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.
Feb
16
Points of Interest on the Road to Innovation
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Like rhubarb, innovation can be forced. And both are often best served mixed with other elements, from mash-up to crumble. But there, worried reader, this rather superficial comparison ends. The results of forcing innovation are often disastrous, would-be dotcom tycoons forget about market readiness, and that valuable old maxim “nothing succeeds on the Internet until it has failed on the Internet” is set aside. Think of the UK’s Independent newspaper. If management had not innovated around the “I” versioning they would have had nothing to sell this week. Ten years after launch the print paper has come to an end, leaving a website and the sale of the I to Johnston Press, a company which, ten years ago, turned over 600 million pounds from some of the most valuable regional newspaper franchises in Britain to create margins of 130 million pounds. Today its revenues stand where it’s margins did then. It reminds us that innovation in the face of change is often not a choice – more a way of survival.
Which makes it even more odd that the two most innovative cultures experienced in my working life – AI and GIS – have taken so very long to get to market. They have had to do name changes and relaunches as entrepreneurs despaired of bringing these technologies to life in user-appealing fashion. So I well recall the advice of an experienced property man when I said that I was doing some work for an emerging property database service. “Maps and data?”, he said, “people just want to buy and sell – and cheat – when it comes to property”. But I was in thrall to the galvanic energy and enthusiasm of Christopher Roper at the time, and believed differently. The company he sold to DMGT, Landmark Information Group, has gone from strength to strength, added great network acquisitions which bring together the needs of surveyors, conveyance solicitors, mortgage parties and eventually buyers and sellers into the same workflow. From providing a non-mandatory environmental check Landmark has become an essential part of buying and selling property. And all of this was sparked by an agreement with the UK’s Ordnance Survey mapping agency to allow re-use of historical survey data going back to the mid – nineteenth century.
But it was the other deal that Christopher Roper did at this time which has left me wondering all these years. He created a joint venture company between Ordnance Survey and Landmark called Point X. The object here was to gather Point of Interest data. The conventional wisdom then was that you would need this data to customized and innovate. Do you need to know the nearest pub? Or vet surgery? Or are your salesmen calling on newsagents? Or sweet shops? We would gather up the data and then offer it like toppings on ice cream. In the age of mash-up this seemed a very obvious strategy. Unsurprisingly to watchers of the glacial progress of change, it has taken a decade for this to come about. You can imagine my joy therefore when I saw the Landmark Solutions Point of Interest Web Portal launched last month. All of that delicious information combined with the Ordnance Survey Open Source mapping environment. If, as some think, web service innovation is a cookbook which begins “first take a map, and then add data” then a new age has begun.
But many things have happened to GIS in the meanwhile. In local and national government, in logistics and distribution, in planning, in agribusiness and in very many other walks of life we are totally GIS dependent. The icy grasp of systems providers like ESRI means that many of these are very idiosyncratic, so achieving compatibility with an installed base, backwards compatibility, is no easier than it was in the early days of Microsoft and Apple. While GIS clearly failed as a religion, it has succeeded as millions of real solutions. So what do you have to do to cope with that? Well, make a customisable solution for a start. Point X has over 4 million points of interest, but they come in 9 groups, with 52 data categories and some 620 different classifications. Go to the portal and you can mix and match, and then select what you need to do to align your custom creation to the GIS system you are using. And the business mode? This is, as it has to be, a Pay As You Go model! (http://www.landmark.co.uk/news-archive/landmark-solutions-launches-points-interest-demand-web-portal)
In a sense, this now seems obvious to the user-centric world in which we live. Yet service developers always think first about prescribing service values and limiting options, so when they let users do what they want to do it seems like a big deal. Here is Reed’s ICIS chemicals database announcing its new Data Express service a a week ago: “Data updates are highlighted automatically and price history updates are sorted in the same column, making it easy to benchmark prices, identify opportunities, and manage risks. This facilitates smoother decision-making, and increased competitiveness for ICIS customers.” This announcement effectively launches an API and an Excel plug-in! (www.icis.com/data express)
So we are in a familiar place in the industry on the road to innovation. We cannot believe what customers tell us about how they want to use information and we hoard information we cannot believe they want. What happened to making service values for the few and then re-iterating for the many? Or even watching how the customer works and makes decisions – and then helping?
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