Looking Towards 2015’s Data Trends
March 5, 2015
Here we go again! Another brand new year and it is time to predict where data will take us. For the past few years it has been all about the big data and while it has a solid base, other parts of the data science are coming into the limelight. While LinkedIn is a social network for professionals, one can also read articles on career advice, hot topics, and new trends in fields. Kurt Cagle is a data science expert and has written on the topic for over ten years. His recent article, “Ten Trends In Data Science In 2015” from December was posted on LinkedIn.
He calls the four data science areas the Data Cycle: analysis, awareness, governance, and acquisition. From Cagle’s perspective, 2014 saw big data has matured, data visualization software is in high demand, and semantics is growing. He predicts 2015 will hold much of the same:
“…with the focus shifting more to the analytics and semantic side, and Hadoop (and Map/Reduce without Hadoop) becoming more mainstream. These trends benefit companies looking for a more comprehensive view of their information environment (both within and outside the company), and represent opportunities in the consulting space for talented analysts, programmers and architects.”
Data visualization is going to get even bigger in the coming year. Hybrid data stores with more capabilities will become more common, semantics will grow even larger and specializing companies will be bought up, and there will be more competition for Hadoop. Cable also predicts work be done on a universal query language and data analytics are moving beyond the standard SQL.
His ending observations explain that data silos will be phased into open data platforms, making technology easier not just for people to use but also for technology to be compliant with each other.
Whitney Grace, March 05, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint On Premises Is Alive
March 5, 2015
The recent news of the upcoming release of SharePoint 2016 has a lot of folks breathing a deep sigh of relief. On-premises support is important for a lot of organizations. Redmond Magazine covers the latest in their article, “SharePoint MVPs: ‘On-Prem is Very Much Alive and Well.’”
The article begins:
“A number of prominent SharePoint MVP experts say they are confident that the on-premises server edition of SharePoint has a long future despite Microsoft’s plans to extend the capabilities of its online counterpart — Office 365 — as well as options to host it in a public cloud service such as Azure. At the same time, many realize that customers are increasingly moving (or considering doing so) some or all of their deployments to an online alternative, either by hosting it in the cloud or moving to Office 365 and SharePoint Online.”
Recent news suggests that a preview of SharePoint 2016 will be available in May. Stephen E. Arnold runs a helpful news service, ArnoldIT.com, devoted to all things search. His SharePoint coverage focuses on the latest tips, news, and tricks, and can be found on his dedicated SharePoint feed. It will be interesting to see the final details of SharePoint 2016 and how well it is received by the user community.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 05, 2015
Good News for Textbook Publishers
March 4, 2015
I read “Students Reject Digital textbooks.” Textbook publishers have embraced slicing and dicing with alacrity. The idea is that a new textbook or collection of readings can be assembled with little input from a human editor. The future of automatically output texts seemed to be zeros and ones.
According to the write up some students are not too thrilled with digital textbooks. I know that find the iPad and Kindle a lousy way to read textbooks with illustrations, charts, and graphs. The iPad, for example, does not allow me to scale up an illustration in the reference book for Sony Vegas Professional. As a result, the illustrations are useless. A printed book delivers an image I can view. Score one for print in my experience.
The article reports:
As Good E Reader reports, a new survey by Student Monitor found that 87% of the students they spoke to preferred to buy or borrow textbooks as physical books. And a study from the University of Washington recently showed that one in four students who were given free digital textbooks still went out and bought a hard copy version, because they think it’s easier to take in information when they read it on paper as opposed to on a screen. And they’re probably right: last summer, a study found that readers absorb more information from paper books than from Kindles, and of course, if you’re up late studying, it’ll be easier to get to sleep afterward if you haven’t been staring at a backlit screen. I just hope that all these tech-eschewing students have got backpacks with strong shoulder straps.
Will textbooks become available in paper? Publishers want to make money, so paper may be the Bugatti Veryrons of education. Digital, despite its warts, may prove to be the easier path to textbook revenue. How does one search a textbook in paper? Not very easily, but the same statement applies to many digital volumes I am licensed to use. And learning? Publishing is usually about money I assert.
Stephen E Arnold, March 4, 2015
Silobreaker Forms Cyber Partnership with Norwich University
March 4, 2015
I learned that cyber OSINT capable Silobreaker has partnered with Silobreaker. Norwich, the oldest private military college in the US, has a sterling reputation for cyber security courses and degree programs. The Silobreaker online threat intelligence product will be used in the institution’s cyber forensics classes.
Silobreaker’s cyber security product automatically collects open source information from news, blogs, feeds and social media. The system provides easy to use tools and visualizations to make sense of the content.
Kristofer Månsson, CEO and Co-Founder of Silobreaker told Beyond Search:
By offering Silobreaker as part of their studies, Norwich University is addressing the need for a more holistic approach to threat intelligence in cyber security. This partnership showcases the power of Silobreaker to provide relevant context beyond the technical parameters of a threat, hack or a new malware. Understanding the threat landscape and anticipating potential risks will unquestionably also require the analysis of geopolitics, business and world events, which often influence and prompt attacks. We are excited to continue working with Norwich University and to open up the young minds of tomorrow to the ever-evolving cyber landscape.
Silobreaker is used by more than 80 Norwich students. The university offers the product across its cyber security classes including Cyber Criminalistics, Cyber Investigation and Network Forensics. Students learn how to apply Silobreaker’s next generation system to intelligence gathering in the context of their investigations. Students are required to use the technology throughout their independent research projects.
Aron Temkin, dean of the College of Professional Schools said:
In order to maintain our excellence in cyber security research and training, we need to stay on top of the latest emerging technologies. Silobreaker is a powerful tool that is both user-friendly and flexible enough to fit within our cyber education programs.
Dr. Peter Stephenson, director of the university’s Center for Advanced Computing and Digital forensic added:
Students can get useful output quickly, and we do not have to turn a semester forensics class into a ‘How To Use Silobreaker’ session. Cyber events do not occur in a vacuum. There is context around them that often is hard to see. Silobreaker solves that. It cuts through the mass of information available on the Internet and helps our students get to the meat of an issue quickly and with a variety of ways of accessing and displaying it. This is a new way to look at cyber forensics.
Silobreaker is a data analytics company specializing in cyber security and risk intelligence. The company’s products help intelligence professionals to make sense of the overwhelming amount of data available today on the web. Silobreaker collects large volumes of open source data from news, blogs, feeds and social media and provides the tools and visualizations for analyzing and contextualizing such data. Customers save time by working more efficiently through big data-sets and improve their expertise and knowledge from examining and interpreting the data more easily. For more information, navigate to www.silobreaker.com.
Interviews with Silobreaker’s Mat Bjore are available via the free Search Wizards Speak service.
Opening Watson to the Masses
March 4, 2015
IBM is struggling financially and one of the ways they hope to pull themselves out of the swamp is to find new applications for its supercomputers and software. One way they are trying to cash in on Watson is to create cognitive computer apps. EWeek alerts open source developers, coders, and friendly hackers that IBM released a bunch of beta services: “13 IBM Services That Simplify The Building Of Cognitive Watson Apps.”
IBM now allows all software geeks the chance to add their own input to cognitive computing. How?
“Since its creation in October 2013, the Watson Developer Cloud (WDC) has evolved into a community of over 5,000 partners who have unlocked the power of cognitive computing to build more than 6,000 apps to date. With a total of 13 beta services now available, the IBM Watson Group is quickly expanding its developer ecosystem with innovative and easy-to-use services to power entirely new classes of cognitive computing apps—apps that can learn from experience, understand natural language, identify hidden patterns and trends, and transform entire industries and professions.”
The thirteen new IBM services involve language, text processing, analytical tools, and data visualization. These services can be applied to a wide range of industries and fields, improving the way people work and interact with their data. While it’s easy to imagine the practical applications, it is still a wonder about how they will actually be used.
Whitney Grace, March 04, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
OpenText Innovation Tour
March 4, 2015
The post on the CEO Blog on Opentext titled Innovation Tour 2015 Kicks Off announces the 15 city tour from a company acquiring technology, not developing it. The company seems unperturbed by this disparity, and touts their excitement to “simplify, transform and accelerate” operations in 2020. The tour will visit four continents and aims to reach out to the companies partners and customers along the way. The blog past written by CEO Mark Barrenechea says,
“Some of the exciting innovations I plan to share on the tour include the very topical cloud and analytics. Since the cloud offers huge benefits to customers, we’ve enhanced our cloud offerings with the addition of subscription pricing and we’ve launched OpenText CORE—an on-demand SaaS solution for cloud-based document sharing and collaboration. We’ve also invested in a predictive analytics platform for all our EIM solutions…Analytics is a powerful addition to our portfolio.”
The tour promises exhibitions, keynote speakers and roundtable discussions. The only question for interested parties may be, can they overhype this tour? Apparently not, with this year’s focus being the Digital First-World and the revolutionary changes that OpenText suspects will take place this decade. It seems that if you miss your chance to participate in the innovation tour, you will never catch up to the companies that do.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 04, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Enterprise Search: Is Keyword Search a Lycra-Spandex Technology?
March 3, 2015
I read a series of LinkedIn posts about why search may be an enterprise application flop. To access the meanderings of those who believe search is a young Bruce Jenner, you will have to sign up for LinkedIn and then wrangle an invitation to this discussion. Hey, good luck with this access to LinkedIn thing.
Over the years, enterprise search has bulked up. The keyword indexing has been wrapped in layers of helper code. For example, search now classifies, performs work flows operations, identifies entities, supports business intelligence dashboards, delivers self service Web help, handles Big Data, and dozens of other services.
Image Source: www.sochealth.co.uk.
I have several theories about this chubbification of keyword search. Let me highlight the thoughts that I jotted down as I worked through the “flop” postings on LinkedIn.
First, keyword search is not particularly useful to some people looking for information in an organization. The employee has to know what he or she needs and the terminology to use to unlock the secrets of the index. Add some time pressure and keyword search becomes infuriating. The fix, which began when Fulcrum Technologies pitched a platform approach to search, was to make search a smaller part of a more robust information management solution. You can still buy pieces of the original 1980s Fulcrum technology from OpenText today.
Second, system users continue to perceive results list as a type of homework. The employee has to browse the results list, click on documents that may contain the needed information, scan the document, identify the factoid or paragraph needed, copy it to another document, and then repeat the process. Employees want answers. What better way to deliver those answers than a “point and click” interface? Just pick what one needs and be done with the drudgery of the keyword search.
Third, professionals working in organizations want to find information from external sources like Web pages and blogs and from internal sources such as the server containing the proposals or president’s PowerPoint presentations. Enterprise search is presented as a solution to information access needs. The licensee quickly learns that most enterprise search systems require money, engineers, and time to set up so that content from disparate sources can be presented from a single interface. Again employees grouse when videos from YouTube and from the training department are not in the search results. Some documents containing needed information are not in the search system’s index but a draft version of the document is available via a Bing or Google search.
Fourth, the enterprise search system built on keywords lacks intelligence. For many vendors the solution is to add semantic intelligence, dynamic personalization which figures out what an employee needs by observing his information behaviors, and predictive analytics which just predicts what is needed for the company, a department and an individual.
Fifth, vendors have emphasized that a smart organization must have a taxonomy, a list of words and concepts tailored to the specific organization. These terms enrich the indexing of content. To make taxonomy management easy as pie, search vendors have tossed in editorial controls for indexing, classification, and hit boosting so that certain information appears whether the employee asked for the data or not.
In short order, the enterprise search system looks quite a bit like the “Obesity Is No Laughing Matter” poster.
This state of affairs is good for consulting engineers (SharePoint search, anyone?), mid tier consulting firm pundits, failed webmasters recast as search experts, and various hangers on. The obese enterprise search system is not particularly good for the licensing organization, the employees who are asked to use the system, or for the system administrators who have to shoehorn search into their already stuffed schedule for maintaining databases, accounting systems, enterprise resource planning, and network services.
Search is morbidly obese. No diet is going to work. The fix, based on the research conducted for my new monograph CyberOSINT is that a different approach is needed. Automated collection, analysis, and outputs are the future of information access.
Keyword search is a utility and available in NGIA systems. Unlike the obese keyword search systems, NGIA information access has been engineered to deliver more integrated services to users relying on mobile devices as well as traditional desktop computers.
Obese search is no laughing matter. One cannot make a utility into an NGIA system. However, and NGIA can incorporate search as a utility function. Keep this in mind if you are embracing Microsoft SharePoint-type systems. Net net: traditional enterprise search is splitting its seams, and it is unsightly.
Stephen E Arnold, March 3, 2015
Google Loon Looms
March 3, 2015
Which is grabbing more traffic: Facebook or stories about Google Loon? We know that Google has found social media a slippery fish. To address the lack of grippiness on innovation, Google is pumping up the Loon balloon.
Navigate to “Google Thinks Its Internet Balloons Will Be a $10 Billion Business.” The story reports:
…The company’s “floating cell towers in the sky” are capable of staying aloft up to six months and Google envisions its efforts eventually turning into a business that could make tens of billions of revenue dollars a year…
Where have I seen $10 estimates before. Oh, I remember. IBM Watson was going to be a $10 billion a year business. HP one upped Big Blue by assuming that it could pay $11 billion for Autonomy and make that an even more fantastic amount of billions operation. I suppose I could toss in Palantier, but why confuse people?
The “play” is that Google will form partnerships with telecommunication companies. Isn’t Google setting up its own high speed and wireless service? I don’t know much about telcos but I did pick up some info when I worked on AT&T and Bell Labs’ projects years ago. Telcos don’t like to stray too far from the shadow of the Bell Heads who came before. Outside the US, the telcos may not be exactly what they seem.
I find the notion of balloons interesting; however, I am skeptical that the various pieces will snap into place like a Darth Vadar Lego construction. Didn’t Google invest in doing stuff from satellites? Well, I suppose one should hedge one’s bets.
Stephen E Arnold, March 3, 2015
An Incomplete History of the Semantic Web
March 3, 2015
The article on the blog Realizing Semantic Web titled Semantic Web – Story So Far explores where exactly credit it due for the current state of Semantic Web technology. The author notes that as of 2004, there were very few tools for developers interested in investing time and money. Between then and 2010, quite a leap forward took place, with major improvements in the standards and practices of the Semantic Web technology. The article aims to acknowledge the people and companies that did the most important work. The list includes,
“Tim Berners Lee for believing when we all thought Semantic web might not work and will be another AI failure. And of course for his His work at the W3C. James Handler – in addition to his continued work on Semantic Web, for coming up with gems such as the definition of Semantics/Linked Data Cloud that is most effective….DBPedia & Linked Data Cloud…OWL/RDF/SKOS…Google Refine and similar efforts…BBC & other case studies…”
This list does, however, still seem incomplete and somewhat partial. The author even suggests that more input might be needed, but he only allows for two or so more additions. Is this an accurate reflection of the development of the Semantic Web?
Chelsea Kerwin, March 03, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Preview of SharePoint 2016 Available at Ignite Event
March 3, 2015
Customers were excited to hear that SharePoint 2016 would be unveiled this year, and even more excited to know that Microsoft is extending on-premises support. Now it looks like the first look at the newest version will be at the Ignite Event coming up in May. Read more details in the Redmond Magazine article, “Microsoft To Show ‘Early Version’ of SharePoint Server 2016 at Ignite Event.”
The article begins:
“Microsoft likely won’t have a SharePoint Server 2016 public preview available before its Ignite event coming up in May, but it will show an early version at the event. Bill Baer, senior product manager for SharePoint at Microsoft, explained this week that SharePoint 2016 is currently at an early development stage at Microsoft.”
Stephen E. Arnold keeps a close eye on the latest SharePoint news on his Web service, ArnoldIT.com. He has made a career out of tracking all things search. Follow his dedicated SharePoint feed to stay up to date on all the latest news, tips, and tricks. After the unveiling in May, stay tuned for additional information about SharePoint 2016, as it becomes available.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 03, 2015
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