Before going any further, let’s get a few things crystal clear;

1. The recent success of the Linked Data meme is long overdue, very welcome, and entirely capable of carrying the Web of Data far beyond its current niche adherents. A lot of my current work involves arguing that more organisations should adopt this approach;
2. The Resource Description Framework, RDF, is a key — and powerful — piece in W3C‘s Semantic Web Architecture. Since its earliest days, I have played various parts in advocating the potential of RDF and will continue to do so;
3. RDF is an obvious means of publishing — and consuming — Linked Data powerfully, flexibly, and interoperably. I will continue to argue this, and to advocate its wider adoption.

So far, so good.

The problem, I contend, comes when well-meaning and knowledgeable advocates of both Linked Data and RDF conflate the two and infer, imply or assert that ‘Linked Data’ can only be Linked Data if expressed in RDF.

This dogmatism makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I find myself unable to agree with the underlying premise.

The rest of this post attempts to explain why, hopefully more lucidly than I or those with whom I was debating managed on Friday evening via the largely unsuitable medium of the 140 character tweet.

Andy Powell started things off lucidly enough on Friday, asking;

“is there an agreed name for an approach that adopts the 4 principles of #linkeddata minus the phrase, ‘using the standards (RDF, SPARQL)’ ??”

I was amongst those to respond, suggesting as I usually do that;

“well, personally, I’d argue that Linked Data does NOT require that phrase. But I know others disagree…  ”

Other pieces of that conversation can be extracted from the stream; start by scrolling to the bottom, find Andy’s tweet, and work back toward the top.

It’s worth noting that two of those arguing most vehemently against me were former colleagues Ian Davis and Leigh Dodds. I have massive respect for the technical prowess of both (which is certainly greater than my own), and have learned a great deal from Ian in particular over the years that we have known one another. This issue, though, is one on which we have long disagreed, and it was interesting to see the subject of many a difference of opinion in the bars of various conference hotels spill into this public arena.

Anyway, now let me try to explain what I meant.

Perhaps the most commonly cited definition for Linked Data is the one to which Andy was referring; Sir Tim Berners-Lee‘s Linked Data – Design Issues document. It’s worth noting that this document is clearly flagged (in the current version amended on 18 June 2009, at least) as being both a ‘personal view only’ and ‘imperfect but published.’ So a very long way from being a ‘standard,’ ‘specification,’ or ‘definition,’ but certainly still a pretty good starting point, and one to which I often direct clients and others.

Berners-Lee begins,

“The Semantic Web isn’t just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data.  With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.”

(my emphasis)

That sounds good, doesn’t it? Indeed, we talked about that on the Linked Data panel I moderated at the recent Semantic Technology Conference, and I’ve embedded the video here.

It is the next section of Berners-Lee’s document that is used to validate the view that Linked Data needs RDF;

“1. Use URIs as names for things

2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names

3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF, SPARQL)

4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

(my emphasis)”

On one reading, an unambiguous validation of the view with which I disagree. On another, a suggestion of best practice, expressed as part of a ‘personal view’ with which we are perfectly entitled to take issue.

Would the zealots be calmed by the simple insertion of ‘preferably’ or ‘ideally,’ immediately after point three’s second comma? Maybe. Or perhaps the fires of Linked Data’s self-appointed Inquisition would be stoked for Berners-Lee himself.

Talk of Linked Data, Open Data, the Web of Data and related concepts in recent years have led to a quite remarkable shift in attitude amongst individuals, public bodies and private corporations. Almost everywhere my work takes me, clever people are seriously grappling with the implications of consuming from or contributing to these emerging ecosystems. Not all of their questions have good answers, and not all of the technological, strategic and business implications have necessarily been fully worked through. But these people are asking the questions, and they are asking them in all seriousness.That is a dramatic and welcome shift.

Some, such as the BBC, Thomson Reuters and the UK Government’s Central Office of Information are sufficiently persuaded of the benefits to take risks and to open the previously closed in taking a lead. Others will follow, as fears are assuaged, doubts eased, and benefits realised.

Despite this undoubted progress, the green shoots of a Linked Data ecology remain delicate. By moving from a message that stresses the value of unambiguous and web-addressable naming (HTTP URIs), providing ‘useful information,’ and enabling people to ‘discover more things’ by linking toward a message that elevates one of the best mechanisms (RDF) for achieving this to become the only permissible approach, we do the broader aims great harm.

Yes, those already in the club will probably be very pleased with the purity and functionality of the toys in their playground. But they will have barred a far larger group with data to share, a willingness to learn, and an enthusiasm to engage. At best, they will have slowed the growth of the pool of Linked Data quite dramatically. At worst, they will have created an increasingly irrelevant backwater that more pragmatic people will simply route around. Perhaps, in their pragmatism, those people will now never look seriously at RDF and its power, scared away by the fervour of those who sought to elevate it too high, and too fast.

What are we after? More Linked Data, or more RDF? I sincerely hope it’s the former.

So let’s see loads more Linked Data, and plenty of evangelism as to why RDF could be the best way to do it. But let’s not ostracise the vast majority of potential participants, contributors and beneficiaries in the world of Linked Data, just because they haven’t wholeheartedly embraced RDF yet.

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Image via Wikipedia

Two separate pieces of news came my way during the night, and although both were written about elsewhere whilst those of us on this side of the Atlantic slept, they remain worthy of mention; both in their own right and because of the wider trend of which they are part.

First, Cloud Computing provider 3Tera announced their AppStore;

“the first marketplace for cloud components where enterprise users, software vendors and datacenter experts can exchange production-ready, scalable and highly available cloud components on a pay-per-use basis.”

You can listen to my recent podcast with 3Tera’s Bert Armijo, here.

Second, Semantic Technology pioneer AdaptiveBlue‘s CEO (and Semantic Web Gang regular) Alex Iskold sent an email to point me at their launch of a new Glue API;

“This new API taps into Glue’s databases and semantic recognition engine enabling fun & useful applications about people and things.”

Both companies recognise that there is a far greater pool of talent outside their employ than inside, and both are seeking to place themselves and their technology at the centre of a scalable ecosystem rather than perpetuating the old fashioned model of supplying solutions. Both recognise, too, that the ‘sticky’ destination site is becoming increasingly irrelevant to many of our online behaviours. We want and need functionality, community, reliability and more; but we want it on our terms, delivered in real time at the point of need.

By seeking to build and mediate a critical mass of third party applications, 3Tera is repeating a formula successfully demonstrated by the likes of Apple, Salesforce and others. Partners and developers deliver far more working code than 3Tera’s own developers could manage, and those partners are incentivised to bring their own customer base along with them. 3Tera benefits every time one of these partners makes a sale — for negligible effort on 3Tera’s part — and has an easy route to new customers of its own via its partners. In time, 3Tera’s own AppLogic may even come to increasingly be perceived as no more than an on-ramp to the AppStore’s riches.

AdaptiveBlue’s API extends Glue in an obvious direction, adding to site-independent strengths upon which I have remarked previously.

The world is changing. By embracing the power of networks (both technological and social) and putting others to work on your behalf, companies are increasingly able to punch far beyond their own weight. It is ever-more feasible for small, agile, responsive and engaged organisations to draw upon the resources of others to mutual benefit. As Newton once wrote,

“If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

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Much has been written about growing Enterprise use of social media (usually Twitter, these days) to successfully track and mitigate customer complaint. Many have been quick to spot that the disproportionately high cost of satisfying (or, more cynically, silencing) these early adopters is unlikely to scale effectively as an increasingly large cohort of customers move onto these services, and it must remain an open question as to whether ComcastCares and its peers can survive any move to the mainstream in recognisable form.

It appears, though, that Enterprise engagement in the social sphere changes the game far more significantly than merely enabling a select few twitterati to jump the Customer Support queue, and that this change is worth effort and investment in order to ensure that it does scale. What’s actually happening is that a relationship is being enabled between a brand and what Seth Godin might recognise as its tribe; a relationship in which interactions are no longer driven predominantly by the desire to seek redress. Rather than only raising those issues serious enough for us to have written letters or endured telephone muzak in the past, we now comment on issues at the periphery of a brand. Collectively, we’ve moved from simply complaining about the worst failures of companies, their products and their employees, toward emitting an impressive stream of FYIs. Individually insignificant, and possibly unimportant, together these light touches on and around a brand build into an ever-changing and valuable commentary that brands and the corporations they front would do well to take notice of. The minor niggles about an otherwise exemplary service, the human touches that made us smile, the odd inconsistencies in a polished persona; none are enough to make us pick up the phone, but we comment upon them endlessly in Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and elsewhere, and by tapping into this fundamentally honest stream of consciousness there is much for those about whom we comment to learn. Good companies probably already know about fundamental failings in a product long before their customer support operation melts down under the weight of complaints or their quarterly sales targets are seriously under-achieved. Do they have as good a handle on the things we love? Do they have a clue about the minor gripes of customers outside their pre-launch polling groups? Do they know about the gut reaction to a colour, a touch, a smell, or a careless word that persuaded a likely prospect to buy a technically or aesthetically inferior product from the competition instead? All this and more is there for the taking in the stream of online chatter freely directed their way.

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As European readers are doubtless aware, the EC has traditionally been a generous funder of research across Europe’s member states, with Digital Libraries, the Semantic Web and more owing much to the largesse of Europe’s massive ‘Framework Programme‘ funding cycles. We’re currently in the midst of the Seventh Framework Programme, and a few hundred of the academics and technologists hoping to secure some of the €Millions available for ‘Technologies for Information Management‘ have gathered in soggy Luxembourg to hear what they can bid for, to hear how to bid, and to engage in the funding world’s rather bizarre equivalent of Blind Date by pitching their wares to prospective partners.

I’ve been asked to talk about some of the trends and issues around ‘Big Data,’ to provide a context for the technological discussions to follow, and to illustrate some of the ways in which cutting edge implementations of the sort likely to be proposed might solve real problems.

My slides are on Slideshare and embedded, above, and begin by suggesting that the use of ‘the language of catastrophe’ in describing the ‘flood’ of information around us perhaps sets everything off on the wrong foot. Yes, there’s a lot of information out there… but there’s not too much, and maybe we shouldn’t be attempting to control all of it anyway…

European Commission-funded projects were amongst the first to make serious attempts to ‘control’ and ‘manage’ the early Web, with some suggestions that we could (and should) catalogue Web pages just like books in a library. Some of those laboriously curated, instantly obsolete, and hopelessly under-representative Web ghettos still exist today; but the mainstream Web has moved far beyond them, embracing more scalable and effective combinations of machine processing and lightweight community recommendation. Even in their heyday, those for whom these resources were created were all too often to be found applying their efforts to routing around these obstructions to the free flow of information across the Web.

As the volume of data available to us grows, it presents massive new opportunities as well as significant technological and social challenges. Twitter is just one example of the rise of the ‘real-time’ Web, and connected devices such as the iPhone and Google’s Android devices fundamentally shift the ways in which we consume and contribute to the ever-accelerating flows of data.

Use, re-use and control of data, too, are increasingly topical issues with which we should be concerned. The rise of licensing frameworks such as CC0 and the Open Data Commons are part of an attempt to reduce ambiguity in the ways that data may be repurposed, and expectations grow daily that data will be available; whether from Government, community groups or the private sector. Privacy, security, provenance and trust all come into play, with a path to be diplomatically steered between those too blasé to recognise the real issues at stake and those too cautious to countenance progress perceived to be at their expense.

Moving the quantities of data involved is becoming a serious challenge, too, and a generation of researchers accustomed to ‘simply’ throwing data into the Cloud for later analysis, sharing or retrieval must increasingly grapple with latency and bandwidth. Physical proximity of data to computation might actually matter again, and more than one of the Cloud’s biggest players have been heard to suggest that physical media might actually be the most cost-effective way to move these mountains of data around the globe.

I look forward to seeing what the nascent projects likely to coalesce over the next 24 hours contribute to understanding and progress with any or all of these… and hope that my presentation plays its part in shaping their thinking, their proposals and their outcomes.

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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.

The notions of core and context are, of course, most often associated with Geoffrey Moore, and one of his sites defines them, thus;

Core

“Any activity which creates sustainable differentiation in the target market resulting in premium prices or increased volume. Core management seeks to dramatically outperform all competitors within the domain of core. (Note this use of the term is unrelated to either core competence, which describes differentiated capability, or core business, which describes categories accounting for a high percentage of overall revenues.)”

Context

“Any activity which does not differentiate the company from the customers’ viewpoint in the target market. Context management seeks to meet (but not exceed) appropriate accepted standards in as productive a manner as possible.”

Writing in last weekend’s Financial Times, Gerrit Wiesmann tells us that;

“We’ve been waiting for trains since 1840, the year a British parliamentary committee invented mass transportation by ruling that rail traffic should be exclusively in the hands of the companies that owned the track. It’s an odd notion now, but in the years before that decision, a debate raged about how to use rails. In the 1820s, the British railway visionary Thomas Gray called for a national network for use by private vehicles. He reckoned traffic in and out of London could be handled by 12 parallel ‘rail-ways’.”

Here, as elsewhere, ideas given serious consideration at the birth of an industry are superseded as that industry matures and sustainable business models begin to emerge.

There will always be areas in which technology companies invest their own human capital rather than buying in services and products from third parties. The traditional view, largely captured in Moore’s terminology, holds that companies gain most by focussing their own efforts upon the differentiating aspects of their business whilst making use of supporting services from third parties to enable concentration upon those differentiators. It will tend to be cheaper and ‘easier’, so the argument goes, to pay for commodity services from a third party rather than develop everything in-house from scratch.

In the early stages of any technological wave, there is an understandable tendency to develop and control far more of the stack within a single organisation. Various players enter a nascent market, and attempt to shape it to their needs at the same time as laying the foundations for what they hope will be a successful product or service. Without agreement on standards and specifications, there is very little interoperability. With an emphasis upon attracting and growing a customer base, there is little incentive to make it easy for users to compare offerings with – or move to – the competition. With a fluid understanding of the final product and its differentiating features, there is little clear understanding of that which will be ‘core’ as opposed to that which will merely be ‘context.’ Internal and external pressures encourage, and almost require, an approach that is closed and all-encompassing.

The problem, it seems, is in making that move from a nascent market toward the point at which certain aspects of the technology stack are fit for commodification; the point at which a healthy and competitive ecosystem can begin to emerge that increases customer choice whilst lowering development and running costs. Looking at aspects of the Cloud Computing and SaaS arenas, we must surely be reaching the point at which numerous homegrown technology stacks become increasingly counterproductive? In the Semantic Web space, too, that early burst of innovation is becoming unnecessarily expensive to maintain as one company after another continues to concern themselves with segments of the problem space that might easily be made a commodity.

Look, for example, at the number of Semantic Technology companies continuing to pour effort into building, scaling and maintaining a basic ontology. The ontology is rarely the point of the company. It is simply something they need to have in order to get on with the business at hand. How many of them are ‘wasting’ time recording the fact that Gordon Brown is the UK Prime Minister, or that Beverley is in East Yorkshire, which is in England, which is in the United Kingdom, which is in Europe?

A recent conversation with Hapax CEO Mark Redgrave confirmed the extent to which they are having to focus upon ontology construction with Amplify. Refreshingly, though, he was extremely open to the notion of gaining value from a more open and generic ontology upon which Hapax and others could build, add value, and compete. In the SaaS space, too, Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller has some interesting ideas with regard to enabling others to build their own Software as a Service offerings on top of a common platform that begins to look increasingly like a commodity. It will be interesting to see the extent to which the reality of his company’s SaaSGrid is able to match that vision.

I have spent (too much!) time in the formal standards making process, and would be the last to even consider suggesting that freeform innovation and commercial creativity be snuffed out in favour of protracted and painful rounds of negotiation, specification and never-ending compromise.

However, it seems apparent that early innovators in a given market (Amazon with EC2, Salesforce, etc) often see little incentive to open up and behave less proprietarily. It is in their interests for every competitor to have to reinvent all the wheels that those early entrants first conceptualised. The shift needs to be driven by their competitors, some of whom will be sufficiently successful that they disrupt the market conditions in which incumbents dominate to such an extent that customers are incentivised to consider switching.

A little reinvention is a good thing. It encourages creative thinking, and probably leads to refinement, iteration, and further innovation. Perpetuated at the expense of opening up a nascent market, it becomes a tool of monopoly and ultimately counter-productive for all concerned.

Perhaps it is only at this point that those at the top of a market segment are able to realise the benefits of letting go a little, and of relegating much of what they do to the status of mere context.

Image of a bicycle with square wheels © Michael Vroegop 2007, and licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution License.

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Recent advances in the business of Cloud Computing form just such a picture, and reach out to encompass previously unrelated aspects of Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, Platform Computing, Software as a Service (SaaS) and the economics of Disruption. Not merely some game of buzzword bingo on an unprecedented scale, it is becoming increasingly easy to see the opportunities for a significant shift in the way that we access computational resources; and to recognise that the walls separating organisations from their peers, their partners, their competitors and their customers will become ever-more permeable to the flow of data upon which those distant machines will compute.

There is much to understand that is already known in related fields, and much to discover that only becomes possible in this space. One early challenge is in carving a discrete niche for the place toward which we are moving with such rapidity. Far more than ‘just’ the Cloud; an evolution on from the playful flippancy that diminishes so many of Web 2.0′s poster children; and difficult to relate to the mainstream misconceptions of the Semantic Web’s complexity. Yet this new place is the sum of these parts, and far greater than they can ever be alone. So do we extend the already ephemeral notion of Cloud Computing? Do we appropriate the ‘next big thing’ label of Web 3.0? Or do we need a healthily fresh attitude to business computing’s apparently insatiable desire to apply labels?

First, though, let us consider the shape of this thing that is taking on more substance with each passing day.

Reporting on last week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CNET’s Dan Farber notes that

“The cloud was omnipresent,”

before going on to close his report with;

“cloud computing won’t be very compelling without what is variously called Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web.”

Indeed.

For too long, the emphasis in Cloud Computing circles has been almost exclusively upon provision of rapidly scalable and ad hoc remote computing on top of cost-effective commodity hardware. The Cloud play from Salesforce, Amazon’s EC2 and the rest has been dominated by the implicit assumption that these Cloud-based resources are an extension of the corporate data centre; a way to simply reduce the costs of enterprise computing.

There is value in this business, but there are bigger opportunities.

Nick Carr is amongst those to fear that a small number of players may come to dominate the provision of Cloud resources. He outlines many of these arguments in his latest book, The Big Switch, and more recently has been involved in an interesting discussion with Tim O’Reilly on the topic. Justin Leavesley shares some of Talis‘ views on the economics behind all this over on Nodalities, broadly agreeing with Tim O’Reilly;

“It’s pretty clear that utility cloud computing is highly capital intensive so it should come as no surprise that there are powerful economies of scale to be had. But the bottom line is that you are talking about plant and power. These are rival goods, scarce resources that are created and consumed. This is not different from many utility industries with one exception: the distribution network has global reach, already exists and is very cheap compared to existing utility distribution networks. It is a lot cheaper to access a computing resource on the other side of the planet than it is to send electricity or gas across the globe… [So] what is to stop economies of scale turning this into a global natural monopoly?

Actually, unless there are some large network effects, quite a lot stops single companies ruling entire industries. For a start, without network effects, economies of scale tend to run out: the curve is usually U-shaped. Telecoms, Gas, rail companies have strong network effects from their infrastructure-it makes little sense to have duplicate rail networks or gas networks in a country. Utility computing does not have this advantage because the distribution network is not owned by them.”

Continuing the conversation, Carr captures the usual widely held perception of Cloud Computing nicely;

“The history of computing has been a history of falling prices (and consequently expanding uses). But the arrival of cloud computing – which transforms computer processing, data storage, and software applications into utilities served up by central plants – marks a fundamental change in the economics of computing. It pushes down the price and expands the availability of computing in a way that effectively removes, or at least radically diminishes, capacity constraints on users. A PC suddenly becomes a terminal through which you can access and manipulate a mammoth computer that literally expands to meet your needs. What used to be hard or even impossible suddenly becomes easy.”

This is quite true, but continues and further entrenches the misapprehension that the Cloud is little more than an adjunct to the corporate data centre; a misapprehension that we shall get down to challenging in a moment.

First, though, there is a growing recognition that today’s market leaders will inevitably need to become more interoperable if this business segment – and they – are to grow. The proprietary nature of their offerings today may allow them to innovate ahead of the standards process (that will be shaped in large part by the lessons they learn), and the relatively high cost of switching to a competitor today may give each the critical mass upon which to invest and grow, but the characteristics of the current market are clearly the characteristics of a nascent market; computing’s new Wild West. As so often before, standardisation, true competition, mainstream adoption and commoditisation will all follow as we move toward phases 2 and 3 of Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman‘s intriguing ‘evolution of the Cloud Computing market.’ Similarly, Erica Naone offers a useful overview of Cloud Computing’s open source component in Technology Review this month. None of the projects she covers are a significant challenge to Amazon’s EC2, Microsoft’s Azure, Salesforce’s force.com or Google’s App Engine… yet. But together they help to keep these commercial entrants honest, and remind all of us that switching costs can be brought very low indeed if the pain of the status quo becomes too great.

Writing ‘Welcome to the Data Cloud?‘ for ZDNet last month, I began to explore the important role that data could and should play in the Cloud;

“Just as ‘we’ used to duplicate and under-utilise computational resources, so we do something very similar with our data. We expensively enter and re-enter the same facts, over and over again. We over-engineer data capture forms and schemas, making collection exorbitantly expensive, whilst often appearing to do all we can to limit opportunities for re-use. Under the all-too-easy banners of ’security’ and ‘privacy’ we secure individual data stores and fail to exploit connections with other sources, whether inside or outside the enterprise.

In a small way, the efforts of the Linked Data Project’s enthusiasts have demonstrated how different things should be. The cloud of contributing data sets grows from month to month, and the number of double-headed arrows denoting a two-way linkage is on the rise. Even the one-way relationships that currently dominate the diagram are a marked improvement on ‘business as usual’ elsewhere on the data Web; even in these cases, data from a third party is being re-used (by means of a link across the web) rather than replicated or re-invented. Costs fall. Opportunities open up. Both resources, potentially, improve. The strands of the web grow stronger.“

It is here, in the use and reuse of data, that the potential of the Cloud will be realised. Back in the previously cited conversation between Nick Carr and Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly himself came very close to saying so;

“In short, Google is the ultimate network effects machine. ‘Harnessing collective intelligence’ isn’t a different idea from network effects, as Nick argues. It is in fact the science of network effects - understanding and applying the implications of networks.

I want to emphasize one more point: the heart of my argument about Web 2.0 is that the network effects that matter today are network effects in data. My thought process (outlined in The Open Source Paradigm Shift and then What is Web 2.0?, went something like this:

1.  The consequence of IBM’s design of a personal computer made out of commodity, off- the-shelf parts was to drive attractive margins out of hardware and into software, via Clayton Christensen’s ‘law of conservation of attractive profits.’ Hardware became a low margin business; software became a very high margin business. 
2.  Open source software and the standardized protocols of the Internet are doing the same thing to software. Margins will go down in software, but per the law of conservation of attractive profits, this means that they will go up somewhere else. Where? 
3.  The next layer of attractive profits will accrue to companies that build data-backed applications in which the data gets better the more people use the system. This is what I’ve called Web 2.0.

It’s network effects (perhaps more simply described as virtuous circles) in data that ultimately matter, not network effects per se.”
(my emphasis) 

Talis CTO Ian Davis would appear to agree, commenting;

“People need to be  investing in their data as the long term carrier of value, not the applications around them… the data is more likely to persist than the software so it’s important to get the data right and take care of it.”

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, too, used his Dreamforce User Conference this month to move a company long associated with the ‘data centre extending’ Cloud firmly in the direction of embracing data and the network. As Krishnan Subramanian noted on Cloud Ave before the keynote,

“Till now, the Force.com platform served business users to develop apps that can be used internally within an organization. They have to tap into Force.com APIs from outside platforms to offer customer facing web apps. With the new initiative, it becomes easy for customers to allow the internet users to “interact” with their data.”

Over on VentureBeat, Anthony Ha had more;

“Salesforce.com wants to become an even big player in the cloud computing market with a new service called Force.com Sites, which allows companies to host public-facing web applications in the Force.com platform. That means Salesforce — nominally a maker of customer relationship management (CRM) software, but also an increasingly important platform for business-related applications — is moving closer to direct competition with cloud giants like Amazon Web Services and the Google App Engine.”

Locked away within an organisation, and only accessed by that organisation’s applications, data cannot be put to full use. Much of the value in each individual datum lies in comparing it to other measurements, in delving into detail and in pulling right back to observe the bigger picture.

Organisations believing that either the big picture or the detail reside within their own systems alone are woefully misguided. Even the most specialised, the most proprietary, the most confidential of data only reveal their true value when placed in context, and that context is all the richer when informed by numerous perspectives.

Cloud Computing, and the various *aaS movements, have finally brought us to a place where the fiercely guarded and tightly delineated boundaries between the organisation and those outside it may become permeable in ways that should benefit the organisation rather than threaten it. Data is just a resource. In the terminology of Geoffrey Moore most data is often mere context, and there are savings to be made both in reusing the data of others or in re-selling necessary context to those prepared to pay. Some data, of course, is core to the business, and this may continue to receive the same reverence and protection that we misguidedly apply to the entire database today. Even here, though, the opportunities afforded by (controlled?) sharing may outweigh any desire to maintain data protectionism.

The language of Groundswell offers opportunities to go further, to embrace and to exploit the behaviours and the motivations of customers and the wider Web.

There is clearly far more to write in clarifying this view of both the components and the whole, but as it passes 2,000 words this particular blog post has perhaps gone on long enough.

For now, then, I should conclude by asking what role the Semantic Web has to play in any of this.

The Semantic Web, with its unadulterated recognition of the primacy of the web’s hyperlink? The Semantic Web, designed from the outset to convey context and relationships derived from data spread across the Web? The Semantic Web, supported by technologies that operate openly and at Web scale?

Isn’t it obvious yet?

Returning to the Web 2.0 Summit with which this post began, another presentation was from Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired Magazine. As I wrote this post, I referred to Steve Gillmor and Nicole Ferraro, from whose reports I inferred that Kelly had built upon an earlier presentation (that I greatly enjoyed), in which he argued;

“You have to be open to having your data shared… which is a much bigger step than just sharing your web pages or your computer.”

Fact-checking before hitting publish, I notice that last week’s video is now up, here, and Kevin’s championing of the primacy of data in the cloud resonates with every word I’ve just written.

Yep. Here we go, on a journey toward Kevin Kelly’s “World Wide Database.”

In subsequent posts I’ll explore some more of the detail, and I hope you’ll stick around for the journey.

Storm Clouds image © ‘shidairyproduct‘ 2008. Shared on Flickr, and licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution License. Converted to a jigsaw by Big Huge Labs.