xPatterns in the Context of Pattern-Based Strategy

Posted on March 15, 2011 by

Olly Downs
Chief Scientist, Atigeo

In reflecting with internal and external colleagues in the past few weeks and hearing from Gartner analysts, I’ve become aware of the emerging area of Pattern-Based Strategy. Pattern-Based Strategy is the wave of organizations transitioning to discovery of and adaptation to trends in their business and industry.

I wanted to describe xPatterns in the context of this trend.  One of the most mature technologies leveraged by organizations driving Pattern-Based Strategy is Predictive Analytics. Predictive Analytics is usually delivered using a suite of tools run by a team of statistical analysts on bespoke problems in the BI team.  Predictive Analytics’ next wave is the downward penetration of Predictive Analytics practices to businesses without statistical analysts on staff, or as an in-house BI function.  This penetration is being precipitated by the emergence of Predictive Modeling Solutions, out-of-the-box technologies that make it possible for marketing and business personnel to build predictive models to analyze and take action upon their structured enterprise data.

Analogously, many enterprises are becoming aware of the need to be able to act on silos of increasingly dynamic data that are unstructured.  Today, the most advanced enterprises create and maintain semantic ontologies to allow them to identify and act on semantic concepts expressed in their unstructured data, we call this space Content Analytics.  This is actually a data structuring process, which is hard to scale, and manual to perform.  For example, who would have thought of the association between “winning” and “Charlie Sheen” just a few weeks ago?  xPatterns provides the next generation of unstructured data processing solution – Learning Semantic Search. xPatterns dynamically creates and adapts models of semantic relevance, and makes semantic connections actionable. Such connections for example, can be between the persona, location, and context of an individual, and relevant news or offers, or public discussion of a brand or product.

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Private. Personal. Portable.

Posted on February 8, 2011 by

Data Privacy Day 2011 focused on, “a celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information.”  The issue of online personal privacy is heating up and lawmakers are considering federal regulation of online tracking. While online tracking technologies are used to enable targeting and personalization of online ads, content, and services…often making a user’s online experience more relevant and/or convenient…there are also major concerns regarding user privacy. “In this networked world, in which we are thoroughly digitized, with our identities, locations, actions, purchases, associations, movements, and histories stored as so many bits and bytes, we have to ask – who is collecting all of this – what are they doing with it  – with whom are they sharing it?”

Today’s model for personalization involves tracking, collecting, and exchanging data about YOU.  While some of this data is generalized based on location, demographics, and behavior other components can include personally identifiable information or cohorts of semi-personal data. Where and how YOUR information is snagged, stored, shared and even sold is largely outside of your control. But we see a very different future of privacy taking hold, where you don’t have to retract from the online world to maintain your privacy or alter your behavior to avoid intrusive tracking.

Imagine if YOUR information was transformed into a truly private and portable persona – and put YOU in charge.

This future of personalization will enable a new wave of innovation for online experiences and services without requiring federal regulation, that many fear will stifle growth and commerce. You could receive personalized content and experiences based on your preferences, without ANY specific components actually being revealed to an outside party. With privacy based approaches to user data, trusted applications acting as a “concierge” will host an understanding of you, derived from your persona, which will bring together: preferences, behavior, social graph, location info, your roles/intents, and much more.

For example, a user might want Hertz and the Marriott to get access to their identity, location, and preferences when planning a trip, but not when they are browsing the news or going to the park with their kids. Or they may want Facebook friends to be able to get their music preferences so they can be invited to concerts of their favorite artist. The “concierge” will act on your behalf without revealing the contents of your persona. It WILL enable 3rd party applications to facilitate an understanding of what ad, offer, or item of content may be most relevant, but NEVER specifically why.

The technology allows a unique approach to privacy; to assess a particular piece of content, the attributes within the persona do not need to be shared with the content provider. The content description and any semantic metadata are simply indexed with xPatterns and under the permission and control of the owner, only a “score” of the content affinity to the persona is presented to enabled content providers. In Atigeo’s version of the persona, the contents are expressed in unstructured form as lists of lists of concepts in combination with semantically-expressed spatial, temporal, and behavioral context. When this data is applied to xPatterns indexes of content semantically appropriate actions, items, and offers can be presented to the user at a meaningful time by the content provider.

xPatterns Persona

This model requires a rich understanding of the relationships between different themes and concepts that can in part be learned from the actions that people take. However, equally important is the learning derived from how things are described and talked about relative to one another (which really conveys what something means). With the use of hierarchy-free ontologies, Atigeo’s xPatterns enables systems, in real time, to determine semantic relationships between concepts – simply from reading and reviewing large bodies of unstructured text information about the domain.

 

 

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Unified View of the Customer. Let’s Do It!

Posted on January 21, 2011 by

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”).

ontology example

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!

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