Navy Project Pulls Military into the Nineties
September 13, 2013
Sometimes an initiative comes along that causes me to perk up and declare, “wait, you mean they weren’t doing that already?” That is my response to Slashdot‘s article, “Navy Version of ‘Expedia’ to Save DOD Millions.” I know, I should no longer be surprised by the gross inefficiency of large bureaucracies.
The set of bureaucracies that makes up our military, though, is taking a welcome step toward efficiency with this project being tested by the Office of Naval Research. The system would use “an Expedia-like” search to correlate freight and personnel travel needs with open slots worldwide. Writer Kevin Fogarty reports:
“The Transportation Exploitation Tool (TET) is a little more sophisticated than online-travel sites such as Expedia or Travelocity were in 1996: The system consolidates travel schedules and capacity reports for both military and civilian carriers to give logistics planners a choice of open spaces in ships, planes, trucks, trains or other means of travel, along with information about cost, estimated time of arrival and recommendations of the most efficient route. Previously, logistics planners trying to get an engine part to a Navy ship stranded in a foreign port, for example, might spend hours or days looking through separate databases to find a ship or plane able to carry the part that could deliver it within a limited window of time.”
Though it has taken our government seventeen years to take advantage of this technology, I suppose the fact that they finally are is worth celebrating. The TET system is part of the Logistics Information Technology (LogIT) project, which aims to combine information “from separate systems for travel planning, asset tagging, tracking, location, monitoring and analysis of travel options into a single interface.” Logic is a beautiful thing!
The article includes a few details about how the system will work, as well as expectations for the project’s impact. See the article for more information about this belated but important initiative.
Cynthia Murrell, September 13, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Autonomy: Saddled with HP and Burdened with Real Stories
September 12, 2013
I read “HP/Autonomy Strategy – Still Buy Instead of Build?” Pretty darned amazing. I did not know HP had a strategy. I do know the company has been struggling with outfits ranging from the New York Stock Exchange to its interesting acquisitions. (Anyone remember EDS?)
The write up presents the view of one of the world’s leading experts in content management and related disciplines:
My reaction is this: when software vendors try acquire their way out of chronic product engineering problems, customers lose. I suspect most Interwoven and Autonomy customers would agree. After all, they saw Interwoven use its post-IPO equity windfall to acquire a plethora of other firms, rather than modernize its flagship TeamSite platform, which at its core remains a circa 1997 file management system. Similarly Autonomy went on an acquisition binge (at a time when Apache Lucene was fast overtaking the Autonomy IDOL search platform), ultimately rolling up the Interwoven roll-up, among others.
Yikes. Old news.
The issue is not what Autonomy was. The issue is a now problem for HP. The company paid dearly for Autonomy, watched its founder leave, and gutted the Autonomy marketing machine.
Who or what is lost in space? Management expertise, technology, business savvy? Image from http://urbanshakedowns.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/lost-in-space/
Is Autonomy “lost in space” and drifting? Like it or not, Autonomy was one of the leading vendors generating revenue in search and content processing. Today’s problem is not Autonomy’s. Today’s problem boils down to failed webmasters, poobahs, lax procurement teams, and managers who think search is easy. These folks now face a hard reality: Search and content processing is not for those without technical, marketing, and financial expertise.
Did Interwoven really work? Did neurolinguistic processing work? Some say yes and some say no. The reasons have more to do with managers who think do not consider, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” Now some folks known content processing and findability are not the easy-as-pie solutions marketers, azure chip consultants, and MBA-inspired experts believed.
The problem at HP is more than strategy, and thee may be no happy solution to this calculus problem. You can post that note in your iManage Outlook file and then try to find it after a crash. Don’t forget to use a cloud solution and tuck your data in a proprietary content management system.
Stephen E Arnold, September 12, 2013
Dassault Reaches to Australia New Zealand
September 12, 2013
I have lost track of Dassault, a firm which acquired Exalead a few years ago. Exalead dropped off my radar with its cloud approach to 360 degree information access. I do get an annual request for me to listen without compensation to a “briefing” about the Exalead technology. I have severe webinar fatigue, and I have a tough time differentiating the marketing pitches from different search vendors. As I approach 70 years of age, the diagrams strike me as interchangeable. The terminology used reminds me of a cheerleading session. The PowerPoints are little more than placards saying, “Big Data, Analytics, NoSQL, CRM. Go Team.” The only thing missing from the briefings is a band and hard data about strong revenue and profits generated by the company’s must-have products.
Search is repositioning in an effort to avoid marginalization. Most of the go-to customers already have up to five enterprise search systems. My hunch is that most large organizations are unaware of the total number of “findability” and “business intelligence” systems in their organizations.
Vendors, recognizing a saturated market, have had to either sell out (Brainware, Endeca, Exalead, Fast Search & Transfer, ISYS Search, and Vivisimo) or jump from one buzzword to another in a quest for additional venture funding and revenue.
Cheerleading is show business. Image courtesy of the US Department of Defense at http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=44522
I read “Firstservis Partners Dassault Systèmes to Push Big Data App.” The write up said:
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform brings structure, meaning and accessibility to data across the heterogeneous enterprise information cloud and combines the sophisticated search, access and reporting typically associated with databases with the speed, scalability and simplicity of the Web.
More interesting to me is the reason for this jump to Big Data. According to the write up:
“Their decision to re-platform their business on EXALEAD applications was then validated by Gartner’s 2013 Magic Quadrant Report where the brand was named as the most visionary of enterprise search vendors,” he [Firstservis director, Andrew Young] said.
What I find interesting is that an azure chip consulting firm opened the eyes of Dassault to what it could do with Exalead technology. Now Dassault bought Exalead in 2010 for about $160 million. After three years, a third party has guided a scientific company with 11,000 passionate people, 1790,000 customers, 3,500 (3,501 I suppose if I count Firstservis), and “long term strategy” (See http://www.3ds.com/about-3ds/).
With the pundits and poobahs hoarse from repetition of the “Big Data, Analytics, and CRM” cheer, I found the story interesting and indicative of the challenges those with “enterprise search systems” face.
Will the fans show up for the game? Image courtesy of NOAA at http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/GEOID/GSVS11/images/Longhorn_Stadium_Flippable_Seats.jpg
My hunch is that enterprise search remains a problem. The marketing issue becomes a communication problem. When a company cannot find information, enterprise search is the culprit. Most firms have quite a bit of search experience. Dissatisfaction among users is the norm. So a new positioning is required not just by Dassault but by most of the vendors who used to be in the search business.
A Call for Federated Search in Healthcare
September 12, 2013
The general search engines available on the web are simply not adequate for healthcare professionals looking for the latest pertinent information (let alone personalized data on their patients). The Federated Search Blog shares an important Tedx Talk in its piece, “Dr. Karl Kochendorfer: Bridging the Knowledge Gap in Health Care,” which advocates the adoption of federated search for the healthcare industry. I recommend the video not only for those in the healthcare or search fields, but for anyone interested in getting the best care for themselves and their families. The write-up tells us:
“As a family physician and leader in the effort to connect healthcare workers to the information they need, Dr. Kochendorfer acknowledges what those of us in the federated search world already know – Google and the surface web contain so little of the critical information your doctor and his staff need to support important medical decision-making.”
The write-up summarizes highlights from the talk, including the statistic that says a third of clinicians’ time is spent hunting down information. No wonder doctors are spending less time with patients! The article continues:
“And, the most compelling reason to get federated search into healthcare is the sobering thought by Dr. Kochendorfer that doctors are now starting to use Wikipedia to get answers to their questions instead of the best evidence-based sources out there just because Wikipedia is so easy for them to use. Scary.”
Yes, scary is a good word for it. It is true that data reservoirs that feed federated searches can contain errors—a point Kochendorfer does not address in this video. Still, I have to agree with the write-up: the doctor makes a compelling case on this important issue. The video concludes with a call for listeners to support the development of federated healthcare search tools like MedSocket and open standards like Infobuttons. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Cynthia Murrell, September 12, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google Moves toward Local News
September 12, 2013
Google seems to be eyeing the “hyperlocal” news business. TechNewsWorld informs us that “Google May Drill Down to Neighborhood News.” The write-up cites a report from Quartz that the company is testing the local waters within its Google Now service. Will Google succeed where AOL Patch and others have failed? Writer Richard Adhikari reminds us:
“Online local news sites have not done very well since the hyperlocal news frenzy began back in 2009. NBC shut down EveryBlock in February, The Daily Voice filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May, and AOL’s Patch has been hemorrhaging money and staff.”
Some say that those efforts have fallen short because their hyperlocal focus was not local enough. That is, they have tried to fit local cultures into one-approach-fits-all templates. It may seem counterintuitive, then, to expect a global behemoth to succeed at this gambit. However, the article notes:
“It could be argued that Google’s position as an Internet search powerhouse, and its strengthening geo-location capabilities, would positively impact its move into hyperlocal news if that should come about.
“Google recently added live incident reports on road closures and on-the-go rerouting to Google Maps, for example. Google News already uses geo-location to provide readers with relevant local news, and the GPS is turned on by default when mobile device users go to Google Maps.”
Adhikari suggests that Google’s mobile-related legal woes in the EU may impact its plans. So could the typically limited advertising budgets of small, local businesses. On the other hand, Google Glass could be the perfect platform for hyperlocal content, placing information relevant to our surroundings right in front of our eyeballs. If they invest in true local engagement, physically sending in humans to survey the landscape, this just might pay off for Google. If so, perhaps it will help offset the company’s declining paid-search revenue.
Cynthia Murrell, September 12, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Image Rendition in Display Template for Content Search on Sharepoint 2013
September 12, 2013
The Sharepoint 2013 blog explains how to enhance image results in the post Sharepoint Search Vegas Style, Display Template with Image Renditions. Sharepoint 2013’s Image Rendition enables one to use specific image renditions combined with Channels. This is particularly important when using mobile devices, since smaller images used with Channels allow for a superior performance on websites for mobile devices. This article focuses on the steps needed to use Image Renditions in Display Template for Content Search web part. The article explains that after creating a page and configuring the web part to display only the images desired,
“I opened SharePoint Designer and made a copy of Item_Pictures3Lines.html.
I called the file Item_Picture3vegasLines.html. At line 50, there is a code: var pictureURL = $getItemValue(ctx, “Picture URL”);
I added: var vegasURL=pictureURL + “?RenditionID=5″;At line 71, I removed a class: <div class=”cbs-picture3LinesImageContainer” id=”_#= pictureContainerId =#_”> This removed class sets image to 100px width and 100px height.
The code looks like this: <div id=”_#= pictureContainerId =#_”>”
From there, the author adds an image title next to the image with the code: <div style=”float:left;margin-bottom:5px;” id=”_#= pictureContainerId =#_”>. (The article also includes the full code for Item_Picture3vegasLines.html.)
Chelsea Kerwin, September 12, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Search via Cascading Style Sheets
September 11, 2013
Short honk: We thought that one of our three or four readers would be interested in a CSS-centric approach to full-text search. The details, code, and a demonstration are available in “Client-Side Full-Text Search in CSS.” Go for it.
Stephen E Arnold, September 11, 2013
Anonymizing Writing Style
September 11, 2013
Author J.K. Rowling recently learned firsthand how sophisticated analytics software has become. It was a linguistic analysis of the text in The Cuckoo’s Calling‘s which unmasked her as the popular crime-novel’s author “Robert Galbraith.” (These tools were originally devised to combat plagiarism.) Now, I Programmer tells us in “Anonymouth Hides Identity,” open-source software is being crafted to foil such tools, and give writers “stylometric anonymity.”
Whether a wordsmith just wants to enjoy a long-lost sense of anonymity, as the wildly successful author of the Harry Potter series attempted to do, or has more high-stakes reasons to hide behind a pen name, a team from Drexel University has the answer. The students from the school’s Privacy, Security, and Automation Lab (PSAL) just captured the Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award at this year’s Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium for their paper on the subject. The article reveals:
The idea behind Anonymouth is that sylometry can be a threat in situations where individuals want to ensure their privacy while continuing to interact with others over the Internet. A presentation about the program cites two hypothetical scenarios:
*Alice the Anonymous Blogger vs.Bob the Abusive Employer
*Anonymous Forum vs. Oppressive Government. . . .
The JStylo-Anonymouth (JSAN) framework is work in progress at PSAL under the supervision of assistant professor of computer science, Dr. Rachel Greenstadt. It consists of two parts:
*JStylo – authorship attribution framework, used as the underlying feature extraction employing a set of linguistic features
*Anonymouth – authorship evasion (anonymization) framework, which suggests changes that need to be made.
The admittedly very small study discussed in the paper found that 80 percent of participants were able to produce anonymous documents “to a limited extent.” It also found certain constraints– it was more difficult to anonymize existing documents than new creations, for example. Still, this is an interesting development, and I am sure we will see more efforts in this direction.
Cynthia Murrell, September 11, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Electronic Book Sales Declining
September 11, 2013
Interesting. I didn’t think the move toward digital books was fad, but now Rough Type reports on “The Flattening of E-Book Sales.” Blogger Nicholas Carr noted in January that e-book sales had declined last year, and now shares evidence that the slide continues. He writes:
“The Association of American Publishers reports that in the first quarter of 2013, overall e-book sales in the U.S. trade market grew by just 5 percent over where they were in the same period in 2012. The explosive growth of the last few years has basically petered out, according to the AAP numbers.”
Why? Carr suggests several reasons, including my own suspicion—that enthused early adopters have just about finished transitioning their libraries to the digital format. Other factors could include the realization that e-books work better for some sorts of books than others. Perhaps more importantly, e-books save readers much less cash than expected; most are not much cheaper than a paperback version. He also cites the waning popularity of dedicated e-readers:
“Most intriguing, to me, is the possible link between the decline in dedicated e-readers (as multitasking tablets take over) and the softening of e-book sales. Are tablets less conducive to book buying and reading than e-readers were?”
I personally don’t see why they would be, but then I’ve never worked with an e-reader myself—I didn’t see the point when the much more versatile tablets were hitting the market. Is there something special about the e-reader experience?
See the write-up for more facts and figures on e-book sales. Will the decline continue, or will the market settle into a post-novelty plateau?
Cynthia Murrell, September 11, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Sorting Through Big Data the Right Way with Web Analytics
September 11, 2013
On B2C, an article titled 5 Web Analytics Truths for Smart Digital Marketing mentions different approaches to finding the relevant data for your business. The first suggestion is catering to the staff on hand. People at different levels have different focuses, and an open conversation about what they want to learn from the data at hand might be invaluable. At the same time, how you view the data in powerful tools such as Google Analytics can make all the difference to the impression it makes on you. The article explains,
“Today’s analytics platforms… are very powerful and allow us the ability to go beyond simplistic hit collection, and really dive into rich data and patterns. You can easily report and derive insights with visitor segmentation, have quick visibility into buyer or non-buyer behavior, group content by asset type, measure gated or ungated content consumption, and relatively easily run a cohort analysis. These are just a few views that could be utilized when segmenting your data.”
Another piece of advice is to optimize while tracking everything you can. Keeping technology up to date is imperative, yes, but only if you are using it to its full potential. Altogether, the article provides a handful of the painful truths about the reality of smart digital marketing.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 11, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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