space are new tools for delivering civic benefit through crowdsourcing. Among the Innovative Tech for Civic Good sessions at the recent Gov 2.0 conference:

Ushahidi, a open-source disaster response platform, was used after the earthquake Haiti and has been deployed by citizens in the Gulf Coast to track the oil spill.

And, in the non-existent realm, here’s an excerpt from Fiction Matters “The History of Publishing 2010-2020, Part 3:

The largest technical advance, however, wasn’t the embedding of content inside a text book, but rather in the ability for users to leave comments on an abstract layer outside of a book . . . a crowdsourcing of the study group.

The original cmmtr was a technology that sat on top of a digital text and pushed updates anonymously through a variety of digital routes both to and from the book … “kind of the hybrid child of BitTorrent and RSS.” A few lines of code in the start of a digital text book, and a small application installed on a tablet computer turned most eBooks into independent, distributed social networks – a global, real time, persistent, study group.

[The] work gained popularity with several developers around the world and quickly gained an impressive feature set, expanding well beyond anonymous text comments to include pictures, video, and the ability to link to other cmmtr-enabled books and passages.

While “cmmtr” isn’t real this fictional view of the near-future of publishing seems increasingly plausible.

As Michael Clarke’s recent post aptly noted, publishers–and not just trade publishers–have a pressing need to:

  • communicate with and receive feedback from consumers
  • assess their requirements and priorities
  • provide direct, engaged customer service
  • build direct brand-to-user relationships
  • do all this efficiently, maximizing ROI

Given the shifting consumer and technology landscapes, traditional practices are costly and non-agile mechanisms for creating and sustaining this type of engagement. Although publishers may not be fluent in Web 2.0 yet, they may have more reason than ever to explore new applications, technological capacities, and vendor services.

Content sharing and direct-to-user communication tools will increasingly replace outmoded services that fail to connect publishers/brands with their ultimate consumers of content.

Web 2.0 services, if used effectively, have the capacity to make content the nucleus of an engaged discussion or work process and to foster two-way communication with key constituents. Publishers who can effectively incorporate Web 2.0 in their programs may be able to reduce their reliance on intermediaries–and will stand apart by harnessing the power of their consumer audiences.

(The SSP 2010 Annual Meeting in San Francisco will include a social media round table lunch this Thursday; registration is available on site.)

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May 25, 2010

Data.gov: Selling the Government and Democratization of Information

Posted by Alix Vance under Experimentation, Research, Social Media, Technology, Tools, Usability, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Last Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative (OGI). The occasion was honored with a cupcake and candle on the landing page of the newly re-designed Data.gov site and a widely disseminated announcement from the White House.

For global publishers who have generated a significant portion of revenue building and selling databases, a requirement to make their data freely available is a mixed blessing. Despite the fact that global access and use of the data are expected to rise exponentially, balance sheets will take a hit.

Databases are not just part of a publishers portfolio, if done right they can be the most profitable part and have sometimes carried the less profitable and declining parts of the publishing line up — namely, books. Presses being impacted by this change must quickly seek new ways to recapture publishing expense and reinvent the services they provide.

Conversely, if a business has retooled to conceive of and build data services, it’s a golden egg.  For publishers in adjacent spaces — CQ Press,  Bloomberg, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, National Journal, CQ-Roll Call, the Washington Post — access to troves of free, authoritative, updated data presents a significant opportunity to create new revenue streams by developing bespoke products and services that monetize free content.

What’s It All About?

If unfamiliar with the OGI, an excellent summary of the initiative and the role the Office of Science and Technical Information (OSTI) has played can be found on the OSTIblog in an article written by Walt Warnick, Director of OSTI, and Peter Lincoln, co-author of the Department of Energy (DOE) Open Government Plan:

On January 21, 2009, his first full day in office, President Barack Obama signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government.  The memo was addressed to the heads of all Cabinet departments and agencies, and in it, the President called for “an unprecedented level of openness in Government” and instructed the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to prepare a directive that would serve “to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration” throughout the Federal Government.

On December 8, 2009, OMB Director Peter Orszag issued the Administration’s Open Government Directive, which required agencies to take a number of steps to advance the principles of transparency, participation and collaboration, including preparation and publication of an Open Government Plan by April 7, 2010.

The Department of Energy was one of 29 agencies that has posted its Open Government Plan online, and OSTI’s contributions appeared throughout the 30-page DOE document.

Data.gov includes more than 250,000 datasets, up from 47 made available at launch. The impact of the OGI is not confined to the United States. At present, six nations outside the U.S. are also developing open repositories of government data.

And these datasets are being accessed for all sorts of things, according to the White House:

To date, the site has received 97.6 million hits, and following the Obama Administration’s lead, governments and institutions of all sizes are unlocking the value of data for their constituents. . . . From these datasets, citizens have developed hundreds of applications that help parents keep their children safe, let travelers find the fastest route to their destinations, and inform home buyers about the safety of their new neighborhood.

In the area of semantic Web innovation, a proposal is also in the works with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to provide  a ”new encoding of datasets converted from CSV (and other formats) to RDF.”

The message from the Obama Administration is that the OGI signals a sea change for government information that will:

  • Spawn a global movement to democratize access
  • Enable global linking of data
  • Foster innovation and transparency via the creation of “community developed” applications

Who is Paying Attention?

This sweeping initiative presents an enticing opportunity for the technology community. The Gov 2.0 Expo crowd is already descending on Washington for a meeting this week. Referred to as “THE IT event for 21st Century Government” by UMB TechWeb and O’Reilly Conferences (the organizers), the Gov 2.0 Expo will include keynotes from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Danah Boyd, Dave Girouard, Tim O’Reilly, and others. The premise, question, and objective that the meeting proposes to deal with:

The rise of Government 2.0 signals the emergence of IT innovation and the Web as a platform for fostering efficiencies within government and citizen participation. How can we harness these innovations to decrease waste and increase productivity? Gov 2.0 Expo brings stakeholders together to explore transformative technologies and discover new solutions.

Sunlight Labs, an extension of the Sunlight Foundation and member of the data.gov community (featured previously on the Scholarly Kitchen), will announce the winners of  its “Design for America” contest during the event. Sunlight developed the contest with the purpose of inspiring the design community to create and share applications using the data.gov resources.

Nancy Scola, a NY-based writer with the Personal Democracy Forum, has followed the site since its launch last February. In “The New Data.gov Sells the Idea of Gov Data,” Scola notes some interesting differences in the way that the project is being presented today compared to 2009.

[L]ast February, Data.gov had data itself front in center. . . . The new version of the flagship site of the Obama Administration’s open government push seems to have an increased interested in selling the very concept of open government data. [T]he Obama White House and CIO Vivek Kundra have a lot riding on Data.gov. There seems to be a renewed acknowledgment in the new site that the vast majority of us have a very tough time wrapping our minds around the import of raw data sets.

Will It Work?

The quasi-evangelical enthusiasm coming from fans of the program tends to focus the conversation towards future opportunities and away from present day challenges. Stripping out the rhetoric, what data.gov and its international counterparts deliver are profoundly complex sets of expert research data via API.

APIs and data are only part of a larger equation.

In a discussion on TechCat, Vivek Wadhwa makes a convincing case for OGI’s necessity, based on deficits in the government’s own technology infrastructure:

While grandma flips through photo albums on her sleek iPad, government agencies (and most corporations) process mission-critical transactions on cumbersome web-based front ends that function by tricking mainframes into thinking that they are connected to CRT terminals. These systems are written in computer languages like Assembler and COBOL, and cost a fortune to maintain. . . . [OGI] provides entrepreneurs with the data and with the APIs they need to solve problems themselves.  They don’t need to wait for the government to modernize its legacy systems; they can simply build their own apps.

A post on NextGov says “the Obama administration still has its work cut out for it” and goes on to discusses potential weaknesses and areas for improvement–noting that the academic research sector can help:

[T]he information portal now needs to focus on data context and integrity to achieve true transparency …. Data.gov must do a better job of disclosing the methodology agencies and the White House use to collect and process the underlying information. . . . Academic research has well-established protocols and expectations for how data should be revealed in order to permit others to replicate reported results.

Even professionals face challenges.

In a first installment in the Guardian, “Making things with data.gov.uk – Part 1,” a staff developer presents a play-by-play of what it takes to create and application from data in the beta release of the UK Government Data platform, data.gov.uk.  (The post also includes a useful summary of the UK counterpart to the Open Government Initiative and Government 2.0 in the United States, which, in the UK, is led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and is described in his TED2009 talk focusing on the “next Web”.)

The obstacles that Thorpe describes indicate that there is a steep learning curve, with support needed, for building even a basic app:

One of the challenges of making official government data driven apps is that only a small percentage of the people already making things in this space are fluent in SPARQL, the query language used to retrieve data from RDF stores.

SPARQL 1.0 has no support for aggregate queries such as COUNT but fortunately SPARQL 1.1 which many of the data.gov.uk stores support does.

Not all records are created equal . . . not all of the schools have triples corresponding to these objects. For example at the time of writing 3 schools didn’t have a name.

And, in response to Thorpe’s post:

[I]t’s interesting that the Guardian are offering an introduction to SPARQL before anyone has published a dedicated handbook on the subject. I know the data.gov site has had a bit of a bashing in newspaper comments, but that’s at least partly due to the lack of a guide like this one.

The End Game?

Professionals will find or create the means to build utilities from these emerging global repositories of government data that will:

  • Enable comparisons of data that has historically been unavailable, siloed, and non-standardized
  • Deliver tools that surface previously hidden relationships between data points and suggest relational meanings
  • Aid users develop new hypotheses and research entry points

Whether this translates to empowerment of the general public — or strictly adds to the use of charts and graphs in presentations and articles by researchers and in the media, which pass by the general citizenry — is an open question.

The Obama Administration has presented their lofty vision. However, the locus of control for productizing the data currently lies outside government. As the data.gov website states, innovation will be driven by the “community.” This means that significant responsibility rests with technology professionals and businesses who are equipped to deliver tools, applications, visualizations, and services from the data.

As we have seen recently in the Web 2.0 space, businesses that begin with noncommercial “do no harm” doctrines may ultimately be won over by forces pulling them in other directions.

Pending questions:

  • Will the technology community remain fiercely committed to using open data to serve the public good?
  • Will commercial interests predominate?
  • Will the level of commitment and interest in the objectives of a global data program continue without institutional incentives?
  • Does the Administration have its own plans for making this type of information digestible for the general public?

An articulated strategy for harnessing resources to continue the process will be a primary determinant of outcome. Otherwise, it is up to independent business and nonprofit interests to embrace and expand upon the mission.

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May 20, 2010

Measuring Up: Gaining Customer Insight vs. Getting Lost in Business Complexity

Posted by Alix Vance under Experimentation, Metrics and Analytics, Research, Technology, Tools | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
1 Comment 
closeup of a steel ruler
Image via Wikipedia

Let’s suppose you’re an information provider who has decided to diversify revenue opportunities by creating platforms and tools to monetize data. Perhaps your organization has received a mandate from the Obama Administration to support the Open Government Initiative. Perhaps your strategic plan compels you to move away from text and pictures. Either way, you are facing a paradigm shift that brings with it any number of complex implications for your business. One of these will be that, almost overnight, you will need a new framework for peering into your own business because it has become exponentially more complex to track.

Say goodbye to the days of shipping a hardback in a paper wrapper, cashing a check, and heading to the pub. Today, when content is parsed and customized for dissemination in various formats, to numerous devices, and through disparate partner channels, business analytics, assessment, and competitive analysis are (or should be) the modus operandi.

For clarity, in this context “data” refers to a range of content types, not only to numeric data sets. In some cases, this involves the licensing of content and its associated tags, which will enable it to be more searchable and parsable so that it can be exported in customizable subsets via APIs. Or, it could involve such data sets accompanied by charts and text discussion.

The Dataverse Network Project, housed at the Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, provides an open source structure for maintaining data and making it available for re-use via user-customized collections. The concept is to help maintain a future-proofed repository, providing tools that lets people select, download, and re-organize public data sets in structured environments:

The Dataverse Network Project includes integrated developments in web application software, networking, data citation standards, and statistical methods designed to put some of the universe of data and data sharing practices on firmer ground.

Whether content is linguistic, numeric, visual, or mathematical, using a standardized mechanism to disseminate data leaves you facing some key business dimensions around what you distribute:

  • Evaluative information - Mechanisms for capturing information about the impact of your content once it leaves the nest, which supports standardized analysis and reporting back to business stakeholders
  • Legal information – Terms of use for licensed material; liability and mutual expectations

A growing number of SaaS companies are specializing in the creation and support of business intelligence (BI) dashboards. Companies such as RJMetrics pull data via API from Netsuite, Google Analytics, and Twitter as well as directly from relational databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or SQL Server. PivotLink offers prepackaged connectors to over 70 different systems to access data or to push data to a SaaS platform via API.

The Metric System, an RJMetrics-sponsored blog, uses publicly available customer data from Twitter to analyze trends. Their data-based inferences, as of January 2010, included the following:

  • The monthly rate of new user accounts peaked in July 2009 and is currently around 6.2 million new accounts per month (or 2-3 per second). This is about 20% below July 2009’s peak rate.
  • A large percentage of Twitter accounts are inactive, with about 25% of accounts having no followers and about 40% of accounts having never sent a single tweet.
  • About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times.
  • Only about 17% of registered Twitter accounts sent a tweet in December 2009, an all-time low.

Regardless of your take on Twitter, these examples provide insight into customer behaviors that can be highly valuable to strategic business leads, marketers, and product development teams.

Measuring and assessing customer activity farther afield remains elusive, particularly in connection with content resale or licensing. In addition to crunching data emanating from customer activity at a central site or server location, information businesses will also require mechanisms for pulling bespoke usage data back to the main repository. This may include information about device-based user activity and, ideally, will draw upon standardized data APIs from channel partners and licensees.

Which brings me to the “Legal information” bullet above.

If a business is focused on having visibility into the use of its content, wherever it occurs — with the purpose of creating a feedback loop for the business — this needs to be articulated from the outset in the language of its licensing, partnership, and resale agreements. Publishers should have the foresight to  include provisions in their agreements that allow them (or their specified vendor partners) to pull consistent, normalized data feeds, via standard systems or APIs, from licensee’s platforms for re-aggregation and collective analysis.

Without such mechanisms, a 360-degree view of the business becomes a 180-degree view.

As a colleague aptly summarized, “once we had readers, now we have users.”  The digital publishing business is a quickly becoming a content + tools = service business. This brings with it a new requirement to more completely comprehend end-user behaviors, wants, and needs.

As a level setting, transparency has not always been the norm in publishing. Those who conduct significant business with book wholesalers or subscription agents sorely lacked information about purchasers and end users. They have had access to volume sales data, but not much else. In most cases, they have known that their customers are ”libraries” — and that’s where the customer knowledge trail ends.

Without this knowledge of who their ultimate consumers are, they have lacked insight about brand authority, market share, purchasing preferences, and the relative utility of different sub-types of content.

In the realm of e-journals, there has been more reliance on analytics because impact factor and citation/linking measurements are the backbone of scholarship and tenure processes.  Common DTDs and tagging and linking standards were implemented earlier for e-journals than for e-books, and this has provided a basis for comparative analysis.

There are compelling reasons for publishers to focus on analytics:

  • In the library sales market, budgets are shrinking and the competition for scare dollars can be cutthroat. Content types compete with one another and with other university infrastructure and service investments. When developing products and making compelling use cases, business intelligence can provide a measurable advantage.
  • Publishers are migrating from a content/product model to more varied and complex, data- and multimedia-centric service models, which involve diverse repackaging structures, device formats, and distribution channels. This trend will continue as publishers mine content repositories for new services and extend their reach to global audiences.

Given the volume of experimentation in the information industry, it’s prime time to ground your business operations by establishing extensible processes that allow for routine evaluation of trends in information output, input, and throughput — not indiscriminately, but closely tied to the particulars of our content and mission.

If you’re new to the service arena, it’s important to invest in understanding who your customers are (and will be in future), what is essential versus “nice to have,” and how behavior aligns with preferences to establish a use case.

If seeking new ways to monetize your content, it’s not too soon to peer around corners and establish internal and external expectations that foster clarity and reinforce strategic capabilities despite an increase in business complexity.

Having the capacity to centralize information from diverse platforms and channels is of greater value than ever to digital information businesses — and will set the stage for the next phase of growth.

For those interested in joining a live discussion, Ann Michael and I will be conducting a session with Chris Beckett, VP of Business Development at Atypon; Mike Sweet, CEO of Credo Reference; and Marc Segers from iFactory  about digital reference monetization, networked data models, device use, and the underpinnings of a 360-degree customer view at the SSP Annual Meeting, June 2-4 in San Francisco.

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May 17, 2010

The Digital Universe, Information Shadows, and Paying for Privacy

Posted by Alix Vance under Controversial Topics, Research, Social Media, Technology, Tools, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
[27] Comments 
Lovers In The Shadow
Image by Aesum via Flickr

Everywhere we turn, we encounter debates over the risks and legality of uses of “private” data by social media mega-businesses like Facebook and Twitter.

Google is the latest culprit to be caught in the spotlight.

The lead technology piece in Saturday’s New York Times zeroed in on Google’s violation of German privacy laws, in connection with the company’s admission that it had systematically harvested private data from households in Europe and the US since 2006 — including email content and websites visited — in the course of capturing drive-by images for Google’s Street View photo archive.

There are already books to teach Internet privacy “survival skills” and software downloads to “erase” your data  footprint. It won’t be surprising to find that some are willing to pay generously for services that sanitize their information shadows with virtual lye and steel wool. Privacy will be a scare commodity, and its market value will rise. When privacy becomes monetized, we may assign relative values to our own private information according to the type of information that is protected or made available.

While papers have touched on the potentially inverse relationship that exists between user privacy and the efficacy of Web 2.0 social ranking and recommendation engines, social media engines are only the beginning of what is to come.

For every product aimed at helping to protect information, there are exponentially more designed to extract and use your data. It’s hard to imagine that the pace and trajectory of these types of technologies will not surpass our ability to keep records and activities personal.

One of the great recent innovations in mobile technology — which will have a profound impact on the harnessing and re-use of personal data — is the use of sensors in handheld devices. In a section of their white paper, “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On,” Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle cover this in the section entitled,  “Web Meets World: The ‘Information Shadow’ and the Internet of Things“:

Today’s smartphones contain microphones, cameras, motion sensors, proximity sensors, and location sensors (GPS, cell-tower triangulation, and even in some cases, a compass). These sensors have revolutionized the user interface of standalone applications. . . . But remember: mobile applications are connected applications. The fundamental lessons of Web 2.0 apply to any network application, whether web- or mobile phone-based (and the lines between the two are increasingly blurred). Sensor-based applications can be designed to get better the more people use them, collecting data that creates a virtuous feedback loop that creates more usage.

Beyond the information that is gathered, we must also consider where it resides and travels.

Cloud services for data storage and service provision, including content dissemination, are increasingly necessary for business. Individuals, using services for PC, iPhone, iPad, or other devices, are also turning more often to cloud services for storage, data back-up and retrieval, and information sharing. Examples of consumer cloud-based services are many — popular ones include Google Docs, Mozy, SharePoint, Rackspace, GoodReader, and Slideshare.

A quirky collective of entrepreneurs, business people, and digital thinkers have posted their kaleidoscopic look into the next 10 years of the Web on Slideshare.

Examples of the visions for the next decade:

  • “Businesses will redefine virtually every internal process and . . . service they offer customers to leverage wireless access to information and contextual data to create new value for customers.” – Russ McGuire, VP Strategy, Sprint Nextel
  • “People in developing nations will get online on mobiles before they do on PCs. . . . The mobile phone will become an enabler device, carrying users’ digital identities, preferences, and possessions around with them.” – Carlo Longino, Blogger, Mobhappy
  • “Location will become THE core technology. . . . Nearly every user interaction with mobile devices will become location aware.” – Ted Morgan, CEO, Skyhook Wireless
  • “Mobile payments will significantly replace currency [with cloud-based financial services managed by mobile device].” – Jonathan MacDonald, Founder, JME
  • “The phone will become your doctor [using sensors to collect, transmit, and evaluate your health data].” – Steve O’Hear, Editor, last100

Regardless of whether one subscribes to these particular visions, two common themes are:

  • Personal data, gathered via device, will be the coin of the realm
  • Information will reside in and travel through remote hosting and service layers

In addition to what we put out there, businesses — including hospitals, financial centers, employers, airports, agencies, and the media — already gather our information, access it dynamically, and store it outside the confines of their own facilities. The data that we “control” through our own decision-making is only part of the story.

In 2008, IDC partnered with EMC to create the presentation, “The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011“:

We discovered that only about half of your digital footprint is related to your individual actions—taking pictures, sending e-mails, or making digital voice calls. The other half is what we call the ‘digital shadow’—information about you—names in financial records, names on mailing lists, web surfing histories or images taken of you by security cameras in airports or urban centers. For the first time your digital shadow is larger than the digital information you actively create about yourself.

By 2020, a significant portion of the Digital Universe will be centrally hosted, managed, or stored in public or private repositories we call “cloud services”. And even if a byte in the Digital Universe does not “live in the cloud” permanently it will, in all likelihood, pass through the cloud at some point in its life.

Anyone for an e-commerce start-up offering a PDF report on “your personalized digital shadow” for $39.95, or $59.95 with a mood ring app thrown in?

A comment from Tim O’Reilly posted on Web2forDev reflects on the changed state of the Web:

The Web is no longer a collection of static pages of HTML that describes something in the world. Increasingly, the Web is the world: everything and everyone in the digital world casts an “information shadow,” an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunities and mind-bending implications.

We are just beginning to stretch the parameters of our experience, in which technology plays an increasingly integrated and experiential role. We should seek to re-examine the construct of privacy in light of the disruptive impact of technological change and adapt our expectations and management strategies to emerging paradigms.

Akin to Stephen Hawking’s recommended strategy for not confronting the extraterrestrial, our most prudent tactic may be to reduce our visibility versus seeking engagement.

For good measure, let’s start by assuming that they already know where we live.

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May 10, 2010

Can New XML Technologies and the Semantic Web Deliver on Their Promises?

Posted by Alix Vance under Experimentation, Research, Social Media, Technology, Tools, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |
[7] Comments 

PhotonQ-Tim Berners Lee on Linked Data at TED by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE.

Tim Berners-Lee at TED2009 by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE on Flickr

 

I recently read a paper from Los Alamos National Labs (LANL), “Using Architectures for Semantic Interoperability to Create Journal Clubs for Emergency Response.” Without diving too deeply into the technical weeds, what the paper describes is: 

[A] process for leveraging emerging semantic web and digital library architectures and standards to (1) create a focused collection of bibliographic metadata, (2) extract semantic information, (3) convert it to the Resource Description Framework IExtensible Markup Language (RDFIXML), and (4) integrate it so that scientific and technical responders can share and explore critical information in the collections. 

Why recommend creating a semantic research repository in RDF XML? Let’s step back and take a look at this interesting use-case: 

Problem (specific to the LANL paper): Prevent bioterrorist incident outbreaks and prevent spreading of viruses having the potential develop into a catastrophic pandemic. 

Desired outcome: Assemble an appropriate group of experts who quickly receive access to customized research and tools, which enable them to collaboratively head off large-scale crises. 

In order to proactively respond in the event of an emerging emergency response situation, in this case the potential threat of the SARS pandemic, the authors have outlined a process — leveraging both Web 2.0 (social networking) and Web 3.0 (semantic) capabilities, and using RDF XML to normalize data without confining its meaning or future expansion possibilities — which mobilizes expert research groups in alignment with situational specifics and provides them with customized research information and visualization and analytical tools that enable them to quickly and collaboratively generate solutions and curtail the impact of the biological threat. 

Extrapolating from the article—and expanding a bit on what the authors have proposed—a generalized process outline would look something like this: 

Condition: Urgent need for expert research response 

Content: Using a semantic repository of technical articles (developed via the harvesting, augmenting, and mapping processes, which the article describes) 

Activity 1: Dynamically assemble specialist expert “journals clubs” or researcher networks based on biographical metadata — such as expertise, affiliation, publication history, relationships, geography — to quickly form a collaborative emergency response team 

Activity 2: Facilitate the equally dynamic creation of custom knowledge collections, driven by semantic search that is supported by enriched metadata contained in normalized RDF XML 

Activity 3: Provide visualization tools and provide other analytical capabilities to support collaborative problem-solving the expert group 

Close the loop: Capture process and outcome information, scenarios considered, implementation recommendations and provide routes for republication and sharing — with or without further peer review 

The LANL author team is not alone in exploring this terrain. 

Collexis is another highly visible proponent of semantic technologies in the scholarly research industry. Their BioMedExperts, for example, accomplishes a number of the functions proposed by the LANL group: 

BioMedExperts contains the research profiles of more than 1.8 million life science researchers, representing over 24 million connections from over 3,500 institutions in more than 190 countries. . . . profiles were generated from author and co-author information from 18 million publications published in over 20,000 journals. 

BioMedExperts includes visualization and linear/hierarchical tools for browsing and refining result sets, authority metrics, and networking tools to facilitate conversations among geographically dispersed researchers. For the curious, free access is available on the site. Collexis has also recently announced a project with Elsevier SCOPUS, University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State to create a statewide expert network. From the press release: 

Once implemented it will be the largest statewide research community of its kind. The web community created will have fully populated information on publications grant data and citations from over 15,000 researchers across all research disciplines. 

There is active debate on the Web about the potential for Web 3.0 technologies and the standards that will be adopted to support them. Writing for O’Reilly Community, Kurt Cagle has remarked: 

My central problem with RDF is that it is a brilliant technology that tried to solve too big a problem too early on by establishing itself as a way of building “dynamic” ontologies. Most ontologies are ultimately dynamic, changing and shifting as the requirements for their use change, but at the same time such ontologies change relatively slowly over time. 

This means that the benefit of specifying a complex RDF Schema on an ontology — which can be a major exercise in hair pulling — is typically only advantageous in the very long term for most ontologies, and that in general the flexibility offered by RDF in that regard is much like trying to build a skyscraper out of silly putty. 

As of January 2009, when Cagle wrote this, RDF had failed to garner widespread support from the Web community — but it has gained significant traction during the past year, including incorporation in the Drupal 7 Core. 

Last year, Gigaom spotlighted Tim Berners-Lee speaking about the need for linked data standards at TED2009: 

Berners-Lee wants raw data to come online so that it can be related to each other and applied together for multidisciplinary purposes, like combining genomics data and protein data to try to cure Alzheimer’s. He urged “raw data now,” and an end to “hugging your data” — i.e. keeping it private — until you can make a beautiful web site for it. 

Berners-Lee said his dream is already on its way to becoming a reality, but that it will require a format for tagging data and understanding relationships between different pieces of it in order for a search to turn up something meaningful. Some current efforts are dbpedia, a project aimed at extracting structured information from Wikipedia, and OpenStreetMap, an editable map of the world. 

The promise within this alphabet soup of technologies is that semantic Web standards will support the development of utilities that: 

  • Provide access to large repositories of information that would otherwise be unwieldy to search quickly
  • Surface relationships within complex data sets that would otherwise be obscured
  • Are highly transferable
  • Deliver democratized access to research information

But there are risks. Building sites that depend on semantic technologies and RDF XML can take longer and be more costly initially. In a stalled economy, long-term financial vision is harder to come by, but those with it may truly leapfrog. In addition, there are concerns about accuracy, authority, and security within these systems, ones the architects must address in order for them to reach the mainstream. 

In our industry, which depends on research authority, one may wonder whether this is an all-or-nothing proposition. Without speed and consistent delivery of reliable results, projects such as these may fail to meet user expectations and be dead in the water. On the flip side, if RDF XML and its successors can accomplish what they purport to, they will drive significant advances in research by providing the capacity to dynamically derive rich meaning from relationships as well as content. 

Thanks to David Wojick for sharing the LANL paper that contributed to this post. 

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May 4, 2010

A Future of Touch and Gestures: New Interfaces Driving Scientific Information Presentation

Posted by Alix Vance under Authors, Experimentation, Reading, Research, Technology, Tools, Usability, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , , |
[16] Comments 
Intel Cube
Image by jdlasica via Flickr

For scholarly publishers, librarians, and readers, the article remains the coin of the realm — a text-based narrative that strips data of all but its most superficial aspects and doesn’t integrate itself into the body of knowledge it supposedly adds to.

Your eyes can read the words and see the figures, but you can’t explore the article, expand the data, or experience how this new work fits into the realm of knowledge.

A main reason for this may be that computer interfaces have been, themselves, enslaved to the word, with keyboards, printers, viewscreens, and mice allowing us to do basically what we could do before — write information, read information, put information on paper, and move containers of information about.

New advances may change this, and some publishers are grasping the opportunities.

Through the popularity of the iPad and iPhone — and inheritors — consumers have become familiar with the experience of multitouch technology, which Wikipedia explains as:

An enhancement to touchscreen technology, which provides the user with the ability to apply multiple finger gestures simultaneously onto the electronic visual display to send complex commands to the device.

The variety of app-delivered games and tools currently available offers a representative taste of current capabilities in graphics manipulation and uses for interactively received inputs. The true potential for multitouch technology is still in its nascent stage.

Displax and Archimedes Solutions are two companies seeking to seize the opportunities offered in this emerging area.

Displax is promoting a lightweight, transportable polymer film that will transform a 50”+ LCD screen into a receiver that can accept input from 16 simultaneous touch points and registers the intensity and direction of air flow (the latter conjuring up visions of puff-driven Frisbee golf or other spin-offs of lung-powered Pong). Displax projects are predominantly B2C focused, including museum exhibits, TV meteorological reports, World Cup analysis, and retail and virtual shopping displays.

Archimedes Solutions has its roots in the high-tech exhibits business. But, while Displax is focused on lightweight solutions, Archimedes has headed in another direction with Session Desk, a heavy-duty hardware installation that resembles a 1970s copier.

Don’t let this dissuade you from watching the Session Desk trailer on YouTube. If video manipulation and/or data visualization are of interest, you’ll find something of interest in this four-minute product demonstration.

For the scientific community, the GLOBALDATA project is the most compelling. According to the GLOBALDATA product page, the application was created by Archimedes Solutions on behalf of the Max Planck Society and in cooperation with National Geographic and geoinformatics experts. It consists of:

  • Four different overlapping and interchangeable maps
  • Global development data on overfishing, food production, nutrition, and population, dating from 1950 to projections through 2030
  • Capabilities that enable users to exchange views and manipulate visual data displays using these criterion

This encompasses three of the leading trends in our industry:

  • Increasing demand to derive new utility from current and archival data sets [which is fueled by . . . ]
  • Emerging data visualization and data networking  capabilities [which will be delivered by . . . ]
  • New mechanisms for user interaction across any/all devices

Information experts should begin to grasp not only how multitouch technology supports limited information interactions, such as those delivered by iPhone app, but what course this sets for future content and data experiences.

From a January 6, 2010, STMicroelectronics press release:

The new [STMicroelectronics] multi-touch controller detects up to ten simultaneous touches with fingers, nails or stylus, enabling application designers to replace complex menu sequences with more direct and natural user controls. Actions made easier with multi-touch capabilities include browsing and selecting options, handwriting and data entry, arranging and sizing windows, picking up and dragging images, and fast and intuitive game play. Other abilities include drawing pictures, using touch pressure to adjust line thickness.

As these technologies continue to improve, they will significantly alter the ways we work with and experience information, including images and data. We will increasingly transition from environments governed by the restrictions of mice and keyboards to more fluid and interactive environments — in the vein of Wii, iPad, and iPhone — that support a more fluid, intuitive, and experiential exploration of scientific and non-scientific content and media.

While timelines are uncertain, expect that consumers of our information will include traditionalists/linear thinkers and visual/experiential thinkers, all of whom will increasingly require that we meet them “where they are” by providing a suite of mechanisms for interacting with content of various types.

This requires us to have a vision and strategy for managing transition and an understanding that most of our transitions are complicated by an attachment to prior modes of working. How long will be able to maintain a foot in every camp, supporting numerous devices and capabilities?

What strategies will we develop (as an industry) to manage efficient and economical change?

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