Apr

18

With Milton in Fiesole

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

He scarce had ceas’t when the superior Fiend
Was moving toward the shore; his ponderous shield
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At Ev’ning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands,
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.
. . .

So wrote the poet and so l learnt at school from Paradise Lost that the valley of the Arno was indeed a paradise, and that from the “top of Fesole” you could indeed seek out new lands, on earth as well as the moon. And, a week ago, with the annual Fiesole STM Retreat back at home in that town, courtesy of the wonderful hospitality and organization of Casalini Libri I responded eagerly to an invitation to apply my Optic Glass by way of summing up and closing the meeting.

But you cannot get away with a few genial generalities and then open the Prosecco with these people. This is a rare meeting – a mixed audience of librarians, publishers, scholars and technologists. How Katina Strauch, Becky Lenzini, Ward Shaw and Anthony Watkinson, representing the Charleston side of the agreement that keeps Fiesole’s agenda in shape, manage to do so speaks well of their acute ear for market discordance. The series has now run 18 years and you can see the results – and this year’s slides – at http:digital.caslini.it/retreat/. As an example, look at the pre-conference session on eBooks. Now, what is there left to say about eBooks? Ann Okerson described this session, which she chaired, as as the parable of the blind men and the elephant. And her speakers duly obliged by touching the beast and describing its very different characteristics. Sven Fund saw it as a business with flaws, needing to move the model away from the apparent print parent. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto saw it as an original format underdeveloped, Lauren Schoenthaler of Stanford exposed the legal protection weaknesses while Wolfgang Mayer of Vienna’s massive University was clearly intent on never buying a book again where digital was available. All fascinating, and a reminder that whenever we wish upon the new name of the old, we imprison it in false expectation and limit its development. We should offer a prize for the renaming of the Object formerly known as eBook – especially when they become fully interactive with each other and, as Marvin Minsky once foretold, the books on our shelves really do talk to each
other.

The conference was blessed with two main speakers – Roly Keating of the British Library and Mike Keller of Stanford. Roly has now fully conquered the brief and the plan has wonderful dynamics and is shaping up brilliantly as a sector of the Kings Cross Knowledge Quarter. But how I wish we did not fall into PR-speak in trying to make libraries seem relevant. “Living Knowledge” and “living Science” – to distinguish them from the dead, hidden-in-print versions? Or the work of living as distinct from dead scholars? Or do you need to be alive to visit the British Library? Like Milton’s apparitions, I carried these thoughts into three great sessions on discovery and discoverability. On reputation management, and On new business models. This is one of the few audiences I know which can have a lively discussion on standards, so Todd Carpenter of NISO faced lively questions, while Graham Stone made a strong case for resource discovery tools.

Reputation management really ignites audiences at STM conferences these days. I sense a sub-text, never frankly stated, in which some in the audience are saying to themselves “Is this all it is about – what happened to scholarship?” While others are murmuring “I knew this was the endgame – why not cut to the chase and just create a new index of Scholarly Worth?”. Charlie Rapple of KUDOS and Sara Rouhi of Altmetrics laid out the new territory while Andrea Bonaccorsi of ANVUR, the Italian Research Evaluation Agency, created the framework of need very effectively and charmingly. I have a feeling that we all now recognize the terrain, but I had promised the conference that in my Optic Glass I would fit a new lens suitable to our times. I suggest that, from Snowden to the Panama Papers, the business model we should be applying is the leak. We would get a far shrewder evaluation of scholarly reputation if all the data was known but all the judgements were secret. Then someone could leak the rankings of institutions and individuals onto a website in Kazahkstan, which would demand we all paid attention and made positive contributions to ensuring that ratings were reasonable.

And new business models took us satisfyingly all over the map. Stephen Rhind Tutt deserves a prize for getting data collections into our focus. How we treat and make data available and searchable should be a subject for the 18th agenda. France’s Pinter rightly celebrated the gathering strength of Knowledge Unlatched and Toby Green of OECD described his freemium model in detail – a gloriously left field business model for a very conservative organization, but one which succeeds excellently in adding value and growing revenues for an institution which is bound to release its data free of charge, with excellent topicality we ended with Daniel Schiff describing Thieme’s successful experience of Open Access.

No one on the hill of Fiesole could have used an optic glass without seeing new lands. The new map emerging is no longer journal-centric, and the meaning of Collections is shifting. How we measure the worth of a far more productive scholarly community, and how we effectively map their communications, remains on the dark side of the moon, though community suggests some answers and yet more questions. But there cannot be a better place or a wiser crowd amongst whom to consider the issues.

Jan

24

Think Block Chain, not Bitcoin

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, privacy, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Here is a really great moment to celebrate. A readable UK government report with a real impact on markets (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/492972/gs-16-1-distributed-ledger-technology.pdf). It tells us what Honduras and Estonia are doing that we are yet to fully consider. Yet it fingers a new area of creativity that some authorities liken to the dotcom boom – a new configuration that we relaunch B2B inventiveness in the network around commercial workflows in a way that will take us much further than conventional network technologies. So far it has been the instrument of the crypto currency businesses, but this is far more than that, and the U.K. Office of Science paper, prepared by a team reporting to the Government Science Advisor, Sir Mark “Open Access” Walport, deserves the very widest attention, especially in Shoreditch, Tech City and other parts. There is enough here to launch a whole raft of B2B start-ups.

So let’s start a bit closer to the beginning. When Bitcoin was launched in 2008 the thought was that if a shared, encrypted database could be installed and mirrored across the network, then transactions updated to each ledger and validated would form a useful way of circumventing the use of cash by creating a means for secure asset transfer. Data thus added in each instance of the transaction thus created a data “block”, and as transactions grew more numerous and blocks thus chained together more widespread it became even safer – intervention and alteration of data would have to take place on thousands of machines at the same instant, even if the encryption was circumvented. These Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) have seemed like the white hope of interference-free financial transactions, but despite the fame of Bitcoin have been very hard to move into popular focus.

But this too is a characteristic of the Internet age. Technologies arrive, get used on a narrow front, get half-forgotten, and then come sweeping back in to answer questions that were never even thought about when they were invented. This appears to be the fate of DLT. When the Hondurans wanted a new land title system that was not open to third part falsification and could be updated by parties to a land deal or ownership change, then this was obvious. When the Estonians sought a way of leveraging one of their areas of expertise – the use of PKI (public key) encryption technologies – the DLT provided the answers. Amongst the case studies in the report is one after my own heart – an angel investor service network called Funderbeam which uses DLT to allow investors to turn their investments into a trade able currency and move money from investment to investment, preserving investor liquidity while avoiding the lock-in normally experienced by start-up investors.

So DLT has real benefits where asset classes are being exchanged. But we have not been in the data game for the last 30 years without knowing that data itself is an asset. This week, during an eye examination and an annual routine Heart examination, I found myself wishing for DLT in healthcare. What if my records were automatically updated, and any of my health advisors, authorised by me, could see every alteration in drugs or treatment decided by other practitioners treating me? And if I sell my house or trade in my car, can the whole intermediary network please be informed at the same time, including the bank, the insurer, the new owners and the registrars in government who need to know these things?

In the early days of the Web we spoke earnestly about Disinter mediation. Then many of us spoke equally confidently about re-intermediation, as we saw how markets moved fresh digital agents into place in digital marketplaces. It may be harder for the middleman to reinvent himself in the brave new world of DLT technology, however, and taking jobs and increasing productivity will become the focus of inventiveness in this area. Before the last election the UK government made a half-hearted attempt to privatise its own Land Registry. That organisation enters records by hand as well as digitally and employs 5000 people in the business of admits ration and verification. Now imagine it Honduran-style: land transfers are entered by sellers and verified by buyers and their lenders, insurers and other concerned parties, and archived in a block chain where all transactions are archived and held. While we may need an office of Land Transfer Governance we may never again need the current structures. Anyone reading this report in the Shareholder Executive should sell government agencies fast.

All this sounds like redress for the problems of Big Government. But there are other aspects that could affect every business in the land. If we look at business relationships as an asset, then the report suggests that Smart Contracts are likely to become the way in which we action and police business deals:

“Smart contracts are being considered for a wide variety of uses, particularly for regulatory compliance, product traceability and service management, and also to defeat counterfeit products and fraud in the following sectors:
• Food
• Financial Services
• Energy
• Pharmaceuticals
• Health
• Aerospace
• Aviation
• Telecommunications
• IT and communications
• Transport
• Utilities
• Agriculture
• Oil and gas”

So if we are content to sit back and relax, thinking that the technology behind Bitcoin is a “sometime, maybe” phenomenon. This technology is as potentially disruptive as the Web was once perceived to be, it will spark a host of start-ups and within a year every one of us will be thinking about how it applies to what we do – and how we live. And this technology centres on the SmartPhone! Happy New Year!

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