In the fifteen or so years since Platt made his observation, the challenge of keeping track of what your staff knows and what they are really capable of has become considerably more complex.  Organizations are more geographically dispersed than ever before and the trend is toward more virtual offices and transient teams.  This is generally a good thing in terms of productivity and employee satisfaction but it can make expertise management extremely difficult. 

Attempts to  translate the knowledge and expertise of highly skilled people into some external form, say a knowledge-base article or tip-sheet, generally fail. This was in fact the primary cause of the downfall of most KM vendors throughout the late 90s. Not only is it nearly impossible to boil down years of experience into an easily digestible form, there are significant disincentives for the individual possessing the knowledge to do so.   The obstacle usually cited is the time and effort required,  but the real reason is that we still haven’t gotten past the scarcity view of knowledge and information.  The expert has something of value (knowledge) that others do not and if that resource is turned into a commodity that can be accessed and used independent of the expert (ie putting it into an anonymous knowledge-base or some such) they have diminished the value of that resource (its now available to everyone) as well as their own value (the expert no longer needs to be consulted).  For many reasons, this is a false argument and attitudes are starting to change as web 2.0 technologies and attitudes become more common.  But many organizations are still caught up in a knowledge hording culture.  There is still a prevailing attitude, reinforced by the current economy, that being the only one that knows how to do something means job security. 

A key to overcoming this unfortunate state of affairs is to focus on the individual as a source of knowledge rather than attempting to externalize, codify and document the knowledge itself. This has the double benefit of keeping the information current and incentivizing the expert to share.  The more people that come to me for information and assistance, the more I’m perceived as a key player in the organization.  Most people also enjoy being considered an expert.  Never underestimate the importance of ego in driving knowledge sharing. 

Staff lead seminars, tutorials, brown bag talks and formal mentoring relationships will go a long way to changing attitudes toward information sharing and will lay the foundation of a collaborative culture.  But before these activities can begin, you need to know what you know (or more accurately what your people know).  You may be able to kick start things based on your own knowledge of people in the organization or by leading a tutorial yourself, but to sustain any program of focused knowledge sharing, you need to undertake a more formal inventory.  My next post will discuss different approaches to conducting an expertise inventory and what to do with the results.  Until then.

The larger an organization gets, the more difficult it becomes to answer these questions.  An HR system may have resumes and CVs on file, but those documents are usually out of date and were likely tailored to fit a job posting rather than to reflect actual skills and interests.  If the knowledge you need lies outside of your department, or worse outside of your company altogether, connecting with the right person is difficult even if you can identify them.  Finally, if the planets align and the right people with the right expertise do manage to connect, will they be able to share information?  Will all parties use the same terminology to refer to the same thing?  Will their databases and web services be able to share information in a meaningful way?  Unless and until each of these areas is addressed, an organization will never reach its full collaboration and innovation potential.

These questions are nothing new and  have in fact been at the heart of knowledge management efforts for decades.  Attempts to answer them have yielded mixed results, usually because they are focused on a single area, technology or technique.   The phone directory might get  revised. The biography section of the company website may get a facelift. A new knowledgebase might be created.  These efforts, while admirable, are Band-Aids that do not move an organization forward in any substantive way. Even more ambitious KM initiatives generally end-up becoming siloed projects that fail to address the need for a comprehensive approach to building and sustaining collaboration.  A multipronged, integrated approach is required. Three key disciplines, when used in concert, can provide the framework and mechanisms to realize the full potential of the collaborative enterprise.

• Expertise Discovery
• Social and Organizational Network Analysis
• Semantic Information

Over the course of the next few blog posts, I will address each of these areas and how they contribute to the collaborative enterprise. These are each mature disciplines in and of themselves, but only rarely are they brought together to find that elusive “sweet spot” that maximizes collaboration and innovation.  There are a few examples, such as NASA’s POPS (People, Organizations, Projects, Skills) is probably the best example to date of bringing these techniques together, but others are emerging.  I’ll look at several over the next couple of weeks.

NASA’s People, Organizations, Projects, Skills

Unfortunately, the economic upheavals of the past two years have derailed much of this progress. I recently conducted a survey of the employees of a large organization that defunded support for their intranet as a result of the economic crisis.  This was an illuminating snapshot of corporate priorities and its consequences.  While the organization felt it could not justify expenditures on its internal web, it increased funding of its outward facing web. As a result, they have made dramatic progress on improving the usability of the web for their customers while their workplace-web has degenerated to the point of being unusable.

Out of 508 people only 3 said they could find

what they need on the corporate intranet.

Of the 508 people who responded to my survey, three said they could always find what they needed on the company intranet.  That’s not 3%. That is three people.  26% of respondents said that they have given up on looking for information on their intranet or only use it as a last resort.  An additional 20% said they rarely or never find what they need.  When a user is able to find relevant information among the 88,000 pages of content, it generally proved to be out-of-date, conflicting with other information on the intranet or just flat out wrong.  One of the main causes of this is the difficulty users have in publishing information.  27% of respondents claimed that their departments are unable to add or edit content on the intranet.  This proved to be more than just an annoyance.  Because this organization had placed its emphasis on its outward facing web, including deploying a new content management system that simplified publishing, sensitive information that belonged behind the firewall ended up being posted for all the world to see. 

This trend is likely to be self-reinforcing.  As with so many other companies, this organization was forced to make dramatic reductions in its workforce.  Among the first to go were its experienced webmasters.  This may have seemed to be a reasonable action since with the new content management system, advanced web skills were no longer required to maintain the company’s many websites.  Unfortunately, the intranet does not run on the new content management system.  As a result of the layoffs, there is no one left who knows how to publish internal content.  It seems inevitable that the intranet will continue to deteriorate.

Annual cost of time spent performing common tasks

in a company with 10,000 intranet users:

Good intranet usability (Q1)	$7.5 M/year
Average intranet usability (median)	$9.9 M/year
Poor intranet usability (Q3)	$12.9 M/year

So what is the moral of this?  Is there an actual cost to poor intranet findability and functionality?  According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen there is.  And its big.  In a study of 27 Intranets, Nielson found that employees of a company with a poorly designed and supported intranet spend about 43 hours a year performing 18 common intranet tasks.  Assuming a labor cost of $30/hr this translates to $12.9 Million per year for a company with 10,000 intranet users.  That cost drops to $9.9 Million for a company with average usability and again to $7.5 Million for companies with a “good” intranet.  This amounts to a significant savings.  As Nielson puts it:

Thus, a company with poor intranet usability would save $3 million per year if it improved its intranet usability to an average level. And a company with average intranet usability would save $2.4 million per year if it improved its intranet to the usability level found in the best 25%.

Nielson goes on to point out that these numbers only estimate the productivity gains from the common intranet tasks they tested. In addition, “most companies have their own special, mission-critical intranet tasks that by definition can’t be tested across organizations, but which usually have much more impact on overall employee performance than do the common intranet tasks.” It would follow then, that most organizations would actually realize a larger return on their investment than demonstrated by the most common tasks.

The past couple of years have been difficult for most organizations and knee-jerk cost saving actions are understandable, but short-sighted.  While engaging customers and clients is essential to any organization, without supporting the information needs of staff, no one will be able to respond to the needs of those customers and clients.  Such fuzzy savings as productivity gains rarely win out over line-items cost reductions such as reducing headcount.  But when headcount has already been reduced, enabling the survivors to do their jobs more effectively through access to information is the only reasonable response.  Without adequate support of internal knowledge sharing environments, such as a well crafted and supported intranet, “communication, collaboration and transparency” are likely to slip into the waste bin of empty slogans.

The Fourth International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing

SEMAPRO 2010

October 25 – 30, 2010 – Florence, Italy

Since its inauguration in 2007, SEMAPRO has emerged as the leading forum for discussion of semantic technology research. I’m thrilled that OHSU is a technical co-sponsor of this year’s conference and that I have the opportunity to help shape the program.  SEMAPRO 2010 is co-located with NexTech 2010 and will be held Florence, Italy October 25-30.  The call for papers is now available and final submissions are due May 20, 2010.  The conference has a broad scope and potential topics include, but certainly are not limited to:

• Basics on semantics
• Ontology fundamentals for semantic processing
• Semantic technologies 
• Semantic Deep Web
• Semantic reasoning
• Semantic content searching
• Hypertext and hypermedia semantic
• Semantic voice-video-speech (VVS) searching
• Semantic multimedia
• Semantic social media
• Semantic networking
• Domain-oriented semantic applications
• Economics and governance of semantics technologies
• Semantic applications/platforms/tools

These topics can be discussed in terms of concepts, state of the art, research, standards, implementations, running experiments, applications, and industrial case studies. Authors are invited to submit complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other conference or journal.  All tracks are open to both research and industry contributions. Please do not hesitate to contact me or any of the other program chairs if you have any questions.

SEMAPRO 2010 Call for Papers

.

Book Review: 

David Siegel
Portfolio Hardcover, 2010
ISBN-10: 1591842778, ISBM-13: 978-1591842774

As one of those people still bitter that personal jet-packs have yet to materialize, I am always a bit skeptical of breathless depictions of the future.  David Siegel’s new book, Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business definitely falls into this category, but in this case his predictions are likely to come true.  In fact, as he repeatedly asserts, many of them already have.  Ironically, much of my cynicism about rosy-eyed predictions of the World of Tomorrow is rooted in the promise of the Semantic Web as first articulated by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila in a 2001 article in Scientific American.  In that article Lee and his W3C compatriots painted the future of the web as “an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.”  This vision has never really materialized, but to a large degree  the semantic web has.  It is just emerging in a different form and with a different emphasis.  Rather than focusing on autonomous software-agents just shy of becoming self-aware, the semantic web is all about linked-data.

Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as "a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF."

–linkeddata.org

This is the manifestation of the Semantic Web Siegel is so excited about.   He takes a broad definition of the Semantic Web focusing mainly on the importance of shared metadata (ontologies aren’t discussed in any depth until chapter 12) and illustrates with business applications, both current and potential. Each chapter enthuses about the possibilities inherent in ubiquitous, structured and meaningfully tagged information.  His prose is often a bit too evangelical for my taste. You often come across sentences like, “As you learn about new game changing technologies, keep looking for the management mind shift you’ll need to go bravely into the world of pull.” And his scenarios often have a gee-whiz flavor similar to the agent-oriented predictions of Berners-Lee’s decade old vision.

In the semantic future, information lives online, waiting to be pulled through your device-mesh.  If you’re watching a movie at home and have to go to the airport, you’ll log into the display in the waiting lounge or on the airplane, and the movie will automatically continue where you left off. Your music or favorite news station will start playing as soon as you get into your rental car, you’ve logged into your personal data locker and now the rental car (including mirror and seat adjustments) is tuned to your personal ontology.  In fact, all your preferences will live online, and your preferences will replace many of the products you own today.

The notion of a “personal data locker” is a good example of how Siegel’s exuberance is actually pretty well grounded.  Though he doesn’t discuss it explicitly, Personal Health Records such as Microsoft’s HealthVault and Google Health are already in place with much of the functionality Siegel predicts.  (see my post from last year on Personal Health Records) In some cases, Siegel gets things wrong, as with his discussion of the Health Insurance Privacy and Accountability Act (HIPAA) but overall he does an excellent job of presenting the current state and direction of these technologies.  Just as important, he connects them to concrete business problems without jargon that may intimidate (or bore) non-technical readers. 

Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business is what I usually classify as an airplane read; a nice business-related title that can be read easily on a flight from Portland to New York.  It is written at the level of a Discovery Channel documentary and is quite engaging.  Imagine someone at a cocktail party, (after maybe one glass of wine more than is strictly prudent)  explaining to an intelligent but not technologically savvy guest what the semantic web is and why it matters.  This book is not going to give you the depth of information available in other titles such as Allemang and Hendler’s excellent Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, but it is not intended to.  The vast majority of business readers do not need, nor want, to know the nitty-gritty details of OWL, RDFS and SPARQL.  They do need to know how semantic technologies as a whole are shaping the web and business in an information intensive world.  In that context, Siegel’s book succeeds admirably.

Last year Amazon organized a pilot study of using their Kindle DX Wireless Reading Device in place of traditional textbooks.  Oregon’s Reed College was among the seven institutions selected to participate.  This morning I received a copy of the final report of  The Reed College Kindle Study.  Reed’s study took place during the fall semester of 2009 and involved 43 students enrolled in three upper-level undergraduate courses. Participants agreed to use the Kindle DX for these classes, evaluate the features of the device and its impact on the learning experience and to assess the overall prospects of eReaders in higher education.  Reed expected about half of the eligible students would sign up.  They ended up with nearly 95%.  I suspect the fact that participants got to keep the Kindle at the end of the study may have had something to do with the high participation rate.

The students loved the reading experience on the Kindle DX and the fact that it fit so handily in a backpack. These and other perceived benefits, like paper savings and “over-the-air” distribution of course materials, weren’t surprising. What was surprising was that the single-function design of the eReader was perceived as an advantage rather than a drawback.   A multi-function netbook, or a tablet like the recently announced, much-hyped and unfortunately named iPad, apparently offer too many temptations for an easily distracted student.

Faculty in the pilot study noted, however, that use of the Kindle DX in class didn’t lead to the distractions that are typical of laptop use. Students were not tempted to check their email, browse the web, or use the Kindle in class for anything except to refer to course materials. The functional limitations of the platform, generally viewed as a shortcoming, proved to be a real benefit to class discussion dynamics.

So is this a death knell for traditional print textbooks?  Probably not.  At least not yet. In fact both students and faculty involved in the study unanimously concluded that the Kindle DX, at least in its current incarnation, was unable to meet their academic needs.  Many of the challenges reported by participants amounted to little more than annoyances that will likely be overcome as the technology matures. More troubling was the impact on discussion and comprehension of the course material.

All three courses in the study were upper-division seminars centered around careful reading and discussion of assigned texts.  Students are expected to back up their assertions and opinions with supporting evidence from the readings.  During the course of discussion the entire class needs to be able to locate references quickly in order to keep the conversation moving.  The cumbersome navigation in the Kindle and the slow page refresh rate made this impossible.  (To be fair, I have yet to see an eReader, the nook included, that does facilitate this). As a result, students reported that their in-class conversations were “more superficial and less supported by texts” than was normally the case.  After a month, many students abandoned the Kindle in favor of traditional textbooks, even though this meant forfeiting the gadget. The ultimate result of this frustration, along with the difficulty of jotting down notes on an electronic text, was that student’s comprehension of the material plummeted.

By far the most troublesome feedback we received during the study was from a faculty member who felt that his students’ comprehension of the reading materials suffered from use of the Kindle DX. He speculated that the difficulty students encountered with highlighting and taking notes on the device eventually caused them to read passively, thereby reducing their ability to reflect on and retain complex information. He saw evidence of this in assignments as well as in class discussion.

In order for eReaders to truly replace traditional hardcopy textbooks, they need to emulate some of the most basic features currently only available from dead trees.  Namely “the flexibility and ease of jotting notes on paper, flipping from page to page, and spreading multiple texts across a desk.“  Tablet PC’s may be able to take on this role as they mature and students will just have to control their urge to Tweet in class.  The Reed Kindle study does end on a hopeful note for the future of eReaders in academia, concluding that “once technical and other issues have been addressed, eReaders will play a significant, possibly a transformative, role in higher education.”

Collexis creates a professional profile of a scientist by mining public information sources, such as PubMed and NIH RePORTER, for the concepts with which each researcher is most strongly associated. For example, here is a profile of OHSU’s Vice President for Research, Dan Dorsa . In addition to the basics, contact information, research interests, funding, publications, and the like, the profile shows Dr. Dorsa’s collaboration network,  trends in his activities and identifies similar experts at our institution.  Version 3.5 adds some incremental improvements in the functionality.  A few of the highlights are CV integration with the profile (bye bye InfoEd GENIUS), self-serve bulk data export  and bibliographic export to Endnote. (They also finally explain why the nodes in the collaboration network map keep moving in that weird psuedo-brownian way.)

This is all welcome news, but what got me all atwitter this morning was the announcement that Collexis will be working with Mike Conlon to develop a connector between Collexis and VIVO.  Dr. Conlon is Associate CIO for IT Architecture for the University of Florida and Principal Investigator on the VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists project.  VIVO is “an NIH funded study to develop and implement a semantic web-based platform for representing faculty interests, activities and accomplishments, and make that data available to search, social networking and a new generation of interoperable collaborative applications.”  In short, VIVO aims to create a national system of federated research expertise directories. 

The project received a significant vote of confidence from the National Institutes of Health last October in the form of a $12.2 million NCRR grant. The planned Collexis / VIVO connector will publish information from a Collexis application, like OHSU’s Research Expertise Locator, to VIVO and will present VIVO search results within any Collexis-powered portal. Collexis will also offer hosted VIVO implementations to their customers.  No timeframe has been given for the availability of the connector.  This is understandable since the VIVO consortium hasn’t finalized their implementation and spec.

The new version of Research Profiling also marks a significant expansion of the scope of the Collexis platform by incorporating information beyond the life sciences in the form of Elsevier’s SCOPUS.  The first implementation of this new range of subjects (based on release 7.2 of the Collexis engine) will be for the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State, eventually expanding to 18 institutions for a statewide deployment.

The User Group call wrapped up with an overview of two forthcoming features that won’t be included in the 3.5 release, but that are pretty exciting.  First is “community functionality” which will allow users to search for expertise across institutions with Collexis implementations.  According to Christian Herzog, Managing Director of Science, Technical and Medical Markets for Collexis, this functionality is ready to go.  A demonstration implementation has been deployed at the University of Michigan Medical School.  But rather than simply opening up cross institution search, Collexis has wisely decided to consult its customers first to determine how (and if) this could best serve them.  Conversations around this topic will happen over the next couple of weeks, but all of us on the call were enthusiastic.

The second “coming soon” feature demonstrated on the call was a new Metrics Module (shown below).  This module incorporates data visualization tools into the Research Profiling toolset allowing you to compare departmental (or even individual) research performance over time and according to whatever rubric is meaningful to your institution.  This will provide capabilities similar to another Elsevier offering, SciVal, but will be a lot cheaper. This functionality will not be part of the public portal, but will be available to authorized users within each institution.

It will be interesting to see how the partnership between Collexis and VIVO plays out.  Prior to VIVO receiving the NCRR grant, Collexis had been in discussions with the University of Pittsburgh (my alma mater) to form a similar alliance with the Digital|Vita project under Titus Schuyler.  If nothing else, it demonstrates that Collexis is in tune with developments in research networking and rather than trying to dominate is more interested in integrating and collaborating.  I think this is a good sign.  After all, isn’t that the whole point?

• Where data or collections of data are published it is critical that they be published with a clear and explicit statement of the wishes and expectations of the publishers with respect to re-use and re-purposing of individual data elements, the whole data collection, and subsets of the collection. This statement should be precise, irrevocable, and based on an appropriate and recognized legal statement in the form of a waiver or license.

  When publishing data make an explicit and robust statement of your wishes.

• Many widely recognized licenses are not intended for, and are not appropriate for, data or collections of data. A variety of waivers and licenses that are designed for and appropriate for the treatment of data are described here. Creative Commons licenses (apart from CCZero), GFDL, GPL, BSD, etc are NOT appropriate for data and their use is STRONGLY discouraged.

  Use a recognized waiver or license that is appropriate for data.

• The use of licenses which limit commercial re-use or limit the production of derivative works by excluding use for particular purposes or by specific persons or organizations is STRONGLY discouraged. These licenses make it impossible to effectively integrate and re-purpose datasets and prevent commercial activities that could be used to support data preservation.

  If you want your data to be effectively used and added to by others it should be open as defined by the Open Knowledge/Data Definition – in particular non-commercial and other restrictive clauses should not be used.

• Furthermore, in science it is STRONGLY recommended that data, especially where publicly funded, be explicitly placed in the public domain via the use of the Public Domain Dedication and Licence or Creative Commons Zero Waiver. This is in keeping with the public funding of much scientific research and the general ethos of sharing and re-use within the scientific community.

  Explicit dedication of data underlying published science into the public domain via PDDL or CCZero is strongly recommended and ensures compliance with both the Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data and the Open Knowledge/Data Definition.

The Panton Principles website features an quickly growing list of endorsees of the principles who have signed a petition for adoption, along with a form for adding your own endorsement.

Beyond this declaration of principles, the working group is trying to make putting them into practice as simple as possible.  One tool they have recently launched is the “Is It Open Data?” service.  The idea behind the service is to provide a brokerage for data use enquiries. The mechanism is simple, basically a web form with some boilerplate text seeking clarification of the “openness” of any given dataset. Once your enquiry has been submitted, the service helps to identify the body that can authoritatively answer permissions and usage questions.  The responses are publicly available on the “Is It Open Data?” website.  Since the service is new, there isn’t much there in terms of existing enquiries or responses, but hopefully people will avail themselves of the idea and the network effect will kick in, making this a central point of information sharing about open data.  As awareness of the Panton Principles grows and hopefully they are adopted, data owners will proactively indicate the openness of their data.  The Open Knowledge Foundation has provided some handy icons that can be added to your website to make it obvious.

 open data web buttons

"Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefitted from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008." – Microsoft statement on Google Buzz.

Microsoft is absolutely correct that people want aggregation rather than yet another social media platform, but this may actually be making an argument for adopting Buzz. There are two fundamental obstacles facing wholesale adoption of social media. First, most of the current tools and services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others still lie "above-the-flow" where people have to, as Michael Idinopulos puts it, "step out of the daily flow of work and reflect, codify, and share something about what they do" rather than integrating these tools in the normal process of their day to day work. Buzz, is attempting to move social computing "in-flow" (but then so did Microsoft and Yahoo! with underwhelming results) and according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, to further "bridge the gap between work and leisure." Microsoft might actually have a better shot at accomplishing this if they integrated social media (both inside and outside of the firewall) within Outlook and have taken some tentative steps in this direction. (I’m writing this blog post within MS-Word which will then publish it directly to connected-knowledge). However, most enterprise IT shops would likely disable these features in their Office installations anyway, at least until they drink the Enterprise 2.0 kool-aid. In the meantime, Google’s user-base may or may not start to migrate their status updates from Twitter to Buzz. Facebook, with half a billion users, isn’t going anywhere.

The real opportunity Google should be focused on is intelligent aggregation. Staying current across the proliferation of social media platforms is becoming overwhelming and introducing yet another tool suite isn’t going to help. Google has built its reputation on helping people find relevant information from the internet as a whole. Buzz should focus on helping us find what we want to see out of our increasingly complex social networks. There is at least some thought in this direction within Google. In a New York Times interview, Google vice president for product development Bradley Horowitz said "The stream of messages has become a torrent. We think this has become a Google-scale problem." He is correct in his assessment, but just adding Facebook feeds to your Gmail inbox isn’t going to solve the problem. There needs to be true integration of all social computing profiles and activities at a semantic level. To date Buzz, as well as the social media aggregation and integration efforts of Microsoft and Yahoo!, have focused on "Social Sharing" rather than actual "Social Networking." Being able to post and retrieve content to multiple social sites from a central portal is convenient but not particularly meaningful. I still must maintain a Linked-In profile, a Visual CV profile, a Facebook profile, a Good Reads profile and on and on and on. Each of these profiles has its own attendant social network which remains effectively isolated from the others despite the rich potential for meaningful connections among them. If these disparate networks could all be integrated in a semantically rich manner, we might finally see true social networking emerge.

The groundwork for ubiquitous social computing integration is quietly forming in the work of the "Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities" initiative. SIOC (pronounced "shock") is creating an ontology to "fully describe the content and structure of most online community sites" and to "create new connections between discussion channels and posts." SIOC leverages existing semantic web technologies and schemas such as Friend of a Friend (FOAF) and the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) in order to represent online resources such as people and vocabularies. Ultimately, the specification’s authors, John G. Breslin, Uldis Bojārs hope to align SIOC with other semantic vocabularies such as the Online Presence Ontology in order to foster "Social Semantic Information Spaces" where information is socially created and maintained as well as being interlinked and machine-understandable, leading to new ways to discover information on the Web." In short, Web 3.0 will be the Social Semantic Web.This work is coming primarily out of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, at the National University of Ireland, Galway and has to this point remained a largely academic exercise. SIOC is beginning to make forays out of the ivory tower. SIOC exporters have been written for a number of blog, forum and content management system (CMS) platforms and several commercial applications have adopted the specification. The SIOC ontology has also been published as a W3C Member Submission.  

 Hopefully Google (or Microsoft, or Yahoo! … or Apple?) will recognize the opportunity to not only bring social computing "into the flow" but to move beyond just making social sharing more convenient into creating a meaningfully integrated social networking space. Combining social search, with semantic tagging and some Google secret sauce could be a truly revolutionary offering and increase the social signal within the current deluge of social noise.

The Task Group will:

• Act as a central point of reference and support for individual scientists and research institutions interested in open data in science.
• Identify practices of early adopters and document existing open scientific datasets.
• Develop principles for open data in science, and legal and technical guidance for opening up scientific data.
• Conduct and disseminate research into incentives and obstacles to opening up scientific data.

The group will strive to strengthen the international network of individuals and organizations who support open data in science – bringing together leading figures in this field as well as young researchers from a diverse range of scientific disciplines.

The final proposal is still forthcoming, but this could prove to be an extremely valuable resource to Open Science.