Krista Thomas was responsible for marketing at Thomson Reuters‘ semantic technology success story, Open Calais, and is now VP Marketing at Los Angeles startup Ad.ly.

Scott Brinker is President & CTO at ion interactive, and writes the ChiefMarTec blog.

During the conversation, regulars and guests discuss the way in which ‘semantic technology’ solutions are being successfully marketed to potential beneficiaries.

Have a listen, and learn that pitches to non-semantic technology enthusiasts beginning “We’ll convert all your data to RDF, leverage the Semantic Web, and construct an OWL-based ontology” are probably doomed to failure.

In my latest podcast I talk with Ric Telford, Vice President for Cloud Services at IBM.

I spoke with Kristof Kloeckner – the company’s CTO and VP Cloud Computing Platforms – last year, and in my conversation with Ric we get updates on IBM’s journey into the Cloud. He touches on some of the work involved in bringing traditional enterprise customers along for the ride.

Perhaps orthogonal to the industry’s current angst around public, private and hybrid Clouds, Telford sees a valid and valuable role for ‘industry clouds,’ optimised to handle the particular workloads of a given vertical. The first of these rolled out today to the collaborative healthcare market, and we discuss some of the potential of this approach. If it can work in the highly regulated health sector, can the same ideas be deployed more easily – and cheaply – to other verticals?

This podcast was recorded on Thursday 5 August, 2010.

During our conversation, we referred to the following resources;

• Amazon Web Services
• Cast Iron
• Cognos
• IBM Cloud Computing
• IBM Security Framework
• Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
• Lotus Live
• Microsoft Windows Azure (and my podcast with Amitabh Srivastava)
• Open Cloud Manifesto (and my podcast with Reuven Cohen)
• Open Stack
• Open Virtualization Format (OVF)
• Rackspace (and my podcast with Lew Moorman)
• Salesforce.com (and my podcast with Adam Gross)
• Sharp Community Medical Group
• Smarter Planet
• Thomas J. Watson

Related articles by Zemanta

• IBM to spend $100 million on healthcare research (zdnet.com)
• A Day With the Bloggers at IBM: Notes – Part 1 (readwriteweb.com)
• A Day With the Bloggers at IBM: Notes – Part 2 (readwriteweb.com)
• IBM, Aetna Intro Cloud Healthcare Decision Support (informationweek.com)
• IBM puts its health IT solution in the cloud (zdnet.com)

Formed as a partnership between Microsoft and Accenture, Avanade focuses upon delivering IT solutions based upon Microsoft’s suite of technologies and products, including Cloud offerings such as Azure and the company’s Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS).

I discussed Azure in a podcast with Microsoft’s Amitabh Srivastava last year, and in this latest conversation Scott and Bob share some of the experiences Avanade has gained in rolling out over 1.3 million BPOS seats to a wide range of enterprise clients.

This podcast was recorded on Wednesday 28 July, 2010.

During our conversation, we referred to the following resources;

• Accenture
• Amazon
• App Fabric
• Avanade
• Avanade Cloud Computing
• Azure
• BPOS
• Hotmail
• Java
• Lotus Notes
• Microsoft
• Microsoft Live@Edu
• PHP
• Werner Vogels

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• Microsoft shares (officially) its future BPOS plans (zdnet.com)
• Capgemini now championing Microsoft BPOS over Google Apps (zdnet.com)
• Microsoft launches BPOS Syndication Partner programme (channelweb.co.uk)
• Microsoft gives partners free cloud tools (infoworld.com)
• Is Sharepoint 2010 Cloud Ready? (readwriteweb.com)

This podcast was recorded on Friday 16 July, 2010.

I spoke with John Sheridan of the Government’s Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) back in July of 2009, when this programme was just taking shape. More recently, Talis‘ Richard Wallis recorded a podcast with Richard as data.gov.uk formally launched earlier this year, and his colleague Zach Beauvais followed up with a videocast to explore some uses for the data.

During our conversation, we referred to the following resources;

• ASBOrometer
• Tim Berners-Lee (and my podcast with him)
• Combined Online INformation System (COINS)
• Creative Commons
• Crown Copyright
• data.gov.uk Applications Gallery
• Government Open Data Licence
• The Guardian‘s COINS interface
• IDeA
• JSON
• Linked Data
• Local Government Association (LGA)
• Local Data Panel
• Francis Maude
• mySociety
• National Archives
• Office of National Statistics
• Open Data Commons
• The Open Knowledge Foundation‘s COINS interface
• Ordnance Survey
• OS Open Data
• Public Data Principles (Draft)
• REST
• Rufus Pollock
• Nigel Shadbolt (and my podcast with him)
• SOCITM
• SPARQL
• Jeni Tennison’s recent data.gov.uk blog post
• Tom Steinberg (and my podcast with him)
• Transparency Board
• Treasury
• Where Does My Money Go?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tim Berners-Lee on Data.gov.uk, open linked data and open standards (radar.oreilly.com)
• Data.gov.uk troupe gets shirty about standards (go.theregister.com)
• Gov 2.0 Down Under: Australia and open government (radar.oreilly.com)
• Some Clarity on Transparency (blogs.talis.com)
• UK Gov’t Spending Details Now Online (news.slashdot.org)
• Maude calls for public choice on open data (go.theregister.com)
• The Government has unlocked the open data safe – now we must open it (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)
• Unlocking innovation | data.gov.uk (data.gov.uk)

Thank you to everyone who took the time to share a wide range of views in response to yesterday’s post in its comments, on Twitter, and out on your own blogs. Although reduced to silence throughout the day because of other commitments, I have been reading and learning from all of you. And, despite the sometimes intemperate language of my original post, your contributions have all been thoughtful, measured, and informative.

Several comments raised the duality of RDF; RDF the model and RDF the format (which can itself be expressed in more forms than the RDF/XML of which most might think). Kingsley’s right, of course, when he asks;

“Is RDF a Data Model or a Format re this discussion. The answer to this question is of utmost importance re coherence.”

Honestly, I’m not sure that I know which it was meant to be… but I can fairly safely suggest that the concerns I expressed become increasingly pronounced as we move from ‘model’ toward ‘format.’ I’m still worried about insisting upon the RDF model in anything other than its loosest sense, but can at least see a glimmer of justification for doing so… whereas insisting upon the format seems several steps too far.

I also liked the simplicity with which Alan Dix and Elliot Smith responded to Rob Styles’ ‘Paul Miller is right… and so is Ian Davis,’ writing;

“Surely the critical issue is whether the semantics are available, not whether they are in RDF. If a csv file is published AND suitable semantics are available, then you know which columns are URIs or whatever else.”

and

“if you publish data on the web and a suitable semantics for interpreting that data and linking it to other data, then why isn’t it Linked Data? It just so happens that RDF has a clear(er) semantics describing the interpretation of its data elements (URIs in particular) than a spreadsheet does; it doesn’t mean you couldn’t apply similar semantics to a spreadsheet if you were so inclined.”

Indeed.

Although I actually agree with every single word, Justin Leavesley‘s comment possibly gets close to the nub of things;

“Yes the same mistake was made with the rise of the web.

Once you had URIs and HTTP you already had plain text which is a perfectly good way to encode content. By adopting the STANDARD convention of HTML, all sort of existing text based formats with their various mark ups were locked out. That locked out a lot of content that already existed and required anyone who wanted to play to convert existing content into a html format.

Of course it did have the small side effect that to consume web content you only needed a browser that understood one convention i.e. html.

The same is true of RDF. XML is the equivalent of ascii in this regard. Sure it is a good way to write down data, but it isn’t sufficient to actually use that data unless you understand the various special conventions.

RDF gives you a standard way to understand TYPES of data that you have never seen before. You simply cannot do that with XML alone. You must build a convention at a different level from syntax, which can be expressed as XML. We have, its called RDF!

Ask yourself the question. Why hasn’t the linking of data taken off before? If there is all this data out there, why didn’t it just get linked together?

Because linking between different conventions isn’t very useful.

The problem has never been the linking of data, that is easy as soon as you have URIs. It is meaningfully linking different data so that you have something useful not just a mess. This itself then pulls in more data. Just as we have seen with the growth of the web and just as we are now seeing with the growth of ‘linked data’”

There are surely far more failed attempts to prematurely constrain in the name of ‘standardisation’ than successful ones. If we’re trying to grow and nurture a market (in more senses than just the commercial,) shouldn’t we be more permissive? I’d far rather be engaged in ‘selling’ (to maintain the market metaphor) the benefits of RDF than apologising for its imposition, wouldn’t you?

RDF (definitely the syntax, possibly the model) is a point in time solution to a set of problems that we collectively consider worthy of resolution. The problems will still be there — and hopefully still worthy of resolution — long after the next technical solution has come along.

A lot of the comments, too, talk about ‘converting’ to RDF. Toby, for example, writes;

“Linked data certainly needs to be *linked*, and after that, it’s pretty important to describe the relationship that each link between resources represents (i.e. “this is a link to a parent resource”, “this is link to a resource that represents a place nearby to this place”).

Once you have that, the idea of a triple emerges almost by itself, and what you have is suddenly starting to look very much like RDF. If your format is not RDF, then it’s likely to be convertable to RDF fairly trivially.”

Yes… but if, for the sake of argument, I happen to have ‘the idea of a triple’ in some other form, I may not want or need to convert. RDF is a solution, not the end-goal.

Alan Morrison says something similar, again assuming (?) RDF to be something more than it necessarily is;

“The RDF family provides a metadata umbrella that non-RDF can fit under. It’s possible to avoid religious arguments by allowing alternatives as long as they can be converted to fit under the umbrella.”

Finally, for now, Bruce D’Arcus writes,

“The microdata in HTML5 discussions suggests to me that the first thing that goes out the window when you accept RDF as optional (or more typically, a more pejorative unneeded overkill) is ironically the feature most important to both RDF and linked data: the URI (microdata allows one to use string or reverse DNS identifiers instead for property names and types).”

I’d like to learn more about that, and understand the forces at play there…

And after all the comment and discussion… I’m still convinced that RDF’s model and format are important and useful, and still convinced that they should not be mandatory for Linked Data. Mandatory for ‘Linked Data in RDF,’ yes. Mandatory for ‘Linked Data,’ no.

I will be taking a bigger step in 2009, when I move from full time employment with Talis to see what else I am capable of as an independent consultant.

A lot has happened since 2005. I joined a provider of software to UK libraries that had aspirations to be something bigger, and played my part in the team that made sure we got there. Operating entirely on money the company earned through its existing product lines, with no debt and no external investors, we set about refreshing those existing products and challenging many of the sector’s long-held presumptions about engagement, participation, openness, innovation, and control. From Library 2.0 to Open Data, we were visible on a global stage, we were active, and with white papers, public speaking, blogging, podcasting, facilitation, cajoling, challenging and networking Talis played a significant part in shaping perceptions that are now widely viewed as norms.

The company had bigger fish to fry, though, having embarked upon an ambitious development programme to deliver a technology Platform upon which the next generation of Semantic Web applications could be built. Talis set about assembling the talent required to build that Platform, and I set about building brand recognition in markets and territories where Talis was previously unknown.

In November last year, Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb listed Talis as one of 10 Semantic Apps to Watch;

“Talis is a 40-year old UK software company which has created a semantic web application platform. They are a bit different from the other 9 companies profiled here, as Talis has released a platform and not a single product. The Talis platform is kind of a mix between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web, in that it enables developers to create apps that allow for sharing, remixing and re-using data. Talis believes that Open Data is a crucial component of the Web, yet there is also a need to license data in order to ensure its openness. Talis has developed its own content license, called the Talis Community License, and recently they funded some legal work around the Open Data Commons License.

According to Dr Paul Miller, Technology Evangelist at Talis, the company’s platform emphasizes ‘the importance of context, role, intention and attention in meaningfully tracking behaviour across the web.’”
(my links)

Last month, he revisited the ten and concluded;

“Over the past year, Talis has continued to make a name for itself as an evangelist for the Semantic Web, most notably through the blogging and podcasting [1, 2] activities of Paul Miller. Talis also produces a great magazine for Semantic Web, called Nodalities, and has an active company blog under the same name. As for the company’s products, the platform seems to be iterating nicely and is being used in niche library and government applications.

RWW verdict one year later: Talis has successfully positioned itself as an authority on Semantic Web in the blogosphere, which we love because it’s a great way to keep track of Semantic Web trends!”
(my links)

Through our blogs, our podcasts, our magazine, our presentations and our support for the community, Talis has played a key role in raising awareness and credibility for the Semantic Web as something more than an academic exercise. Talis, and others, have set about demonstrating that it offers a viable set of technologies that reach to the heart of business processes in a wide range of areas. Through activities such as the monthly Semantic Web Gang and ZDNet’s Semantic Web blog, I have played my part in bringing together some of the key players and giving them a Platform on which to share their ideas and experiences.

We have been concerned with more than just technology, though, and have devoted as much time to understanding and illustrating the economic, strategic and organisational disruptions that face businesses now and moving forward. Our early and ongoing support for the Open Data cause is a case in point, underpinning our shared belief that value is shifting at many points throughout the enterprise; previously hoarded data is no less valuable than it was, necessarily, but the opportunities to benefit when the value proposition is reconsidered from the perspective of the open Web are enormous.

I have played a significant part in all of this, and have learned much from the differing perspectives, backgrounds and experiences of my colleagues inside Talis… and all of the people I’ve met outside the company.

As Talis moves into 2009, ready to focus far more on showing how its products and solutions will solve customers’ problems, the time has come for me to look for new challenges. I’ve been careful not to gratuitously push Talis products over the years, and I believe that I have been successful in explaining complex issues in an accessible fashion along the way. I hope that I have demonstrated neutrality, authority, and perspective, even whilst in the full time employ of a single company. There’s a lot to build upon there, and a real opportunity to extend that reach even further. So I’m going to be setting out on my own and taking on work with clients that can benefit from that track record. Analysis, consulting, advice, speaking engagements and more.

I’ve started talking to a lot of people recently, and am already noticing some very interesting prospects which I will be firming up now that this news has entered the public domain. I’m always open to additional offers, of course!

And the first customer for the newly independent me? Talis. My current employer will be contracting part of my time to continue working on some of the broader external activities I was already doing for them. The Semantic Web Gang, for example, will continue to be underwritten by Talis, and I remain its host.

So interesting times lie ahead. I’m excited by the opportunity and daunted by the challenge in almost equal parts. I look forward to seeing where this leads next, and I am sure that I shall see many of you along the way.

Paul.

Thanks for thinking of me, guys, and I look forward to producing some fresh content for you down the line!