David Boardman
Vice President Product Strategy, Atigeo
Olly Downs
Chief Scientist, Atigeo
It’s a battle cry heard around the world in enterprises and start-ups. Hundreds, if not thousands of these initiatives start every day. From the social networking start-up to the world’s largest enterprises…They all start by getting a group of people to decide on what data to put on a profile. Sounds easy right? Try it. Get a group, much less departments within an enterprise or competing corporations, to agree on what data is important to collect. Next, hand out a schema to individual or enterprise software providers, and convince them to change their system to query your definition of the consumer. It’s hard!
There is hope. The semantic web promises to make all of this easier; where the meaning (semantics) of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to “understand” and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use web content. The fuel of the semantic web is ontologies. It’s possible to envision a semantic web where ontologies are used to develop a deep understanding of a customer with a standard set of tools to access and manipulate.
Sounds great. But the semantic web isn’t here yet. Do we need to wait until the ontology and schema are standardized by each industry?
We have a proposal to realize the vision of the semantic web now, while we wait for ontologies to emerge and gain mass adoption. We call it Schema-Agnostic Action on a Profile.
Imagine if you could launch a unified view of the customer initiative and didn’t have to get a group of people or departments to agree on what data to collect or what format that data should adhere to. Now imagine third party applications could query this profile without understanding the structure and content. This transformational approach would allow a more unified view of the customer, initiatives to take less time/ require less effort, and yield greater results.
Schema-Agnostic Action on a Profile
We want to share what we think is one of the most unique concepts behind the technology at Atigeo – the notion that it is possible to act on the attributes of an entity without knowledge of the schema with which that entity is represented.
To share or cooperatively act on the profile of an entity (business, person, object, thing) today requires agreement between the parties interacting in terms of the profile or content attributes/metadata. Take for example MPEG7/21 efforts around media metadata.
Most commonly, systems interact through query-style interfaces where results are returned based on attributes or filters on attributes that are matched. Among the most sophisticated systems today, some are able to step beyond attribute matching to exploit ontologies, graphically-expressed relationships between attributes or attribute sets. These allow relationships that are understood (“my sister is my son’s aunt” and “the Nexus One is a Google Android-based cellular phone”).
Not only do the underlying semantics of some domains evolve rapidly, but often “local terminologies” develop for the same concepts that subsequently need to be reconciled. (BTW – the latter turns out to be a very interesting graph-theoretic problem. See the work of the SHER team at IBM Research).
There are many domains for which there isn’t a standard data format. Additionally, there are many more domains for which, until the Semantic Web becomes pervasive, ontologies don’t yet exist.
Our technology is a solution to automatic hierarchy-free ontology discovery. As a corollary, this allows us the ability to determine affinity of an unstructured profile to content in the absence of “structured/direct match.” Uniquely, the ontology discovery process allows learning, refinement and expansion through user interaction, and through real-time tracking of content generated in the domain of question.
Ok – Got It. But So What?
Imagine an enterprise launches yet another unified view of the customer initiative. Now instead of teams of people battling it out over what attribute should go on a profile, we just set up a profile and start attaching data to it. Now imagine handing out a set of APIs to enterprise IT staff and 3rd party application developers that allow them to act on the unified view of the consumer without providing a schema in a domain for which there isn’t an ontology. Possible? With a more humanistic query language that understands the meaning of the data, the process, and the persona, applications can be built quickly without being constrained by the definition of the data.
In our next blog posts we will explore the proposed framework for a transformational query language that breaks the schema and ontology shackles off of the developer and the data they are acting on. Additionally, we will illustrate how this technology allows a unique approach to privacy. Stay tuned!
