ExclusivesSemantic Tools Helps Grassroots.org Grow
Jennifer Zaino It's a mission that's going to take a hefty helping of volunteers eager to contribute their skills to groups ranging from the Youth Sports Alliance of Grand Rapids Michigan to The Foundation for the Arts in Vale to the SnoGlobe Equality Alliance in Washington State. Grassroots.org, a 501C3 organization, provides its members with more than a dozen free services, such as web hosting or VoIP solutions, often with the help of businesses in these industries, and also helps manage their services projects. Two of the services it offers -- web design and graphic design -- are heavily volunteer-driven. To find volunteers with such expertise, Grassroots.org relies on a number of methods, from word-of-mouth to Idealist.org to Craigslist -- and most it recently turned to semantic web-based matchmaking service Bintro. The organization has been around since 2001, but it's grown significantly in the last year from serving 680 non-profits to more than 2,000, says Shane Hankins, the executive director for Grassroots.org. "We're adding 35 new organizations a week, and with that we need to recruit a lot of volunteers," he says. He credits the uptick in non-profits' membership to having a better marketing plan and also to the economy. "With the economic issues facing everyone, non-profits are seeking better and cheaper solutions, so we're a fit there," he says. "Also I think there's a general trend where more people are interested in volunteering, which benefits us on the supply side. And tools like Bintro help facilitate that." As a non-profit organization, Grassroots.org has some of the same challenges around most effectively utilizing its resources as do the clients it serves. Bintro helps there, because someone doesn't have to constantly go onto the site and repost the same listing in order for its volunteer opportunities to remain at the top of the heap, which is the traditional way most placement sites work. "Once you post it it's an ongoing process," Hankins says. "We still get referrals from some things we posted months ago, which is wonderful." Follow the Money with Redesigned Recovery.gov
Jennifer Zaino One thing that Diane Mueller, vice chair of the XBRL International Steering Committee and VP, XBRL Development, at JustSystems, likes is that the effort supports a number of industry standards, which helps users avoid repeating mapping exercises every time they download data. The next step is creating ontologies or maps that make it easier to make connections across different types of data sets -- making it a more seamless process, for example, to tie geospatial information related to an agency such as the Department of the Interior to other agency data about funding that is being applied to saving animals in western Utah.
Such are the challenges around really opening up government data for use by the citizenry. The ability to make government data easily accessible is just the first step in creating real accountability -- it's also key to make sure that users are able to access and interpret that data accurately. Some of the U.S. government projects fall short there, with Mueller pointing to the recent news that the White House is disclosing visitor access records in the .CSV spreadsheet format. "This is a good example of how not to post your data," she says. After you pull that .CSV file into Excel to see who visited whom on what day, maybe you want to make some synaptic semantic connections between that visitor and the company he works for, for instance, so you trot over to the SEC site and grab the corporate filing information in XBRL. And then maybe you want to find recent news around that executive and his company, and that requires leveraging news feeds conforming to the NewsML format. Then you start cutting and pasting all these data finds together-- a manual and so in and of itself an error-prone process -- for a mash-up and you lose the metadata associated with it. Now its validity can't be verified by others with whom you'd like to share the information, because they can't directly link back to the source for an authenticity check. "The thing that always is missing in most of these conversations about publicly accessible information is harmonization," she says. "The very first thing you have to have is the metadata." WolframAlpha, Twine Look To What's Next
Jennifer Zaino During a webinar conducted by Stephen Wolfram of WolframAlpha, he piqued the audience's interest in the technology's upcoming APIs, which were also a subject during his last webinar update. At that time, in June, he had expected a preliminary version of the developers' API to be available soon. Wolfram said on this webinar that within a few weeks the company expects to deliver a core API that will provide a data exposure layer that gives access to every level of detail around the way Wolfram Alpha data is presented and the way lumps of data are exposed to it. Another level of API is designed to help users build widgets they can install on their web site that can interact with WolframAlpha. Web sites aren't the only places such widgets can be deployed -- they may find homes on mobile devices or within applications themselves. CAD, spreadsheet and other such software can take advantage of this to pull computable knowledge right back into their results, he expects. Wolfram Research's own Mathematica technical and scientific software, in its next version, should support the ability to send queries right to WolframAlpha. The final result can be turning freeform input into precise mathematical input that can be combined with other input to build precise and complex programs, he says. Wolfram Alpha is also in the process of conducting a big experiment that leverages the technology's underlying linguistic processing to try to understand multi-lingual queries, even if those queries are somewhat broken (for instance, written partially in English and partially in another language). The experiment involves 30 languages and involves trying to turn such queries into something cleaner that can be processed in Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram hopes that technology will roll out in a few weeks. Synthesizing output in different languages remains more of a challenge. Wolfram Alpha has also started a group to work with enterprises on taking companies' internal data and mashing it up with Wolfram Alpha's knowledge; it's developing a pipeline for such data curation. The company can use Wolfram Alpha itself to handle some of the technology challenges of the data curation process (such as understanding data within a database that relates to regions and currency), but the harder part is understanding what has to be computed from that data to make it useful, how to set up linguistics to access different aspects of that data, and what is important to present from that data. He called this work a "very active effort" and expects that there will soon be some case studies of organizations that are doing this to some interesting ends. Also, users may want to be on the lookout for how Wolfram Alpha may be leveraging search engines as a distribution channel. "Search is an interesting distribution channel for computable knowledge," he says, and Wolfram Alpha is certainly interested in getting its technology into the hands of as many people as possible. "That means distribution through as many channels as possible," and search is a complementary one to Wolfram Alpha's own mission, he believes. Semantics Have Some Magic In Gartner's Quadrant
Jennifer Zaino You won't find the word "semantic" in the report, but you will find plenty of vendors in the various quadrants that are incorporating semantic web principles or technology in their offerings for enterprise users. Google (positioned in the Challengers quadrant) and Microsoft (in the Leaders section), the report notes, essentially dominate the market for the simplest installations, for project costs weighing in at less than $75,000 for the first couple of years. Microsoft acquired Powerset last year, following its previous purchase of Fast Seach & Transfer, to forward its enterprise search vision with semantic search capabilities. As the information-access-market sees increasing consolidation, it's companies including Microsoft -- along with IBM and Oracle and with Google coming on stronger -- that tend to be viewed as the default choice in organizations where search is increasingly perceived as infrastructure. That is "forcing independent vendors to specialize in particular business problems, most of which cross multiple verticals," Gartner says. It continues: "While the need for search remains strong, it is not likely to see substantial growth again in generalist products, sold separately from other applications. The time and effort devoted by many major vendors to addressing search across their product lines means enterprises will continue to acquire and incorporate search into their projects, but not that they will invest in stand-alone search products from midsize vendors. The market will shift to very large vendors selling platforms as aspects of their product lines, and significantly smaller vendors selling applications founded in search that will not be otherwise available. " That may include some of the vendors with semantics in their portfolio. The Niche Players quadrant, which is defined in part by vendors whose technologies are right for a particular set of needs, special capabilities, and vertical-market or application knowledge, includes semantic players Expert System and Sinequa. The report cites Expert System as being extremely good at analyzing and searching external data sets for competitive and market intelligence and for being highly extensible and allowing for significant customization. "Enterprises with the resources to devote the necessary time and effort to Expert System customization are extremely pleased with its depth and power," Gartner says, while noting the solution targets smaller scale installations and the vendor doesn't invest significantly in the ability to exploit users' historical behavior or explicit status in an organization as a means of determining the relevancy of results. Video Tour: How Xignite Financial Data Works with Wolfram Alpha
Ron Miller In the video below, Ron provides a brief overview of the partnership and provides some real-world examples illustrating how Wolfram Alpha uses Xignite data to deliver real-time answers to complex financial questions.
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"That's when we get into conversations like XBRL for NIEM (National Information Exchange Model), one of the fine federal standards for sharing information between federal agencies," Mueller says. "You have to create those mappings between the standards as well. That's the next level to go on."
