More on Simon's upcoming work with CIKTN

I wrote a couple of months back about year two of my stint as the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network's Metadata Champion. Here's a little interview with me the CIKTN filmed to provide a more detail, or at least to put a face to all the blog posts.

Meet The Team - Simon Hopkins from Creative Industries KTN on Vimeo.

Charles and Ray Eames on computing, 1958

This charming short film was made for IBM by polymath couple Charles and Ray Eames to show the fledgling computing behemoth in a good light at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, which launched the Atomium, and saw the first installation of Varèse's Poème Electronique, among other things. It is, undoubtedly, infused with something of a naive 50s tech utopianism, and no doubt Adam Curtis could cannibalise it to underscore the odd conspiracy theory - indeed, maybe he has already.

But in truth, it's as fine an explanation of the importance of computers in helping society navigate technological and infrastructural complexity as anything put on a screen in the half century since. I was struck by a couple of lines in the voice over:

"With the computer, as with any tool, the concept and direction must come from the man."

"This is information: the proper use of it can bring a new dignity to mankind."

Ah, the 50s: at once immensely more sophisticated than our own times, and somehow less so.

Via Gizmodo

PS. Note the music is composed and conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Quite the meeting of talents.

Unthinkable announce an alliance with playence

For some months now we have been in talks with semantic search specialists playence about a commercial partnership in the UK. We're delighted to announce that it's now on; we thought we'd post the press release here. Don't hesitate to get in touch with any queries about it.

playence Announces Commercial Partnership with Unthinkable Consulting
Innsbruck, Austria, November 18, 2011

playence, the leader in contextualized access to multimedia content, today announced that the company has entered commercial partnership with UK-based Unthinkable Consulting, the leader in realizing the potential in digital communication technology. Under the terms of the agreement, Unthinkable will help playence penetrate the broadcast, government and arts/culture sectors, providing introductions to key players.

The partnership was prompted by playence's desire to enhance its competitive position in the UK, offering a one-stop solution for structuring and easily accessing multimedia content. By working with Unthinkable, playence is able to more efficiently penetrate and serve the U.K. market.

Sarah Turner, Director, Unthinkable, comments: "The commercial partnership with playence will enable a one-stop solution for media-savvy companies that want to realize the value in their multimedia assets. The innovation that playence brings to the U.K. market makes it possible for the first time, to leverage multimedia information assets in new ways not currently possible with existing private label vendors. As an example, playence not only provides advanced contextual search, but has already deployed technology to discover relationships living in multimedia content, bringing structure to plain text documents, audio and videos."

Sinuhe Arroyo, president and CEO, playence, comments: "playence's mission is to become the leading global software vendor of solutions for contextual information access. This new commercial partnership will help playence to achieve this goal by adding to our existing U.K. client base. By utilizing the local market knowledge which Unthinkable has acquired through its years of direct experience with broadcast, government and arts & culture organizations, we can further increase our position in the global market. This heralds a new era for playence and one which we are extremely excited about."

playence is a technology solutions provider to businesses and institutions with operations in Austria, Spain, the UK and US. The company's offering is a Web-based solution for improving information access to multimedia content and structuring unstructured information across the organization. playence’s products have direct application in a wide range of verticals and domains, such as Advertising, Marketing, Media, eCommerce, Finance, Insurance, Telco or Biotechnology. More information about playence is available at www.playence.com.

Contact:
Austria - Headquarters
Martina Wirkner, Marketing and Communications
Phone: +43 664 4349 808
Email: martina.wirkner@playence.com

GT02 Memory and Data

We promised to share more details from our second Group Think, on the theme of 'Memory and Data'. True to our word, here are details of the presentations from the day:

Richard Northover and Chris Sizemore from the BBC presented the 'What If?' concept of BBC Lifespans.

Sinuhe Arroyo of Playence presented on the difference between key-word and semantic search and the future of information access.

My own introductory presentation only contained three more or less random slides, and probably makes more sense as a piece of writing. So here's a loose transcript:

We've struggled to narrow down what we are going to be talking about today. Although we spend much of our professional lives planning for it and speculating about it, the future doesn't exist yet. The present is gone in the blink of an eye. So everything that exists is the sum total of what has happened. It is what the past has bequeathed to us. We sometimes call that memory. So everything that exists is memory.

And data? It’s what the digital world is made of. If you can say something exists in the digital world, by definition it exists as data. And if some work of man or nature doesn’t yet exist as data, we can be pretty confident that it can.

So we have as our theme everything that exists. Just as well we booked the room for two hours.

Why this is interesting is because we are not the only people to have stumbled across this troubling insight.

the Internet is turning us all... into memory institutions.
Tony Ageh, Head of Archive Development, BBC

In other words, the point that everything is about memory and data, and memory and data encompass everything, is is more than a comical point of semantics to lighten up the start of my talk. I believe it illuminates a particular moment that we are passing through as a culture, an economy and a society. We tradtionally think of libraries, museums and galleries as being 'memory institutions', but the concept is becoming relevant to a far wider range of organisations. To be fair to Tony Ageh, I have taken his quote out of context; he was addressing a room full of public service broadcasters, and it's in that context that his quote should be understood. But what I've noticed is that everyone from broadcasters, through arts organisations, news businesses to social networks are now starting to see themselves (consciously or not) as possible 'memory institutions' - and to see the opportunities this presents.

Here's an example of why memory matters to individuals. My first cousin twice removed from Texas sent me this package last week of family memorabilia. Everyone in this room will instantly understand the power of the objects here - photos of my late mother and grandmother, a newspaper clipping, old Christmas cards. I'd like to focus for a minute on what this packet tells us about business models, about sharing and about forgetting.

Here are some of the business models represented by this packet - all business models that have some relation to the business of remembering:

• photography
• newspapers
• greetings cards
• the postal service

As it happens, these are all business models being disrupted fast by digital media.

Something else that's interesting about this packet is that it represents both an action of sharing memory, and data loss. This content - what in the digital world would be bits and bytes - has been lost to my cousin, because the sharing of physical content is a zero sum game (which is incidentally why it's nonsensical to equate file sharing to shoplifting). We've been doing our physical remembering in the context of scarcity - to give another example, it costs money to buy film & develop it. This is equally true for individuals and organisations.

So forgetting has been built into the remembering we do as a natural by-product of its very physicality. Digital changes all that. We now have the terrifying - but probably illusory - possibility of remembering everything forever.

The equivalent to what my cousin did in the digital realm is probably pointing to a photo album on Facebook. And she might well (if she were 60 years younger) let a great many other people in on the act.

And that illustrates the point that in every challenge thrown up by the new ways of remembering & forgetting lies a potential opportunity - commercial, cultural or both - for organisations.

Facebook itself has realised that the past is at least as compelling as the present. Facebook started life as a service focusing on a wide cross-section of the present; serving its users snapshots of each other's lives and doings in the very recent past. Sam Lessin, one of the brains behind Facebook's new Timelines feature (illustrated here), somewhat hyperbolically described that approach as 'the single biggest lost opportunity in the history of human story telling'. Timelines takes a wholly different cut of the data that its users have generated, realising that, properly structured and exposed, it offers them the opportunity to curate the stories of their own lives. In other words, Facebook realised that it had unintentionally turned itself into a machine to generate biographies, or to put it another way, a memory institution.

And here’s another example of why memory matters to businesses: the Press Association's recently published ontology. [More on this here - Ed.] (One thing to note is that in this case, we are talking about businesses curating their own content rather than helping people create theirs, lest we carelessly conflate the two phenomena.)

The Press Association is a news wire agency - what could be more concerned with the here and now? And yet they are building a strategy on using linked data to make sense of their content and the context in which it sits. Now this partly has to do with how PA situates itself in relation to the present, but a big driver for this strategy is also a bet that their archive - their institutional memory - adds enormous value to their daily offering.

So that's the talk. As Simon reported, it led to a lively discussion, but one that focused more on the 'data' half of the equation. The unfinished business of the discussion remains to challenge the basic thesis set out here: is it accurate to observe that organisations of all kinds are turning, or should turn, into memory institutions? What are the limitations of that approach? Will it work for some sectors but not others? Answers on a postcard (or on a less traditional memory medium) please.

Green shoots of linked (open) data around news

Based on Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch - some rights reserved (CC-BY-SA)

A couple of weeks ago Justin and I attended an event hosted by Talis, Data on the Web: The Benefits of Linking. It was a useful session all round (and if you are anywhere near Birmingham on 10 November, I note that another one is planned for there and then). We were particularly taken by this presentation by Jared McGinnis on the Press Association's thinking behind its recent publication of its ontology, and the part the ontology is set to play in the PA's strategy. This points to the commercial value of linked data - not only linked, but linked open data, and open in the read and write directions: PA has openly published its ontology, and it is ingesting geonames to provide IDs around location. The commercial angle is particularly significant, as the argument for linked open data is often couched in the language of public good, and often advocated by public institutions like government or the BBC. PA's advocacy - and we hope proven commercial success will follow - has the prospect of being something of a game-changer in perceptions of the value of semantic approaches. (Incidentally Talis' Tim Hodson provided a nuanced and useful explanation on their blog last month of the difference between publishing data, which often has a proprietary commercial value for its owners (or indeed is not always fully theirs to give away) and publishing the data model.)

But speaking of the BBC and the public service argument for linked open data, it is heartening indeed to see that the BBC is recruiting a data architect for News. I've linked before to Paul Rissen's article of a year ago eloquently setting out the case for the public value of this stuff, and it now looks as though he and like-minded colleagues are really being listened to inside the organisation.

I'm tuned into what's going on in news at the moment on account of my work programme managing the relaunch of ITV's News, Sport & Weather service, but there is clearly wider significance to all of this. I still hold out hopes for linked open data becoming a standard in the music industry; unfortunately the adoption of MusicBrainz that I oversaw as editor of the BBC Music website has yet to travel much further (beyond patchy adoption by last.fm), despite the benefits that I believe could accrue to record labels in particular from adopting such an open standard. As Simon pointed out recently, the ideal of the semantic web still feels like an idea whose time is coming, but we do need to start seeing proven commercial models if it is to make it into the mainstream.