Stand still and watch the patterns, which by pure chance have been generated: Stains on the wall, or the ashes in a fireplace or the clouds in the sky, or the gravel on the beach, or other things. If you look at them carefully you might discover miraculous inventions. (Leonardo da Vinci)
I just ask myself why there are no initiatives to develop standardized data models for customer and organizational data - maybe I didn’t find it yet. But, wouldn’t it be such an improvement to not just talk about databases or data stores but about MDM stores. Don’t get me wrong, I do not think about building another CRM system with another “best data model“. I think about finding something in between providing applications and infrastructural engines. An commercial computinginfrastructure which implicitly contains all the basic data models such as “Customer”, “Organization“, “Product” and so on. This would lead to a boost in interoperability of systems, data quality, …
What do you think. Right now its just a thought while listening to a talk of Adrian Cole of jcloud….
Some weeks ago, I participated in a workshop about the Semantic Web at the FU Berlin, which was quite interesting. During that day I begun to ask myself how it could be possible to connect the systems used for Managing Business Master Data with the idea of the semantic web to build a corporate data web which solves all the integration and retrieval problems Data Warehouses, OLAP, ETL (…) EAI, SOA, and Idenity Resolution Systems shall solve.
The more I thought about that idea the more I was confident that this will be a huge trend within the next 5 to 10 years. With RDF, Tripple Stores and their brothers and sisters enterprises will be able to connect the data within silos with the data of other silos. They will be able to retrieve external data and connect it on the model level by just extending and or transforming the underlying moder graphs. This idea, as any other idea isn’t new, as this link of IBM Research shows, but its still the very beginning of a fundamental swith in thinking about and handling corporate data: Humans and Maschines will be able to walk the graphs of data, identify relations between unknown entities and generate hypotheses and assumptions about the real world facts by just allowing the data to be connected by meaning and relationships; its just like it is in the real world.
To complete this post, I wanna give you an impressive List of videos and podcasts about the semantic web. Happy Watching:
Hey folks. There is little time to write new posts at the moment. I have to prepare for a detailed IT System certification process R24, the company I work for, will go through next week. Anyway, just for notification: This Blog is now accessible via www.codovation.com.
At Web2.0 Expo Tim O’Reilly makes an interesting Key Note speech where he anticipates what Web3.0 will be all about. He compares the Web’s life cycle with the growing of a new born baby. As for the baby for Web1.0 there were loads of information that couldn’t be understood or connected. After a few month the oral phase makes the world interactively plumbable, i.e. the baby sticks things in it’s mouth and discovers that there are differences between materials and so on. This is where Web2.0 started. Today the Web is a child that can play - having fun discovering things, enjoy the information….
Web3.0 is the phase of going to school. The Web will really understand the matters of the world by adding sense throug the semantic web and related technologies. There is the mobile web and the social web…. It’s interesting where the Web will beam us in the near future. O’Reilly says: Web2.0 + The World = The World squared. We’ll see…
What is an opinion? Wikipedia says that “an opinion is a belief that may or may not be backed up with evidence, but which cannot be proved with that evidence. An opinion is neither right nor wrong. It is normally a subjective statement and may be the result of an emotion or an interpretation of facts; people may draw opposing opinions from the same facts.”
However. Understanding and analyzing opinions is fine for geeky twitter-blogosphere-analysts, marketing soldiers (who want to know how their products perform in the public) or, somehow more evil, for political governments to check the people’s opinions about public topics. The last approach could should be inverted: Analyze political publications, quotations in the media and parliament protocols to really understand the opinion and intentions of individual politicians or parties. This can be a tool for positive democratic development.
Opinion retrieval, extraction, categorization, and aggregation
Topic and sentiment alignment in opinion analysis
Applications of topic-sentiment analysis, e.g. corporate reputation measurement, political orientation categorization, customer preference study, public opinion study
Issues in using topic-sentiment analysis as a new research method for mass opinion estimation, such as reliability, validity, sample bias, etc.
Sentiment identification and filtering at various text granularity
Teams are just small “societies” of different people coming together to work: And that is A) achieving personal goals and B) achieving the team goals. This is not an easy task. There is one basic project a team should set up: Development of a strong team statement. As I explained in my article “The Jerk is gone” we did this to have a powerful guideline to rely on when we face conflicts. I want to share those rules. They’ll work in IT teams as well as in any other workplace group of people.
1. Team Culture
We respect each other.
We try to build personal relationships to each other to foster faith and open communication.
We value constructive critics and avoid to verbally attack each other.
We treat other colleagues and the management, and also clients and partners, as if they were team members.
We strive for celebration of personal and team success.
As team members we offer help to find solutions even if the context is outside our responsibility.
A solution or idea which evolved from the discussion of several team members is better then the opinion of just one single person.
2. Meetings
We have a daily meeting between 10 and 10.15 where every team member has to answer 4 questions: What did I do yesterday? Did I accomplish every task? What will I do today? Do I have any problems?
Additional meetings can be called to discuss critical aspects and architectural approaches in the team.
All team members are on time otherwise the person who is late must rework the contents of the meeting and proactively gain and share information. Exceptions: Illness, holidays, meetings with clients or other departments.
If someone calls a meetings that person is responsible to write the agenda and send it to participants one day in advance.
No person will receive responsibilities without his / her agreement.
For extraordinary meetings the team will appoint somebody to take the minutes.
Solutions are more important then time. We finish any constructive discussion or solution finding process even if the scheduled time frame is exceeded already.
3. Communication and decision making
At every time there is just ONE person speaking. Interruptions and side discussions are not allowed.
We focus on facts; emotions and personal bias are ignored as far as possible.
We respect the time of other team members and the predefined schedules.
We first seek to understand what others really mean and try to avoid to judge them by subjective positions.
We aim at distribute speaking time equally among the discussion participants.
We respect and value the opinion and help of experts especially when they are team members.
We accept the company’s hierarchy of decision making, given roles and responsibilities.
We want to become better.
If a team member identifies a problem he tries to deeply understand the problem and develops a few alternatives to solve it before presenting it to the team.
Those rules sound somewhat strict and some of them seem to be to unspecific. It is hard work to establish those rules within a team, especially when there are team members who find themselves to be restricted by them. But it can be a vital foundation of togetherness to find the best ruleset for the team and having the end in mind.
As Seth Godin, author of several books I would suggest (Tribes, The Dip, The Idea Virus), lately had written in his blog, there is one big danger a company has: A jerk “who knows every technical detail” and who is the only one “who can fix that big machine”. I once made an experience with such an “I am the sytem!” - jerk who almost completely destroyed the positive, innovative culture of a whole company just because he felt insecure and threatened as the team grew and new products needed new technical approaches which blew the scope of the existing system. The fear of loosing some of his control was greater then the fun and motivation every other team member felt when we started to leave the past to build a new future. He is gone! A year ago! But there is still a lot of everyday trouble in handling the system he once “owned”. The lack of documentation and system architecture, the narrowly confined parts other team members worked on in the past and the complexity of the overall system needs a lot of effort for extending the system or reengineering single parts to allow more integration. This effort costs time and money and often leads to frustration within the team. But nevertheless the team tried to make a virtue out of necissity: Every team member became an expert of a part of a system and is responsible for the evolution and also serves as the contact person if anybody has trouble or feature wishes regarding that special part. Additionaly we developed a team statement which contains several rules for open communication, sharing of knowledge and the team based ownership of code. Priciples that never woulod work that great if the team did’t have the experience of working with the jerk.
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