The end of documents....

Assumption

If you have to describe any technical subject you are aware that knowledge is hard to express in a straight linear sequence of information topics. In most cases you have to structure the information into information tropics and semantic connection between those => a network of information topics.

Nothing new and a trivial statement, you might say. All semantic concepts are using those principle buildup.

Yes, but why most technical subjects are still using documents or slide shows to express technical subjects?
Those media formats are linear by design. The reader has to follow the one and only linear flow defined by the author of the document. In the best case the author is able to find one of the sufficient linear paths through the network of information and the reader is therefore able to understand the described subject. But even in this case getting the hole picture, identify ways to extend the provided information, embed it to different subject etc. isn't possible or at least requires to re-construct the information tree in mind.

Ask yourself why you are using

• A word processing software to define project information (requirements, design specification, test specification, ....)
• Power Point to introduce a particular problem domain
• A word processing software to trace a result of a workshop (also known as workshop protocol)
• ....

The answer is simple. Because we simple get used to and there are no mainstream alternative media formats out there which can be used without at least one significant constrain (effort to implement and train, difficult to share, ....). The complete office suites still remains rooted in the old linear concepts. Even new players in this business adapting this paradigm (e.g. Google Docs).

Alternatives?

I'm pretty sure that in the future documents will be replaced with applications which providing a way to describe topics as short topics and makes it easy to connect those topics with semantic links (e.g. depends on, contains, .....). A document in this scenario is just one path through the network of information for one particular use case.  This kind of application can replace todays word processing software without loosing any important feature.

In the domain of technical writing topic based authoring (e.g. using DITA information architecture) becomes more and more popular. The main use case there is to (re-)use information as much as possible to reduce creation and information maintenance costs. In my point of view that is "only" a important side effect of having the content defined in a much more usable form. Not a linear sequence of information reflecting a group of authors view but as more or less complete set of information topics linked together. The todays results are still linear documents of some format (pdf, online help formats, ....) but that only corroborate the belief that linear documents are mainstream.

Open Issue


The usability of topic based authoring isn't sufficient today. It is more or less a hand crafted creation of enriched information. To dive into the mainstream usability is the most important factor. The creation and linking of information must be at least as easy as using e.g. Mind Mapping tools (e.g. FreeMind, MindManager) combined with easy to use structured topic content editor (e.g. tools like Xopus or XMAX goes into this direction).



There’s more to come? Lets see....

open usage of sequence of data points

lot of important data out there are simple "Time series" data, means a sequence of one or more data points change over time.

a service to share and use such data is Timetric. currently the amount of user and useful time series are small but in general such pretty platform can deploy common time series from many different domains.

problem

who takes care that the shared data is correct and therefore is valuable to use? all services based on public contribution and usage are faced with the same issue. do you trust the data you see? do you trust wikipedia? in general you should not. you have to double check at least 2 different sources before you use the provided data.

in addition once you double checked your data you have to make sure that the quality of data is guaranteed over time. that is much more difficult.

solution?

if the data is mission critical you should not use data before validating them. in case of non static data you have to validate the data each time they change. this means that you either need more than one data source as service which are not based on same data source or you have to look and buy commercial services takes care of the provided data or you request the service from the organization owns / collecting the data. each of those solution requires special handling for the particular domain.

summary

availability of public data service are promising but i currently do not see a available model to trust in. therefore usage is pretty limited only for some kind of "outline view"

additional semantic for existing information sources

how information enrichment works in real world showing two public use-cases based on different technologies:

• freebase
  "Freebase is an open, shared database that contains structured information on millions of topics in hundreds of categories. This information is compiled from open datasets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the CIA World Fact Book, as well as contributions from our user community."
  
  this means that applications like freebase using already existing information and trying to add additional semantic to them based on combining and extracting information and context or in this case let user add additional semantics without modification to the source of the information.
  
  the tool thinkbase using freebase to provide a visual graph of information and corresponding link dependencies.
  
• MailMark using a xml database (Mark Logic) as backbone for building the application just on XQuery
  
  the semantic comes from information aggregation and combination. in this application no additional user interaction is possible
  

both examples are very useful and showing real world application which you might transform into your own information landscape.....

Buzzwording continues?

the IT industry is very innovative in creating and consuming buzzwords. from year to year at least one new trend alongside with one or more buzzwords are created.

main reason for that success is the corresponding visibility and based on that the opportunity to get budget. the main characteristic of such terms is that there are no formal definition of what is really the essence / definition of such term but on the other hand everybody seems to have a clear and complete understanding and definition for the term / buzzword.

second characteristic of such terms is that a common trend is associated with those terms.

and last but not least the life cycle of such trends are pretty similar, approx. 1/2 year until everybody is aware of it (through publications, blog posts, articles), 1 year highest awareness incl. associated investments and at the end the trend will be replaced by next one.

that looks pretty similar to fashion industry and in my point of view there is not too much structural differences between a new fashion trend and a IT trend.

just a small list of buzzwords from the last few years:

• ....
  
• SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
• xxx 2.0 (esp. Web 2.0)
• Semantic Web
  
• SaaS (Software as a Service)
• PaaS (Platform as a Service)
• Cloud computing
• .....
  

why is it possible to make money with those trends? because all of them promising to solve real existing problems in real industry. if we use the trends mentioned above their main focus is to

• consistent access to required information at the right time at the right place
  
• get rid of increasing IT complexity
• get rid of proprietary vendor driven information silos
• reduce Total cost of ownership for hosting the available information within a company
• improve collaboration between different business groups
• improve adaptability to changing business requirements
  
• ....

if we take the essence of the mentioned buzzwords and collect them again than the following is really promising

• usage of dedicated and well defined services for business automation
• pay for usage of a defined service level instead of paying for hardware / software and corresponding maintenance (what really cares is the service that automates a certain business step)
• architecture that adapts fast and controlled to change of business requirements (changed SLA) and not to changed IT requirements
  
• .....

the trends above of course drives the creation of standards, software and services makes those requirements easier to fulfill but still it still hard work and more than just using those nice buzzwords.....

SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture)

"SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture) is an extensible framework
for building search solutions to access unstructured information in the enterprise.
Besides providing essential infrastructure components and services, SMILA also delivers
ready-to-use add-on components, like connectors to most relevant data sources."

initiated by German based company empolis this project seems to be promising in solving one common problem while dealing with todays information overflow:

• identification and access to information relevant for a given business task / process
  
• integration of "unstructured" information in corresponding business process

used standards are of course complex and not really common used in many organizations right now but that might change in mid term....