Copyright © 2006 Coolheads Consulting – Smarter Data, Smarter Publishing – EP2010 and...

Copyright © 2006 Coolheads Consulting

– Smarter Data, Smarter Publishing –

EP2010 and Europe’s “Smart Content” Vision

Steve Newcomb, Ph.D.

Government Printing Office

11 May 2006

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http://salzburgresearch.at/ep2010

These slides: http://www.coolheads.com/SRNPUBS/gpo060511/


Agenda

• EP2010, Smart Content1. The tension between IT and Content

2. Communications between IT disciplines

3. Investments to be made by content producers

4. Business models to develop and nurture

5. Smart Content: a common vision about disclosing the semantics of content and processes

6. The smartness of Smart Content

7. A cautionary word

8. Some research questions

9. An update from Salzburg

• The problem of authority over language & semantics: • Can’t live without consistency; can’t live with defined consistency

• GPO’s lack of semantic authority seen as opportunity


Advice to Europe regarding EP R&D

• What EP R&D (electronic publishing research and development) is most likely to benefit the European economy?

• Goals assumed:• Europe to emerge as the prototyper of the “knowledge economy”

• Economic and social benefits for Europe and the world


• IT (information technology) and knowledge industries need each other.

• Focus on enabling “collective intelligence”.• Facilitate discovery of reasons to make alliances, combine resources

• Maximize the value (exploitability) of all information assets

1. The tension between IT and Content


• The knowledge industry (read: “publishing industry”) needs to be actively involved in IT development.• Must include assessments of potential value of new opportunities in

bottom-line calculation, instead of only looking for cost-savings in existing lines of business.

• The conventional wisdom is always to avoid disruption. Instead, expect disruption, and seek to be its cause, rather than its victim.



• Consider productivity enhancement a function of the effective knowledge-richness of the tools in use• Note: Knowledge-richness would increase even without new IT…

• Knowledge businesses need to keep adding value• Interoperability of content and services can and must improve• Increasing complexity of all kinds of systems, not just IT systems• Consumer demand for increasing knowledge-richness will continue; it

makes life easier and more enjoyable• Other drivers: citizens’ rights; government transparency, IPR payback,

security concerns, ecological concerns.

• …but the available IT defines the investment opportunities in knowledge-richness. It’s generally better to make smarter, better-protected investments, right?




• Knowledge representation

• Computational linguistics

• CSCW (Computer supported collaborative work)

• AI (artificial intelligence)• Distributed artificial intelligence

• Hypertext systems development

• Database design for EP

• Multimedia, TV & other broadcast content development

• Game development & marketing

• VR (virtual reality

• Hardware, software, systems development & marketing


• Science (from the Latin verb “scire”, to know) is a collaborative human effort.

• Emphasize the funding of projects that have traditionally “fallen through the cracks” between funding targets.



3. Investments to be made by producers of knowledge-rich products & services

• Knowledge strategies

• Knowledge technologies

• Knowledge codifications

• Capacity to acquire and assimilate knowledge

• Capacity to share and trade knowledge

• Human resources with knowledge skills


4. Business opportunities & models to develop and nurture

• knowledge strategy consultants

• knowledge technology vendors, consultants implementers, integrators etc.,

• knowledge codifiers

• knowledge translators

• knowledge sharing/trading mediators/brokers, e.g., knowledge portals

• knowledge skills training organizations



• Both processes and content should be semantically self-describing.• Emphasize the importance of declaring everything about processes.

• Avoid having processes without content that declares their semantics. • Avoid leaving undeclared semantics hidden in processes.• Make access to the declared semantics of processes inherent in the

process interfaces.

• Emphasize the importance of declaring everything about content.• SGML and relational traditions have much to offer• Make access to the declared semantics of content inherent in the process

interfaces

• Lots of work to do here. Dialectic tension between the camps is productive. When one side “wins”, everybody loses.


• Create dialogue between the Process and Content Communities• Process-biased players:

• Hardware, software, bandwidth• Provision of generalized active services: store, manipulate, deliver

content, tasks generally not requiring human attention to the substance of the content

• Content-biased players:• Always particular kinds of content: healthcare, banking, scientific,

entertainment, government, etc.• Add value to content via tasks generally requiring human attention



• The Process and Content Communities need each other.• Processes are information in motion.

• The motion can be impeded by tollbooths. • Money can be collected.

• Content just sits there. • No tollbooths: no money. • But if content stopped being available, it would be sorely missed. It’s

what the toll payers care about.

• Most research projects should involve both kinds of players, and serve both agendas.



• Web services need to be self-describing, and in a way that enables the semantics of their descriptions to co-exist and interoperate, regardless of their diversity.• …and regardless of whether the things described are content or

processes.

• Incoming and outgoing messages need to describe themselves, too, and in the same terms that the web service uses.

• Self-description is a harder problem for content than for processes.• Processes already have formal descriptions, or they wouldn’t work.

• Content is fantastically diverse and usually open to interpretation. Content descriptions resist formalization.




• A banner for diverse research intended to accelerate the exploitation of ideas.• The "smartness" of content is its “ability to participate fully, at the

semantic level, in the ambient intelligence space”.

• The “smartness” of content is its “readiness to be semantically integrated with other smart content”

• Smart content is formally self-describing, and • Smart content is interpretable in such a way as to support semantic (i.e.,

subject-based) indexing, so that master indexes can be automatically and freely generated from diverse, arbitrary combinations of smart sources.


• Smartness applies to all semantics, including semantics that are:• Substantive with respect to some domain

• Renditional

• “Meta” (ontological, taxonomic, etc.)

• Instrumental

• Developmental

• Self-availing

• … etc.



7. A cautionary word

• Forget about making a Master Standard for Smart Content. There is no master, uppermost ontology for all human knowledge, or for all content.

• The real answer is to accommodate diversity, and to thrive in a turbulent semantic, linguistic, and technological environment.


8. Some specific research questions

• Under what circumstances is it necessary, or possible, or desirable, for Smart Content to know about all of the ontologies on which it depends?"



• What is the absolute minimum ontological commitment required to allow Smart Content to be formally self-describing, so as to be "ready to be semantically integrated with other smart content"? • One answer: The Topic Maps Reference Model



• What systematic metaphorical "compasses" can be used to navigate in the "subject spaces" that result from integrating diverse Smart Content, including Smart Content whose ontological diversity is entirely uncontrolled?• What is “Collective Intelligence” and how can we make it a science?

See the work of Pierre Lévy, Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence (University of Ottawa).



• How can the internet be used as an infrastructure that provides accountability for user actions without compromising the independence or privacy of computer owners?• Sacrifice the “end-to-end” doctrine in order to achieve a decentralized

solution to the accountability problem?

• How to avoid dangerous concentration of power:• How to avoid the branding, domination, and monopolistic abuse of basic

public services by private interests?• How to avoid the increasing imposition of centralized authority?


9. An update from Salzburg

• BIG EU projects in the “Sixth Framework Programme”

• EC is betting far more money on Semantic Web Services than on Smart Content.

• Just started an Austrian national testbed for “intelligent objects” in a GRID.

• Semantic wikis: smart content objects for exchanging content between semantic wikis. See http://ikewiki.salzburgresearch.at. (US researchers are licensing it.)


The problem of semantic authority

• Consider: How do people say things that nobody has said before?



• Communities are often commanded into existence.

• However, real communities emerge only from real circumstances. They never exist simply because somebody wants them to exist, no matter how good their intentions..

• By definition, communication occurs only within communities. Each community defines its language, and each language defines its community.

• Fortunately, everybody participates in multiple communities.



• You can’t step into the same river twice. Real communities are constantly changing.

• Informal communication – real communication – is always ahead of ontologists, formalizers, technology implementers, theorists, etc.

• And yet: “we gotta use words when we talk to each other”. Systems have to implement ontologies, because there’s nothing else they can implement.


The conventional wisdom

• There are only two ways to share computer-processable knowledge:• Everybody uses the same ontology.

• Everybody uses a limited number of ontologies, between which there are generally-agreed-upon mappings.


A wiser wisdom

• Let communities constantly emerge. They must.

• Let their ontologies constantly evolve. They need to.

• Create conditions favorable to the growth of a marketplace of evolving mappings between the evolving ontologies.

“Favorable conditions” include:

• Emergence of conventions for effective semantic disclosures.

• Marketplace demand for diverse mappings; incentives to go into the semantic mappings business.

• Government actually acting to create a better-informed, more economically productive public.

• General recognition of the truth of the maxim, “Adapt or die”.


GPO’s problem/opportunity

• Problem:• Power always wants to accumulate more power.

• A government by, for, and of the people must be transparent.

• Transparency is inimical to power consolidation/concentration.

• GPO’s mission is to be the US government’s organ of transparency.

• Small wonder that GPO gets so little cooperation! The less access the public has to integrated views of the workings of government, the less transparency there is.


GPO’s opportunity• Each agency is actually a community of communities, each

struggling to adapt to constant change, each constantly inventing its own language(s). If GPO had ontological authority over them, GPO would not thereby make the government more effective, responsive, and adaptable. The reverse would be far more likely!

• Opportunity: GPO can work to create conditions in which those with knowledge of multiple disparate government communities can profit from allowing the public to exploit their diverse cross-community perspectives. GPO can encourage the development of a marketplace of mappings across all manner of government information.


– Smarter Data, Smarter Publishing –

EP2010 and Europe’s “Smart Content” Vision

Steve Newcomb, Ph.D.

Government Printing Office

11 May 2006

Co

olh

eads C

on

sultin

g


These slides: http://www.coolheads.com/SRNPUBS/gpo060511/

Copyright © 2006 Coolheads Consulting – Smarter Data, Smarter Publishing – EP2010 and...

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