Apr
25
Link Arms for Linked Data
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data protection, Education, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Now we are entering the post-competitive world (with a few exceptions!) it is worth pausing for a moment to consider how we are going to get all of the content together and create the sources of linked data which we shall need to fuel the service demand for data mining and data extraction. Of course, this is less of a problem if you are Thomson Reuters or Reed Elsevier. Many of the sources are relationships that you have had for a long time. Others can be acquired: reflect on the work put in by Complinet to source the regulatory framework for financial services prior to its acquisition by Thomson Reuters, and reflect that relatively little of this data is “owned” by the service provider. Then you can create expertise and scale in content sourcing, negotiating with government and agency sources, and forming third party partnerships (as Lexis Risk Management did with Experian in the US). But what if you lack these resources, find that source development and licensing would create unacceptable costs, but still feel under pressure to create solutions in your niche which will reflect a very much wider data trawl than could be accomplished using your own proprietory content?
The answer to this will, perhaps, reflect developments already happening in the education sector. Services like Global Grid for Learning, or the TES Connect Resources which I have described in previous blogs give users, and third party service developers (typically teacher’s centres or other “new Publishers”) the ability to find quality content and re-use it, while collaborations like Safari and CourseSmart allow customization of existing textbook products. So what sort of collaborations would we expect to find in B2B or professional publishing which would provide the quarries from which solutions could be mined? They are few and far between, but, with real appreciation for the knowledge of Bastiaan Deblieck at TenForce in Belgium, I can tell you that they are coming.
Lets first of all consider Factual Inc (www.factual.com). Here are impeccable credentials (Gil Elbiaz, the founder, started Applied Semantics and worked at Google) and a VC-backed attempt to corner big datasets, apply linkage and develop APIs for individual applications. The target is the legion of mash-up developers and the technical departments of small and medium sized players. Here is what they say about their data:
“Our data includes comprehensive Global Places data, with over 60MM entities in 50 countries, as well as deep dives in verticals such as U.S. Restaurants and U.S. Healthcare Providers. We are continually improving and adding to our data; feel free to explore and sign up to get started!
Factual aggregates data from many sources including partners, user community, and the web, and applies a sophisticated machine-learning technology stack to:
- Extract both unstructured and structured data from millions of sources
- Clean, standardize, and canonicalize the data
- Merge, de-dupe, and map entities across multiple sources.
We encourage our partners to provide edits and contributions back to the data ecosystem as a form of currency to reduce the overall transaction costs via exchange.”
As mobile devices proliferate, this quarry is for the App trade, and here is, in the opinion of Forbes (19 April 2012), another Google in potential in the field of business intelligence (http://www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2012/04/19/how-factual-is-building-an-data-stack-for-business/2/).
But Los Angeles is not the only place where this thinking is maturing. Over in Iceland, now that the banking has gone, they are getting serious about data. DataMarket (http://datamarket.com), led by Hjalmar Gislason from a background of startups and developing new media for the telco in Iceland, offers a very competitive deal, also replete with API services and revenue sharing with re-users. Here is what they say about their data:
“DataMarket’s unique data portal – DataMarket.com – provides access to thousands of data sets holding hundreds of millions of facts and figures from a wide range of public and private data providers including the United Nations, the World Bank, Eurostat and the Economist Intelligence Unit. The portal allows all this data to be searched, visualized, compared and downloaded in a single place in a standard, unified manner.
DataMarket’s data publishing solutions allow data providers to easily publish their data on DataMarket.com and on their existing websites through embedded content and branded versions of DataMarket’s systems, enabling all the functionality of DataMarket.com on top of their own data collections.”
And finally, in Europe we seem to take a more public interest-type view of the issues. Anyway, a certain amount of impetus seems to have come from the Open Data Foundation, a not-for-profit which also has a connection and has helped to stimulate sites like OpenCharities, OpenSpending (how does your government spend your money?), and OpenlyLocal, designed to illuminate the dark corners of UK local and regional government. All of these sites have free data, available under a creative commons-style licence, but perhaps the most interesting, still in beta, is OpenCorporates. Claiming to have data on 42,165,863 companies (as of today) from 52 different jurisdictions is is owned by Chrinon Ltd, and run by Chris Taggart and Rob McKinnon, both of whom have long records in the Open data field. This will be another site where the API service (as well as a Google Refine service) will earn the value-add revenues (http://api.opencorporates.com/). Much of the data is in XML, and this could form a vital source for some user and publisher generated value add services. The site bears a recommendation from the EC Information Society Commissioner, Nelly Kroes, so we should also record that TenForce (http://www.tenforce.com/) themselves are leading players in the creation of the Commission’s major Open Data Portal, which will progressively turn all that “grey literature, the dandruff of bureaucracy, back into applicable information held as data.
We seem here to be at the start of a new movement, with a new range of intermediaries coming into existence to broker our content to third parties, and to enable us to get the licences and services we need to complete our own service developments. Of course, today we are describing start-ups: tomorrow we shall be wondering how we provided services and solutions without them.
Apr
22
Who Needs Editors?
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Its the language that gets you first. CEO in “brutal cull” of Johnston Press editors (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/apr/12/scotsman-editor-in-chief-johnston-press) is a great way to treat editors and subs as they have always treated the world – with a degree of lofty disdain. And I did not really catch on to the deep underlying question until I read Peter Preston’s commentary on this (Observer 22 April, 2012). I usually regard that great ex-Guardian editor as my sanity check, so it was a real shock to find that he had it completely wrong too. No commentary that I have seen has grasped the essence of what Ashley Highfield is doing by this mass firing of senior (and very expensive) editorial potentates at Johnston, or what it realistically recognizes about the nature of news online.
Let me first declare an initial prejudice. During a five year tenure as non-executive Chairman of Fish4, when it was owned by the regionals themselves, it was my observation that Editors were an embattled barrier to digital progress. This is a dangerous generalization, but invariably Editors wanted to run Web presence as if it were the newspaper, were reluctant in those days to allow their own digital media to scoop the paper, used their role as protectors and developers of the brand to diminish and hold down their digital presence, and all too often regarded digital as a subordinate medium which must reflect and emulate print, not create an entirely new approach to the way in which news and comment is digested and responded to by its ultimate users.
So I love Ashley for doing this. It would have been a shade better if he had used Cromwell’s words when dismissing the Rump Parliament – “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ be gone …” and, pointing to the green eyeshade rather than the mace – …”and take that bauble with you.” But one cannot have it all. At a stroke, some mighty expenses have returned to the bottom line and a space has been cleared where the CEO can set to work re-inventing the company. So why will he get closer to getting it right without editors than with them?
It is the nature of digital news services to replace the editor by the reader. The key considerations are concerned with collecting information and relating it to the interests and needs of a targetted audience. Writing stories needs sub-editorial skills, but a great deal of future story creation will be automated (I have already commented here on Narrative Science and Selerity). The critical marketing input will be the interfaces offered to users to customize and personalize the content flow. The key feature of that activity will be the mark-up, tagging and metadata added to the content in process of uploading. The editorial function will be ensuring its accessibility by everyone, whatever their angle of approach. The skill will come in making those interfaces appetising – a marketing role and not an editorial one if ever I saw one. And a role performed by the same marketing team who will manage the digital brand and explain what it is.
At this point I hear Mr Preston straining to get into the argument, for his article is all about the importance of the “leader” article, and the controversy which Polly Toynbee attracts with her views as a commentator in the Guardian. I have no doubt at all that Miss Toynbee, who is, or deserves to be, a national institution, will glide controversially forward through time until she reaches her own Diamond Jubilee. And online we shall have many of her ilk. Lots of bloggers, many outraged citizens, lots of local councillors defending the indefensible, and pressure and lobbying groups special pleading all over the place. And we shall have all of the social media and social tagging attributes that run alongside this. This flow of activity will be open to all and separate from the news flow – something which newspapers cannot seem to manage. In the process of story selection and arrangement throughout the paper, they editorially flavour the news, giving it a “meaning” to readers even though the reader is buying the proposition of fair and proper treatment.
Which brings me to the Editorial page itself. If the views available online are catholic and wide-ranging, and multi-sourced – then finding out what the newspaper or its online version thinks is irrelevant, and Mr Preston, in a circumspect way, seems to be approaching this view as well. I would go further and ask what place the Editorial column has had in the regional press in the past two decades. In truth it has been the most unread section of the paper and has no place at all online. Do I know what the view of the Bucks Free Press is on Mr Murdoch? No, and it would mean little if it did have a view. And I would find it out of place on my smartphone or tablet. Do you, like me, smile when you come across the comment column in the Waste and Pollution Management Journal and find them battling with the issues of the day? And, like me, you probably have that experience less often now, because the editorial pitch, the idea that the organ has to stand its brand value behind a clear profile of views and arguments, has almost gone, and with it went the need for the editors whose pride and joy the curation of those views once were.
Change has a price, but I could argue that Mr Murdoch, aided and abetted by his chums Mr Coulson and the Flame Haired Temptress, got there first by turning the Sun, the NoW and eventually the Old Thunderer itself into another way of expressing the powerful urges of a controlling proprietor. But he did not do this to the regional press or the B2B subscription magazine: they did it to themselves. Ashly Highfield has recognized that, and what he must do if he is to start over, and this clearing of the decks is a very appropriate starting point.
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