Author James Purchase writes:

If I had to directly summarize this analysis, I would say that the SOPA-opposition is significantly more organized and vocal in using Social Media to make their point. Whether or not the social media outcry affects the outcome of the legislation remains to be seen.

Perhaps, though I hope the uproar against the law has reached the ears of even the most tech-adverse legislators. They have interns, right? Some are awkward too. Wipe out!

Cynthia Murrell, February 12, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

The project being funded is, according to the companies, the first interactive text-mining system specifically for chemistry research. Writer Ryan McBride elaborates:

The companies say that pharma and biotech outfits are expected to be the main customers for the technology. With this tool, ChemAxon and Linguamatics want drug companies or other users to be able to do chemical evaluations, hunt for new chemicals, get structure visualizations in searches and ‘explore image to structure conversion,’ according to the companies’ press release.

More personalized medical research is expected to be one application of the system. That sounds promising.

ChemAxon serves the biotechnology and pharmaceutical fields worldwide, providing chemical software development platforms as well as desktop applications.

Linguamatics  bases its data management solutions on natural language processing technology. I2E is the company’s flagship text mining software, also available in the cloud as I2E OnDemand.

Cynthia Murrell, February 9, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

We got a good overall look at the issue from the story, “Government Healthcare and Analytics Make a Good Team,”  showed how, as the title implies, this pairing is making some impressive waves in the world.

Another story, “Social Media and Politics Share Big Data Love”  showed us how Ron Paul and others have utilized social media to get a better take on the issues.

Finally, the most promising of our stories, “Government Grows Into Big Data Workhorse”  shows how governments around the globe could kick start a big data revolution.

Analytics and big data are growing by leaps and bounds. However, it seems as if government can be its best friend and often tries to be so. We’re going to keep chronicling this partnership, because we sense big things on the horizon.

Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com.

Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax, February 6, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

These current approaches are doomed. With respect to social graph curation, people have different roles at during different times. On the weekend, a reader might be interested in arts, entertainment and sports news based on a friends and family. During the week, this same person may be interested in business news based on recommendations from trading partners in the capital markets. How do readers seamlessly reconcile this?

Lamb doesn’t have the answer, but says he does know what technologies will underlie the eventual solutions: tagging, semantic extraction, disambiguation, and linked data structures (including cloud data). See the write up for more the reasoning behind each.

Semantic technology can perform useful functions. Rich media pose some special challenges. Among them are the issues of data volume and available processing power, latency, and variability in indexable content. What about a silent movie? What about a program which features interviews with individuals with a substance abuse problem who speak colloquially with a mumble?

Cynthia Murrell, February 6, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

Chiliad Chairman Patrick Gross noted a couple of challenges his company’s new CEO has already tackled:

The first is the ability to rapidly search data collections at greater scale than any other offering in the market. The second is to allow search formulation and analysis in natural language. This means that no longer is an elite class of analysts required in order to generate meaningful results, thus reducing the personnel training and skills shortages that plague alternative solutions and put timely discovery at risk. The explosion of ‘Big Data’ is real and valuable findings are buried in vast collections for both enterprises and governments. Chiliad has the opportunity to integrate its innovative, massively scalable solutions with emerging open source software to build customized solutions for the largest-scale clients.

It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to this shift.

Cynthia Murrell, February 2, 2012

The first post that I would like to share with you is entitled “SharePoint Joel Lists Seven Actions to Take Before Calling Microsoft Support.” This post shares helpful hints on how to solve your SharePoint issues on your own before having to involve Microsoft.

Writer Ken Toth summarizes the key points:

“The seven things you should do are: 1. Review the Service Pack and Cumulative Update Level 2. Reboot / Recycle 3. Eliminate Third-Party Add-ons as the Issue 4. Engineers Escalate / Partner / Awareness (maybe you could solve the problem in-house if you asked engineering) 5. Isolate the Issue 6. Code Issue 7. Reach Out to the Community (Twitter and/or Newsgroups).”

Many organizations use wikis to gather and share ideas on SharePoint quickly and efficiently. The post “Build the Best Microsoft SharePoint Wiki You Can Build” shares virtues and tips on how to make a SharePoint wiki work effectively for your business.

Toth states:

“To be useful, the wiki must be easy to navigate and provide all of the resources the SharePoint end user needs linked into the wiki Home page. In this way the wiki can be a one-stop shop for information about every task team members need to accomplish. Contributions are limited in order to make sure the information is accurate.”

Another noteworthy post from this week is “Excellent Resources on End User Issues for Those New to SharePoint” which points beginners with no previous experience with SharePoint to small to medium-sized implementations to resources that can be of help.

After sharing the three helpful resources for SharPoint end users, Toth notes:

“The three resources above can be quite useful for beginning users of SharePoint in smaller deployments, but if you have frustrated end users in an enterprise deployment, look to Smartlogic. The Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform provides a comprehensive solution to frustrating out of the box SharePoint search and navigation.”

As always, while these articles provide helpful tips for users to efficiently overcome the lack of out-of-the box help that SharePoint provides, It is important that users recognize the web application platform’s limitations and utilize other products like Smartlogic’s Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform. Smartlogic fills in the gaps by using semantic technology to deliver information quickly and in context.

Jasmine Ashton, January 31, 2012

According to the Pandia Search Engine News Article “Huge Problems for Search In the Enterprise” Schillerwein believes there are a few reasons why enterprise search is problematic. Users don’t account for the fact that enterprise search is different from Web Search, they have unrealistic expectations and there is a clear problem of lack of content. The Pandia article asserted: Schillerwein suggests a solution based on several elements, such as consistent coverage of information flows for processes, bringing together the worlds of structured and unstructured information, and adding context. I would agree as this ability to combine structured and unstructured data while maintaining context is key in our approach. However, when you combine the crowded jumble of tweets, social media and other data that crowd employees’ smart devices the problems with enterprise search could continue to take a downward spiral and “finding a needle in a haystack” could be easier than doing an enterprise search.

These observations triggered several questions and observations.

First, there are a number of companies offering enterprise information solutions. Many are focused on the older approach of key word queries. There are business intelligence systems which provide “find-ability” tools along with a range of useful analytic features. Although search is not the focal point of these solutions, they do provide useful visualizations and statistics on content. The problem is that most organizations are confused about what is needed and what must be done to maximize the value of systems which go beyond key word retrieval. This confusion is likely to play a far larger role in enterprise search challenges than many market analysts want to acknowledge. Instead, many solutions today seem to be making information access more confusing and problematic, not clearer and more trouble free.

Second, the challenge may be more directly related to figuring out what specific business process needs which information. Without a clear understanding of the user’s requirements, it may be difficult to deploy a system that delivers higher user satisfaction. If this hypothesis is correct, perhaps more vendors should adopt the approach we have taken at Digital Reasoning. We make an extra effort to understand what the user requires and then invest time and resources in hooking appropriate information and data into the system. No solution can deliver the right fact-based answers if the required information is not within the data store and available to the algorithms which make sense of what is otherwise noise? We think that many problems with user acceptance originate with a misunderstanding or sidestepping of user requirements and the fundamental task of getting the necessary information for the system.

Third, the terminology used to describe information retrieval and access is becoming devalued. At Digital Reasoning, we work to explain succinctly and without jargon how our next-generation system can facilitate better decision making for financial, health, intelligence, and other professional markets. We have complex numerical recipes and sophisticated systems and methods. Our focus, however, is on what the system does for a user. We have been fortunate to receive support from a range of clients from government and industry as well as the investment community for our next-generation approach. We think our strength is our focus on the customer’s need and not only our unique predictive algorithms and cloud-based solution.

To learn more about Digital Reasoning and our products, navigate to www.digitalreasoning.com .

Dave Danielson, Digital Reasoning, January 30, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

April Holmes, January 12, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

As businesses become aware that the Big Data trend is here to stay, publishers are looking for reliable support. The Apache Hadoop project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. The company offers much in the way of dealing with unstructured data and is setting the pace for consolidation as well as personalization. I came across an interesting article, “State of the World IT: Big Data, An Offer That is Formed” (The original article is in French, but http://translate.google.com works well for this gosling). We learn:

As a recognition of the market in 2011, Hadoop has also attracted the top names in the IT industry who put this framework in the heart of their range of data processing volume. One reason: the cost mainly reminded us James Markarian, executive vice president and technical director of Informatica confirming that the framework ‘helped to change the economic model of the Big Data.’ Adding that flexibility… was as a criterion for adoption.

It is clear that the excess of data will only continue to grow by the minute. Generations of search, publishing, and consolidation will continue to emerge. I recommend staying informed of the products and the specific capabilities of each. However, Big Data which is filtered may pose some interesting problems; for example, will the outputs match the pre-filtered reality? Will predictive methods work when some data are no longer in the stream? So far the cheerleading is using chants from an older, pre-filtering era. Is this a good thing or a no-thing?

Andrea Hayden, January 11, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata.

Years ago I studied at Duquesne University, a fascinating blend of Jesuit obsession, basketball, and phenomenological existentialism. If you are not familiar with this darned exciting branch of philosophy, you can dig into Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint by Franz Brentano or grind through Carl Stumpf’s The Psychological Origins of Space Perception, or just grab the Classic Comic Book from your local baseball card dealer. (My hunch is that many public relations professionals feel more comfortable with the Classic approach, not the primary texts of philosophers who focus on how ephemera and baloney affect one’s perception of reality one’s actions create.)

But my personal touchstone is Edmund Husserl’s body of work. To get the scoop on Lebenswelt (a universe of what is self-evident), you will want to skip the early work and go directly to The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. For sure, PR spam is what I would call self evident because it exists, was created by a human (possibly unaware that actions define reality), to achieve an outcome which is hooked to the individual’s identify.

Why mention the crisis of European  thought? Well, I received “American Society for Microbiology Teams Up With TEMIS to Strengthen Access to Content” in this morning’s email (January 10, 2012). I noted that the document was attributed to an individual identified as Martine Fallon. I asked to be removed from the spam email list that dumps silly news releases about Temis into my system. I considered that Martine Fallon may be a ruse like Betty Crocker. Real or fictional, I am certain she or one of her colleagues, probably schooled in an esoteric discipline such as modern dance, agronomy, and public relations are familiar with the philosophical musings of Jean Genet.

You can get a copy of Born to Lose at this link.

I recall M. Genet’s observation:

I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.

Temis, a European company in the dicey semantic game, surely appreciates the delicious irony of explaining a license deal as a “team”. The notion of strengthening access to content is another semantic bon mot. The problem is that the argument does not satisfy my existential quest for factual information; for example, look at the words and bound phrases in bold:

Temis, the leading provider of Semantic Content Enrichment solutions for the Enterprise, today announced it has signed a license and services agreement with the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), the oldest and largest life science membership organization in the world.

Do tell. Leading? Semantic content enrichment. What’s that?

What about outfits like Access Innovations, Concept Searching, Expert System SA, Smartlogic, and more than 75 other firms in the semantic space. The “leading” word is interesting but it lacks the substance of verifiable fact. Well, there’s more to the news story and the Temis pitch. Temis speaks for its client, asserting:

To serve its 40,000 members better, ASM is completely revamping its online content offering, and aggregating at a new site all of its authoritative content, including ASM’s journal titles dating back to 1916, a rapidly expanding image library, 240 book titles, its news magazine Microbe, and eventually abstracts of meetings and educational publications.

I navigated to the ASM Web site, did some poking around, and learned that ASM is rolling in dough. You can verify the outfit’s financial status at this page. But the numbers and charts allowed me to see that ASM has increasing assets, which is good. However, this chart suggests that since 2008, revenue has been heading south.

Source: http://www.faqs.org/tax-exempt/DC/American-Society-For-Microbiology.html

In my limited experience in rural Kentucky, not-for-profits embrace technology for one of three reasons. Let me list them and see if we can figure out what causes the estimable American Society for Microbiology.

1. Cost reduction. Professional associations are not usually in growth mode. Health is a hot area, but it is looking at green eyeshades covering accounting programs that have to chop jobs. Automated indexing is one of those teen fantasies about silver bullet solutions that sound good in a meeting but can prove a bit of a challenge in the real world. Not even the medical vocabularies are immune to the disease of language drift and neologisms, issues that marketers and PR professionals often ignore.
2. Declining traffic. There are folks inspired by taxonomy fire drills, boot camps, and triage sessions who assert, “Better indexing will boost traffic.” Sorry. Life does not work that way. Annoyed users may become less annoyed if the indexing changes deliver on point content. In my experience more than a single system’s indexing is needed to remediate the often lousy usage of an increasingly expensive enterprise or Web site indexing system. Once again, it is often easier to focus on a component of a far larger problem than tackling the cause of poor usage. Perhaps management, resources, and technical expertise are the issue? Again, most sales oriented organizations ignore the facts documented in Successful Enterprise Search Management.
3. Remediation of a lack of planning and management actions. I am 67, worked at a couple of reasonably respectable management consulting firms, and have had to investigate vendor compliance with statements of work in search and content processing. What I have learned is that short cuts are preferable to hard work, truism more important than facts, and hope valid than the blunt edge of reality. Without effective management, do we end up with search disasters? Perhaps.

Why focus on Temis? I previously asked the firm’s public relations expert, who seems to be more inclined to spam than research, to cease sending me meaningless spammy news releases. My request was ignored. Nifty. What fascinated me is that Temis asked me to facilitate an introduction for them to a $1.2 billion company’s president. I did this and moved on. I assumed in the manner of French cultural norms that I would be rewarded with entrecote. Wrong. My reward has been spam.

Does this illustrate how Temis perceives equity? Does the spirit of M. Genet apply? My recommendation? Check out the semantic products from the Temis competitors. I quite like Expert System SA in Bologna, Italy, and Bitext in Madrid, Spain. Great food, interesting culture, and–nota bene– no spam. One has to get the semantics correct. No spam from Italy. No spam from Spain. Hmmm. There’s a cultural message perhaps?

What PR spam connotes is what in my opinion could be characterized as desperation marketing. The phenomenon itself defines the act and its progenitor, does it not? And what about those semantics? As M. Genet allegedly said:

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

Stephen E Arnold, January 11, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com, publisher of the New Landscape of Enterprise Search which does not include an analysis of Temis and the firm’s technologies which are asserted to be from “the leading provider of semantic content enrichment solutions for the enterprise.” I just don’t believe this, but the outfit is good at spam.