• Please tell us a little about yourself and your team.

My name is Jean-Marc Lazard, and I’m the founder of OpenDataSoft, which offers a turnkey solution for quickly creating open data portals and intelligent data access services. Our platform is designed to allow our clients, companies, or communities to dive right into the big data and cloud computing era. This is possible due to our experience with the issues of processing and exploiting data on a large scale, specifically on the web.

• Tell us about your project.

Our project is called OpenDataWare. OpenDataWare will be the social data platform that will allow organizations, journalists, individuals — basically anyone — to easily create their own space where they can display and share data.

• Where did you get the idea for OpenDataWare?

The idea for OpenDataWare was the result of three observations:
1/ Today, everything exists in the form of data; it never even occurs to us anymore whether or not some piece of content or information is available in digital form: that’s our definition of big data
2/ The Internet has given us the technical means to easily connect content and people, and has given rise to new practices, like social networks and cloud storage
3/ There is no social platform in the cloud that is dedicated to data, that allows you to create and use data in a participative way within a special-interest community; the only options are using online storage services or sharing services for files (like spreadsheets).
But OpenDataWare goes beyond these limitations and lets people create and manage their own spaces for publishing and sharing data.

• How do you plan to deliver this new service to the public and other users?

Users will be able to create their own spaces on OpenDataWare and load their own data into them, whether the data comes from files on their computers, a database, or a software product.
OpenDataWare will offer different online services:
- data enrichment (adding geographic coordinates taken from a list of addresses, adding links to Wikipedia from proper nouns, etc.)
- expanding on data (renaming column headers, adding comments, suggesting translations, etc.)
- making data access more intuitive (search engine for data, map navigation, etc.)
- and, last but not least, sharing data publicly or within closed communities (data that can be downloaded in reusable formats like CSV, XML or JSON; ability to access data dynamically via APIs, etc.).
So our online service would be attractive for:
- small groups of people who need a quick and easy way to share data online without requiring any specific technical skills (homeowners’ associations, nonprofits, professional organizations, small communities, SMEs, etc.) – or the largest of organizations that want to break free from the application silos to which their data is confined, and finally be able to get added value in return for their investments in their backend systems.
OpenDataWare is firmly founded on cloud principles, both technologically and economically speaking.

• Why Dataconnexions?

From an open data point of view, Dataconnexions was able to gather a significant number of players from very different worlds: startups, major companies in services and industry, researchers, government, education… This is an indicator of the importance of data sharing in creating new economic models: it’s no longer possible for anyone, whether a company or a public entity, not to have access to all of the data necessary for them to offer new services.
Sharing our vision and our solutions with the Dataconnexions community seemed like the obvious choice.

• Have you already integrated the EXALEAD CloudView platform into your OpenDataSoft solution?

What have been the main advantages?
Because I have five years of experience creating and running Labs projects at EXALEAD, I had a very good idea of what EXALEAD CloudView could do for us in a big data context. Along with other big data technologies (specifically MongoDB and Hadoop), the OpenDataSoft platform exploits the rapid indexing abilities and robustness of EXALEAD CloudView when it comes to large volumes of data. The typical example would be a data stream (several million pieces of data per day) acquired through a network of linked objects, that needs to be assembled in near real time in map interfaces, with a response time that is consistent with what the public expects from the web, and at an acceptable cost.

• At what stage are you in your project?

OpenDataWare is in production and is being used by a limited number of alpha testers. Within a few weeks, we are expecting to send out invitations so more users can join, and then we plan to open the platform to the public in the second quarter of 2012.
We are, of course, open to proposals from any organization that might want to work with us on the development of OpenDataWare during this phase. (contact@opendatasoft.com)

• What’s it like working with Exalead teams?

We are, I think, the first team to use the latest version of EXALEAD CloudView, V6, in production. So we are in very close contact with the EXALEAD development teams, who are interested in our feedback. Plus, that means we are among the first to benefit from improvements to the product.

Today the spotlight is on Benjamin Rivalland, project manager and developer, who is one of the two founders of the D-Data Santé project, the citizens’ public health guide.

Alex Lepriol                                                                                       Benjamin Rivalland

• Please tell us a little about yourself and your team.
The members of the team we put together for the D-Data Santé project have a wide range of skills and were recruited through the Décision Publique consulting company and its partners. Because of the make-up of our team, we’re well equipped to carry out software development, establish relationships with sources of public health and social data, create a visual identity, and devise a sustainable business model built around the re-use of public data.

• Tell us about your project.
D-Data santé is positioning itself as the Guide that aggregates and geolocates all public health services in order to inform the general public of services that are available and aid in decision-making. On a single site, D-Data Santé offers previously unpublished health sector information that will help people make healthcare decisions based on current official data:

• A healthcare GPS feature in the form of interactive mapped directories to help people locate healthcare services, professionals, or organizations. Soon they will also be able to search for healthcare options by specific medical problem.
• A customizable “health quality” dashboard displaying demographic and environmental indicators and public health alerts (flu epidemic, presence of allergens, etc.).
For the first time, the public will have a platform where they can exchange information about their preferred providers and their opinions about healthcare services (the reception received, waiting time, follow-up, etc.). In addition, they will have access to verified information related to topics they specify.
• Contextualized comparison of healthcare services by city, administrative department, or region.
• Secure personal space where users can manage and store their “healthcare favorites.”

The D-Data Santé project also has the following objectives:

• To support the public at a time when individuals are increasingly involved in decisions regarding their own health or illnesses. Approximately 10% of French citizens consult a health-related site several times a week.
• To help the next generation of doctors and communities deal with the changing medical demography, and to address the unequal distribution of healthcare professionals in the country.
• To contribute to improved healthcare and cost control throughout the healthcare process by offering a service that clarifies the specific areas of expertise of different healthcare professionals and helps users distinguish among the different levels of medical services.

• Where did you get the idea for D-Data Santé?
In the course of our work as consultants to healthcare professionals and communities, we saw that healthcare services in France lacked visibility. To make the best use of our diagnostics, we had already created a mapping feature for all healthcare professionals in the country using information drawn from a variety of data sources (yellow pages, ameli.fr, etc.). But the data had to be regularly corrected to reflect changes. That’s when we got the idea to create a service for the public that provided up-to-date and comprehensive information on healthcare throughout the country.

• How do you plan to deliver this new service to the public and other users?
We’ll have a dedicated website complemented by mobile applications. Communities will have a module designed specifically for their use, which they can integrate into their existing websites. Institutional users will be able to add their own data sets in order to cross-reference them with the public data used by our platform.

• Why Dataconnexions?
Our team saw Dataconnexions as a real opportunity. By this I mean that there is a strong trend towards re-using public data. We wanted to embrace this trend and be part of it. Dataconnexions is a good way to meet those who produce and use open data and open access data, which we need in order to proceed with our project.

• Why did you choose Exalead ?
A project like ours needs a reliable and powerful search engine. We plan to aggregate a great deal of data from a variety of sources. Since our very first exchanges with Eric Cervantes during Dataconnexions, we saw the potential for bringing more credibility to our project and taking it as far as we had hoped we could.

• What’s it like working with Exalead teams?
Exalead is providing step-by-step support as we work with CloudView.  I also attended a training session during which expert consultants gave us guidance with regard to data indexing.

• So what’s next?
Next we’re going to focus on further developing our network of institutions that produce and re-use public health and social data in order to ensure a continuous flow of reliable and current data. And we still have one remaining development phase to complete before we can make our module available to local communities.

Want to know more about this project? Watch the video introduction to D-Data Santé and keep track of the project’s progress on these social networks:

Twitter: @ddatasante (http://twitter.com/#!/ddatasante)

Facebook: /ddatasante (http://www.facebook.com/ddatasante)

In an article published last Thursday on its website, 01.net introduces some of EXALEAD CloudView advanced search features.

EXALEAD CloudView brings the agility, usability and performance that are necessary to address 01.net broad audience’s needs.

Natural language querying, full-text search, fuzzy matching… a wide set of innovative capabilities allows 01.net to provide its visitors with always-relevant results.

Want to know more about how 01.net boosts its website with EXALEAD? Discover a few tips on how to make the most out of our technology.

>> Read the article in French

Yakwala, the brand-new platform for hyperlocal information and interaction, understands this very well, and is about to burst onto the scene! Chosen by Exalead during Etalab’s Dataconnexions start-up competition, Yakwala is in the spotlight this week. A casual interview with Julien Le Bot, co-founder and president of Yakwala:

• Please tell us a little about yourself and your team.

Yakwala is the product of a perfect storm: the hyperlocal market needs to be better defined, local information needs to be more visible, and the release of public data in France provides an opportunity for those who wish to offer new services to local stakeholders. We have a great team, and we’re about to release the beta version of Yakwala. Everybody’s contributed the skills and knowledge we need to create a tool that improves information sharing on what we call a “hyperlocal” scale.  Yakwala came to be when a journalist got together with some web experts.

• Tell us about your project.

The project is built around the hyperlocal concept: unlike classic local information, which is delivered to the user based on geography, with Yakwala, the user is the starting point. Whether users are at home or on the road, in the city or out in the country, Yakwala tries to deliver them relevant local information. The information provided is based on where users are at a given moment, when they perform their search, and their preferences.

• How do you plan to accomplish this?

Yakwala offers a tool that aggregates data that is currently scattered, and delivers hyperlocal information in map or timeline format (as on social networks). To achieve this, Yakwala is working on implementing information services for the general public while, at the same time, providing a platform that will drive clients to local businesses and services. So Yakwala is both a tool that provides a public service, and a tool to assist local players (businesses, government bodies, merchants, etc).

• Why Dataconnexions?

This competition came along at the perfect moment for Yakwala: creating the web version of Yakwala allowed us to work on the information ecosystem, the display format, and the user experience. As we speak, users can already publish content, read aggregated data, leave comments and share the information on social networks.
Now we have to optimize the performance of the platform, as well as develop more services and add more information so that our users will be motivated to adopt our tools.
In this regard, the release of public data is an incredible opportunity that will allow us to provide more substantial information, even in real time, if possible. Is there a medical clinic open when I need it? Is the public pool crowded right now? What kinds of scores did students in my area get on the high school exit exam?

• Why did you choose Exalead? What’s it like working with Exalead teams?

From the beginning, Exalead was involved in the community that grew up around Dataconnexions. That’s why we were able to communicate our needs and our approach to processing data and to putting hyperlocal information to good use. Very early on we could see that a number of the tools offered by Exalead were a good fit for the work we were doing. So we decided to take advantage of this opportunity – because Exalead is a partner in the competition – to enhance what we were offering. And it’s going really well because, every step of the way, the Exalead teams have provided the support we need to get us past every technological milestone we’ve faced in implementing CloudView.

• So what’s next?

For Yakwala, the next step will of course be the beta testing so we can get more feedback from the community of users who are interested in our product. Then, of course, getting our solution to market and launching the service in pilot regions (in France or internationally), but also continued improvement of our services (to individuals and professionals).

Want to know more about this young startup? Watch the video interview with Julien le Bot created by FrenchWeb, and the demo video of the platform!

The Yakwala team:

Exalead picks two projects during the first Dataconnexions competition: Data Santé, the citizens’ public health guide, and Yakwala, a tool that aggregates hyperlocal information and displays it in map or timeline format.

Data Santé

The goal of the Data Santé project is to make public health data available (institutions, authorized healthcare providers, availability of social and medical-social services, educational disciplines, etc.) in order to bolster the efficiency of the healthcare sector.
The application is a platform for services: D-data santé. This is designed for the general public, healthcare professionals, communities and advertisers.
The D-data santé guide will be accessible through its own website, but also through the sites of participating local communities. These clients will have their own dedicated space in the form of an open source, online Health Portal, which will display data specific to each commune, department, region, metropolitan area, etc.
Mobile applications will also be developed.
The public and health professionals will be able to access this data at no cost. Custom payment plans will be offered to communities, allowing them to choose the information they are interested in, such as “healthcare quality and provider demographics,” which would increase visibility for healthcare services and assist in decision-making, or annual healthcare reports containing benchmarks.
The team members brought together for the D-Data Santé project have a wide range of skills, and were recruited through the Décision Publique consulting company and its partners.

Yakwala

Yakwala offers a tool that aggregates hyperlocal data and delivers it in map or timeline format (as on social networks). To achieve this, Yakwala is working on implementing information services for the general public while, at the same time, providing a platform that will drive clients to local businesses and services. So Yakwala is both a tool that provides a public service, and a tool to assist local players (businesses, government bodies, merchants, etc).
The project is built around the hyperlocal concept: unlike classic local information, which is delivered to the user based on geography, with Yakwala, the user is the starting point. Whether users are at home or on the road, in the city or out in the country, Yakwala tries to deliver relevant local information based on where they are at a given moment, when they perform their search, and, when possible, their preferences.
Yakwala is the product of a perfect storm: the hyperlocal market needs to be better defined, local information needs to be more visible, and the release of public data in France provides an opportunity for those who wish to offer new services to local stakeholders. Yakwala came to be when a journalist got together with some web experts.

Next week, we’ll take a closer look at Yakwala in an interview with Yakwala co-founder Julien Le Bot . The following week, we’ll bring you an interview with Benjamin Rivalland, Project Manager for the Data Santé project.

*After analyzing a candidate’s dossier, Exalead will offer selected Dataconnexions start-ups free access to Exalead CloudView for two-years — or until the completion of the first phase of funding — as well as training and technical support. This offer will be extended as a commercial offer specifically adapted for start-ups.

Join us the 22nd of May for a seminar at the Palazzo delle Stelline in Milano and discover the first Exalead’s Vertical Search-Based Applications (SBA)

Exalead is organizing this seminar to reveal the benefits of its packaged SBAs as well as present customer case studies explaining how search technologies are currently addressing critical issues such as:

• Managing the global inventory in order to deliver the right part to the right place as quickly and economically as possible

• Extending the value of legacy CRM systems

>> Per ulteriori informazioni

“I had the honor to be the moderator of a very stimulating round table at WWW2012. The participants were:

- François BANCILHON, Founder & CEO of Data Publica, a company working on assembling data sets built from both public data and open data, and then selling these data sets to companies to help them build innovative applications. Data Publica describes itself as a “Data Vendor” similar, in the domain of Open Data, to what “Software Vendors” are to the domain of Software.

- Sébastien LEFEBVRE, Founder & CEO of Mesagraph, a company specializing in making sense of Twitter posts to develop innovative social TV viewing experiences.

- Denis WEISS, CIO for Industry at Groupe La Poste (the French Postal Service), who talked about examples of cutting edge applications of Big Data to monitor their core-business, namely, the distribution of mail.

The focus of this roundtable was on the Industrial Applications of Open Data and Big Data, and at least four new trends and open questions emerged during our discussion.

Trend #1: The Internet of Things is already here!

When you think about it, it’s not so long ago that the “Internet of Things” (a vast collection of small devices seamlessly connected to the Net) was still just a concept in research papers. And before you know it, it’s here, and like Monsieur Jourdain, people don’t quite fully understand it. Even if you think calling your smart phone a “Thing” is debatable, and yet it is a “Thing” that sends lots and lots of information to many servers world-wide, you would be amazed to know the number of anonymous devices that are already fully connected. For example, La Poste has worked with Exalead on connecting the opto-electronic machines that it uses to filter and sort our mail to the Net. It then uses all the information gathered to build a full-fledged business intelligence tool, used to operationally monitor the system. Another example: did you know that high-end car manufacturers have turned their vehicles into “Things” that keep sending monitoring information to central servers to assure better service and maintenance? One has to understand that every such “Thing” creates huge logs of, literally, hundreds of billions of records: that’s more than pages on the entire Web!

Trend #2: What is (are) the right business model(s) for data?

Data, data, data. Data, is the new frontier these days. Big Data, Open Data, DaaS (Data as a Service), you name it. Data is like Software, it is very scalable: one invests heavily to create data sets, and then sells them by the millions, with zero or very small marginal costs.

Well, at least that’s how the theory goes. But in fairness, it’s hard to say that anybody has cracked the right business model for data. For instance, one interesting question remains: to be scalable, a data set needs to be reusable by many applications and developers. But then, the value of such a data data set is probably very low, unless it’s absolutely needed to build everybody’s application and you have exclusivity, which is likely to be a very rare case, especially with Open Data.

At the other end of the spectrum, using the Big Data artillery to build a very specific data set can yield a very exclusive “product” that can only be used by one or maybe a handful of non-competing companies. Such a data set can be very expensive (to build and to buy), and can also create a lot of value for the company that uses it. But it’s an entirely different business model that is very different from the intrinsically scalable business model of the software industry (especially, SaaS). At least until someone cracks it. Any volunteers?

Trend #3: Adding a Social layer to traditional activities

Well, that is also a very interesting trend: using social networks like Twitter to produce real-time “voice of the customer” applications. For instance, Mesagraph is working with broadcasters to build iPad applications connected to TV programs so that you can comment and interact with other viewers in real-time, while you’re watching a show. That is truly revolutionary: finally, a way to connect back to the broadcasters. Consumers can find their interests here, quite obviously, but at the same time, think of the implications in terms of advertising. Real-time advertising, even. Fine-grained audience segmentation. This is an entirely new field with all sorts of promises and challenges.

Another very interesting application that was presented at WWW2012 is the use of tweets to monitor the Netflix media streaming service, by detecting tweets containing phrases like “is out” (come on, guys, you can do better than that . Even with very simple heuristics, about 90% of outages were correctly detected. Truly awesome, IMHO.

Trend #4: The New Frontier of Business Intelligence & Semantics at petabyte scale

The Internet of Things is making petabyte scales a reality today (a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, or 1,000,000 gigabytes). A copy of the entire Web amounts to several petabytes. So Big Data technologies are needed to handle such a vast amount of data, and one has to perform some form of Business Intelligence to make sense of it.

There are two major breakthroughs to handle this challenge. On one side, RAM-based databases, where data is organized in “columns”, as opposed to “rows”, allow for very fast processing of large quantities of data (as long as this data fits in RAM, that is). Slicing and dicing couldn’t be any faster or easier. On the other hand, search-engines, which are “columnar” by essence, are evolving to handle many more kind of data (semantic, numeric, etc.), are becoming more and more transactional (“ACID”, in barbarian terms) and can process even larger data sets since they do not require that entire data sets fit in RAM.

You get to choose your favorite. But one thing is clear: semantic treatment of textual data will be a major requirement for next-generation Business Intelligence platforms. That is the next frontier for Big Data. And search engines are uniquely positioned to win this race.

It was a rewarding week full of exchanges with researchers, students, entrepreneurs, partners, academics, bloggers, journalists and… with competitors too!

You have unfortunately missed this event? Don’t panic! We reviewed what happened on our stand for you

The last version of our Labs demo was shown with, among other things, Voxalead, MOMA, Chromatik. We also explained to participants, who were very interested in our products, our unique hybride DNA (consumer search engine and BtoB solutions), the performance of our CloudView solution , our experience with Web crawling… Jean-Marc Lazard, OpenDataSoft CEO, and Exalead partner, also introduced his solution.

The rest of the week at a glance:

-           Wednesday 18^th, on the afternoon, François Bourdoncle, co-founder and Exalead CTO, hosted a round Table about “Industrial Applications of Open & Big Data”. Among the participants, Denis Weiss, Industrial IS Director at La Poste, explained his Big Data approach with Exalead.

-           Friday 20^th, our CSO – Gregory Grefenstette, led a session in the Agora space, dedicated to the Semantic Factory of the Exalead CloudView solution. The University of Lyon was also there, and interviewed Gregory. You can have a look at the interview here. Curious about what Tim Berners-Lee or Bernard Stiegler said? Watch their speeches on the WWW2012 website!

We were very pleased to participate and to be a gold member of this world event! Ready for 2013?

The Industrial Practice and Experience track serves as a forum for high quality papers reporting on the more practical issues and experiences encountered when building large scale Web-based systems that are deployed to a large number of users.

The first session is about Big Data where research from Amazon, Ask, Netflix and Yahoo!, together with researchers from UCSB and Cal Poly are presented. The corresponding panel was on the industrial applications of open and big data moderated by François Bourdoncle from Dassault Systèmes.

The second session is on eCommerce, Mobile and Patents where articles from eBay, Samsung, and Yahoo!, together with Oxford University are presented.
The panel of this session is on protecting innovation by using patents and/or copyright moderated by Eva Hopper of the European Patent Office.

The third session is on Users and Linked Data with articles from IBM and Yahoo!. The subsequent panel discusses Link Enterprise Data and is moderated by Christian Fauré from Cap Gemini.

The fourth and final session is about Forums, Cloud, University, including work from Microsoft, UST (China) and the U. of Waterloo. The final panel is on Industry-University Collaboration moderated by Ricardo Baeza-Yates from Yahoo! Research.

Considering the importance, novelty and diversity of the topics covered, we hope that you enjoy this track. See details!

Nearly 2,000 scientists, developers and business innovators will gather during the week to exchange knowledge and opinions concerning the evolution of the Web and its associated technologies, and to debate the impact of those changes on society and culture. Keynote speakers include Tim Berners-Lee, Bernard Stiegler, Neelie Kroes and Chris Welty.

We invite you to join in the conversation with us as we discuss the impact of phenomena like the mobile Internet, social media, Big Data, the Internet of Things, Open Data and cloud computing on the future of the Web. You can find us at:

• The 3DS Exalead Big Data Roundtable, led by François Bourdoncle, Exalead Co-founder & CTO, who will be joined by Denis Weiss, Director of Industrial IS at La Poste and François Bancilhon, CEO of Data Publica;

• The 3DS Exalead R&D Space (Stands 46-49), where our Web Search & Analytics team will unveil an exciting new project of interest to all who believe in the potential of the Web to drive discovery and innovation in business, science and government.

To learn more, visit the WWW 2012 site where you’ll find program and registration information.

And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and visit our blog to stay up on the happenings at WWW2012!