Regardless of where you stand on some of the questions of detail with respect to the Linked Data meme, it’s clear that significant enthusiasm is being marshalled behind both the concept and the opportunities that it promises.

Dion Hinchcliffe looks at some of the means by which enterprise data can be more visible on (and useful to) the Web in a ZDNet post this week. The ‘Semantic Web & Linked Data’ are included, and Dion writes;

“By far the most sophisticated and complex of the three approaches to open data presented here, [Linked Data is] highly suitable for certain applications that have rich data sets that need powerful means of processing and consumption. In particular, scientific, technical, medical, mapping, and certain government domains are highly suitable for this approach. It remains unclear if Linked Data will finally trigger the boom in the Semantic Web so use with care. However, definite consideration should be applied, given the potential of the approach to create data sets with extraordinarily high function. Businesses already managing their data with Semantic Web technologies will be the most likely candidates for adoption.”

We’re certainly seeing plenty of talk — and some interesting beginnings — in the Government domain, and organisations such as Thomson Reuters and the BBC are also taking compelling steps around the periphery of their core businesses.

Education offers another interesting set of opportunities, and Jason Ohler’s piece in Educause Quarterly (and a related podcast I recorded with him whilst I was still at Talis) illustrates one view of that opportunity.

Here in the UK, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is beginning to take note. They first funded a review of ‘Semantic Web Technologies‘ back in 2005, then revisited the topic with ‘Semantic Technologies in Learning and Teaching‘ (and a related workshop in the south of France later this year). I’ll be recording a podcast with the manager of that project, Thanassis Tiropanis, later this month.

JISC have also asked me to conduct a short piece of work to look specifically at the opportunity presented to the Higher Education community by Linked Data, and this work will run over the next few months. I’m certainly keen to learn about concrete examples, and to hear reasoned arguments for and against in order to submit comprehensive findings and recommendations. So if you have something to say, please do get in touch.

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There has been some coverage of the recent announcement by UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, that Sir Tim Berners-Lee will be helping the UK Government to make more of its data available for use and reuse. Charles Arthur at the Guardian was quick off the mark, and the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones followed through with an interesting telephone conversation, the full content of which is now available.

“So that government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people, I [Gordon Brown] have asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee who led the creation of the world wide web, to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data in the web over the coming month.”

The ‘coming month’? Singular??? That’s definitely what the transcript says…

Readers of this blog will be no strangers to Berners-Lee, the Linked Data movement, or the opportunities to apply some of its ideas to mainstream applications in the public and private sectors.

It’s good to see the mainstream attention. Now all we have to do is make the most of opportunities like this (and similar initiatives emerging from the Obama administration) to deliver on the promise.

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I am travelling to San Diego next week to speak about the importance of evolving Enterprise attitudes to data. Borrowing some nice turns of phrase from Sir Tim Berners-Lee‘s recent TED talk and JP Rangaswami‘s keynote to Powered by Cloud, amongst other things I’ll be suggesting that they ‘stop hugging their data’ and move ‘from data centre to data centric.’

The Linked Data initiative, which began in March of 2007 as a community project supported by W3C‘s Semantic Web Education & Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group (of which I was a member), has been a huge success. Described by Berners-Lee as ‘the Web done right,’ the notion of Linked Data rests upon the acceptance of four simple principles, yet opens the door to previously unanticipated re-use of data scattered across the Web.

The most rapid adoption has, unsurprisingly, been seen in terms of liberally licensed data already visible on the Web in some form. DBpedia, for example, is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and expose the individual facts for use across the Web. There have also been examples — as always justified by hacker mentality, ‘academic freedom,’ the imprimatur of ‘research,’ or the expectation that the perpetrators are ‘too small’ to be noticed — in which data have been appropriated to the cause without due care and attention to the rights of the data owner, but these isolated cases should certainly not detract from the value of the broader effort.

Public Interest data from organisations such as the BBC has also begun to appear in the ‘Linked Data Cloud‘ (click on individual data sets for more),  and the frequency and strength of reciprocal links between participating resources grows rapidly.

Enterprise data is effectively invisible to this Cloud, which brings me back to Andreas’ first post. In it, he asks;

“Since the [Linked Data] cloud is kind of the basic infrastructure which drives the whole process – this layer should remain a freely accessible one. But how could new business models be built on top of it (and constantly spend money on maintaining and extending the underlying infrastructure)?

Where could enterprises start using Linked Data? Only by retrieving data from the ‘outside’ and mash it up with the ‘inside’ – only one way?”

I can certainly see cases in which cautious corporates will be willing to consume without contributing in return, and there’s clearly work to do in demonstrating the value that they could gain from more balanced participation; participation that should never mean unwillingly ‘giving away’ competitive advantage or sensitive data.

We have an annoying tendency to view data in our databases as an indivisible mass, vigorously and unthinkingly applying the same (expensive) protections to an uninteresting and low-value factoid of underlying context as we do to the core attributes of our next big lead.

Andreas concludes this post by suggesting something very similar to JP Rangaswami’s notion of ‘data centric’;

“Information has no ‘place’ anymore, energy can’t be shipped around the world. We should rethink the meaning of a ‘data store’ and information will flow without flooding us. Linked Data might become the essence.”

Andreas’ second post followed after he’d listened to the most recent episode of the Semantic Web Gang, which I Chair. During the show, recorded last month, we discussed the latest release from Thomson Reuters‘ Open Calais activity, which sees it embrace Linked Data’s principles whilst continuing to run and grow a viable global business.

Andreas extrapolates from the conversation to suggest that a viable business model for the data-curating Enterprise might be to expose timely and accurate enrichments to the Linked Data ecosystem; enrichments that customers might pay a premium to access more quickly or in more convenient forms than are available for free. He also sees a market for application builders that optimise the flow of information, and both of these are certainly possible.

The Linked Data — the Data Web — opportunity is far greater, though, and too little attention is being devoted to it by Linked Data’s advocates as they concentrate their efforts on big public datasets of the sort Berners-Lee discussed in Long Beach last week. Big public data sets are important, and Berners-Lee is right to suggest that more Open and Linked access to the outputs of scholarship will help in our efforts to tackle many of the world’s ills. There’s as much value locked up inside our commercial enterprises too, though, and yet the rationale that will ultimately lead to us unlocking this is quite different.

It is that rationale which we need to get right, almost certainly without mentioning ‘RDF’, ‘Semantic Web,’ or even ‘Open.’

And if you’re in Southern California next week too, why not come and say ‘Hi’…?

‘Sunrise over San Diego‘ image © Alon Banks, 2007

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Driving home last night, listening to podcasts from the BBC, The Guardian and John Willis, I began to wonder about the ‘inevitability’ of Open Source in the Enterprise. I shared the initial idea on Twitter and had some useful responses overnight;

“Thought; Open & Closed Source coexist well in enterprise. BUT once you deploy Open Source tool can you ever get budget back for Closed ver?”

Conversation was clearly constrained by Twitter’s 140 character limit, and several respondents (incorrectly, but understandably) assumed that I was simply suggesting Open Source Software to be cheaper. It may be, but it doesn’t have to be. And that wasn’t the point.

For the avoidance of doubt, let me first expand upon that brief tweet in order to clarify what I meant. Then we can explore the issues in a little more depth and see whether the premise holds water.

Thankfully, we appear to have moved beyond the ridiculous polarisation of recent years that saw Open Source evangelists square off against Microsoft junkies and other proponents of closed source proprietary solutions. Naive notions that ‘free’ software would not cost anything to deploy and maintain have faded from the conversation, enabling growth in for-profit ventures to support deployment of all that ‘free’ software. In essence, we have reached (or are rapidly approaching?) a healthy balance; a point at which Open and Closed Source solutions co-exist within many Enterprises, with each solution selected on its merits rather than for the flavour if its religious dogma.

So far, so good; and it is against this background that my question should be considered.

The essence of my question, actually, isn’t one of Open versus Closed at all. The essence is about budgets and politics, and the ways in which organisations manage them. A traditional on-premise installation of proprietary software is generally held to be a Capital item in the budget. It’s a single – and sizeable – allocation of funds once every 3-7 years that results in ‘ownership’ of an asset. Even if an Open Source deployment actually ends up costing almost the same over the lifetime of the installation, the vast majority of those costs are in terms of people who are either employed or brought in as contractors from outside. Those people are recurring items of expenditure in the budget; smaller amounts, more often.

In choosing to procure a new piece of software, it probably doesn’t ‘matter’ whether it’s Open or Closed. Instead, the decision should (correctly) be made in terms of the ability of the chosen solution to meet a set of business requirements. Sometimes the best solution will be closed source, sometimes it will be open.

But once an enterprise has opted for an Open Source solution, various internal considerations take over;

• the budget holder (probably) gains a number of staff dedicated to supporting and customising the new solution, either on the payroll or as external consultants. The size of the budget holder’s empire grows visibly larger;
• the CFO sees the unpleasant pain of large Capital investments removed from their books, replaced by a more manageable steady trickle of recurring costs each and every year.

At that point, I’d argue, it must effectively be impossible to turn back from an Open Source solution to a future Closed Source replacement. The switching costs, perceived loss of ‘power’ and perceived hit to a bottom line accustomed to the steadiness of recurring costs all combine to dissuade numerous stakeholders from making the switch away from Open Source. Any proprietary competitor would have to be far better than both the incumbent and all the other Open Source alternatives to stand any chance at all, and in a mature software world where most applications are actually pretty comparable that seems unlikely in the extreme.

So, I’d propose, the decision to move to Open Source is actually made on a reasonably level playing field but the decision to move away from Open Source takes place in an environment so stacked against Closed Source that it’s unlikely to happen. If that is true, we will see a gradual movement of various Enterprise applications towards Open Source as purchasers select each application on its merits (inevitably, some proportion of those will be Open Source). However, we’ll see almost no movement the other way, leading to the eventual dominance of Open Source across the Enterprise. QED. Or maybe not?

And, for some reason, my background in Archaeology comes bubbling to the fore, offering the Roman Army’s fossa punica as an analogy; you can get in [to Open Source], but you can’t easily get out.

An email conversation this morning suggests that vendors of Closed Source solutions are aware of the threat, at least subconsciously. Rhys Wilkins, for example, pointed to the relatively low incentive for piecemeal replacement of software from companies such as Microsoft that tend to bundle ‘desirable’ and less desirable products together in packages. Their customers are prepared to continue paying for the desirable products (Exchange, say) and as they have to keep paying for the bundle whether they use all of its pieces or not there is a disincentive to gradually bring in alternative offerings.

Hosted subscription applications (SaaS) such as Salesforce only serve to confuse this picture still further. They’re not Open Source by any means, but in budgetary terms this new generation of subscription software is a recurring rather than Capital item of expenditure. Will we therefore (as Justin Leavesley suggested in an email) effectively see a race between those trying to push Open Source Software into the Enterprise and those trying to evangelise the benefits of entrusting previously internalised processes and applications to proprietary Clouds? And what happens when Open Source meets Open Data and the Cloud, and some of today’s proprietary silos begin to leak out onto the open Web?

But that, I think, is probably the subject of a subsequent post.

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