Valentin's Blog

Discussing the use of Collective Intelligence for the 'Enterprise 2.0', one almost inevitable argument is that experiences from the web cannot be transferred, because web scale is just sooo much larger. But I wondered - exactly how much larger, in particular when we look at really really large organizations, even the biggest of them all:

Too make it quick: 600 times; there are 600 times more web-users than there are employees in the largest organization. Current estimates put the number of web-users at 1.5 billion, while (according to wikipedia) the largest organization has 2.5 million employees. There are more people in the Facebook group "AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK LAYOUT" than there are people in the largest organization on earth! By the way: this organization is the state owned Indian Railways (hence the nice picture by Akuppa); other organizations of similar size are the People's Liberation Army (estimated at 2.25 million active duty personnel) and the largest private organization: Wal-Mart (2.1 million). The largest German organization is Deutsche Post (DHL) with 0.5 million; there are 3000 times more web users than employees in Germany's largest company.

So yes, very clearly, experience from the open web cannot be easily generalized to organizations; not even to the biggest ones and not even if we disregard all issues beyond pure size (e.g. motivational issues).

In a recent post ReadWriteWeb laments the little use of RDF in commercial applications. While the general point is valid, they miss quite a few large scale uses of RDF that I wanted to share with you:

1) The largest use of RDF in a real web setting: FOAF, and in particular its support by Google's Social Graph API.

2) XMP, the format used by Adobe to embed metadata in PDF (and other) files. Its most commonly stored in a subset of RDF. With all the Adobe tools, this is deployed on more than a hundred million computers.

3) The use of RDF in Firefox, e.g. for the description and management of extensions. Just take a look at you profile directory, you'll see.

Labels: SemanticWeb

We finally came round to write up our ideas on how to overcome the motivation and incentive problems for collaborative heavyweight knowledge formalization:

This paper argues for collaborative incremental augmentation of text retrieval as an approach that can be used to immediately show the benefits of relatively heavyweight knowledge formalization in the context of Web 2.0 style collaborative knowledge formalization. Such an approach helps to overcome the "Curse of Prepayment"; i.e. the hitherto necessary very large initial investment in formalization tasks before any benefit of Semantic Web technologies is visible. Some initial ideas about the architecture of such a system are presented and it is placed within the overall emerging trend of "people powered search".

You can read the entire paper here. I will present it at the INSEMTIVE workshop at this year's ISWC; if you're in Karlsruhe, it would be great to see you there!

Labels: publication, SemanticWeb, SOBOLEO