Fusion ECM

A very informative slideshare on inference and the power of the Semantic Web.
Hat Tip to Brian Dirking for the link to the slideshare on his facebook page.

The data contained within information artifacts must be accessible by people and machines. We will cover 3 main advantages that data accessibility for people and computers deliver.
1. High relevance leads to lean systems.
2. People want relevant information, not potentially relevant hits.
3. Context drives relevancy, delivery drives efficiency.

We are in the midst of a series investigating collaboration. We previously wrote about the two types of collaboration - intentional and accidental.
INTENTIONAL: where we get together to achieve a goal and
ACCIDENTAL: where you interact with something of mine and I am never aware of your interaction

While intentional collaboration is good it is not where the bulk of untapped collaborative potential lies. Accidental collaboration is. But the challenge is to intentionally facilitate accidental collaboration. For the full list of 10 requirements see the original post. Last time I wrote about requirement #5: why data must be referencable and portable. This time we will continue on that theme but discuss why the data we made portable and referencable last time must still be accessible to both people as well as computers.

First remember that the data we're talking about is not nicely contained in a row or cell in a traditional relational database. The data we're interested in and that we have been talking about is the data that exists inside documents, web pages, images and other information artifacts. So in one way at least, the information is already human accessible. It is in a document or other information artifact after all. And those are typically created by people for people. Parsed and extracted data that is referencable is still accessible because we do not fundamentally alter the original container (i.e. the document). Any good enterprise information architecture must include a fully-fledged ECM (enterprise content management) system for this reason. There needs to be a place to store the original source documents, images, videos and web pages.

Also, computers and systems should have no problem accessing the data that we derived from the artifacts in the previous posts. This is because after the data is parsed, extracted and marked up in the ways we've previously described, it gets stored in a computer referencable system like a database or an RDF store or a linked combination of similar stores and indexes. Computers and systems can access that data (of course assuming network connections are established and maintained). Indeed, many SOA and Service Bus integration layers have been doing similar things for some time. They are able to access transaction, web service and request data and attach it to the brokered request while bringing along original documents and other unstructured information files as payload.

But did you notice what I just wrote there? The relevant data as well as the containing or supporting unstructured data files are attached to the request and passed around from system to transaction to data store to website. It is the equivalent of carrying around a file cabinet full of stock photos when all I really want is to sort catalog entries on blue shoes. "Blue" is important data that is only accessible by a human looking at a picture. Or, best case, by a computer system that can parse attached metadata assuming that "blue" was entered by a person somewhere further up the line (and not "teal", "aqua", or "navy"). But if a similar SOA request had access to the full complement of parsed and extracted data then it could carry with it only that data that was actually needed rather than the over-full payload it is today.

Continue reading "Ten Requirements for Achieving Collaboration #6:Data Accessibility for People and Computers" »

Oracle ECM has a rich network of very experienced partners. From time to time I will post their education events to help get the word out.

Fishbowl Solutions has three ECM education events on the way that can be found here.
These events focus on the follwoing:
Security in Oracle UCM: Single Sign-on and LDAP/AD Integration
Process Automation: Automating Content Review
CollabPoint: Lightweight Collaboration Built on Oracle UCM

If you have an Oracle ECM or E20 event you'd like me to post, drop a line. Comments here and email works well (billy < dot > cripe < at > oracle < dot > com)

E20 Reconciliation (no small task and lots of good charts) - Contentation Re-Considered (Stéphane Croisier)

Understanding how we share links - Haystack Blog

Behavioral Targeting on the web - Pretzel Logic

Thoughts on SEO and their bad rap - Search Engine Land

Thoughts on the latest Gartner ECM MQ (with links to the report)- Bex Huff

Hope To See You There!

a good analysis

Stéphane Croisier has a good post on Social Collaboration vs Knowledge Networks

while

Sameer Patel writes about E20 and Social Partnership Paradigms

Daniel Tunkelang has a thought-provoking piece about patents and big corps vs small startups

If geeking out is more your style, Stefano's Linotype post on data reconciliation is an insightful series. Microfornats/data vs HTML5 vs RDFa.

Kyle Hatlestad has a practical piece on setting up image watermarking with UCM's Digital Asset Management features and he does it with LOLCATS (ROTFL!)

You should still sign up for the E20 Virtual Conference (link on lower right) that's happening later this week.

And don't forget to comment HERE for a chance to win a piece of personal computing history.

That's right, we're giving away a vintage, new in the never-been-opened package, Palm Zire 21 Handheld device (stylus included).

Leave a comment explaining what you're looking forward to from Oracle Open World and win a piece of technology history.

Suitable for framing.

Check out the SlideShare presentation or watch the VIDEO (WMV format) from Bex Huff of Bezzotech on performance tuning your WCM system.

This is full of good tips and best practices for making your system scream. Even if you don't (yet) use Oracle WCM, there is enough good general performance development material to be worth your while.

Nice post Bex.

Be Sure to register for the Enterprise 2.0 Virtual Conference to be held Oct 8 (banner link at bottom right)

Oracle continues to be a major sponsor of the ARMA Conference (Orlando, Oct 15th-18th). Both myself,
Shahid Rashid - Oracle Universal Records Management (URM) Product Manager, and Victor Owuor, Director of URM Product Development will be in attendance at the conference. Victor will be presenting in two sessions:

• Thursday 3:30pm - A Holistic Approach to Enterprise Solutions: How can RIM, IT, and Business Process Work Together to Adopt a Solution?


• Saturday 8am -Technology in the Spotlight

Earlier in the week, we will be at Oracle OpenWorld (San Francisco, Oct 12th-15th) where records management will be presented in Oracle and customer led sessions, the demogrounds, and executive keynote sessions. Due to constraints around the effort required to support Oracle OpenWorld, we will not have an Oracle product booth in the ARMA Expo Hall. However, Victor and I are taking redeyes to be at ARMA ourselves and are more than happy to meet with you.

Please contact me, Shahid Rashid, if you would like to set up a meeting at ARMA.

We are in the midst of a series investigating collaboration. We previously wrote about the two types of collaboration - intentional and accidental.
INTENTIONAL: where we get together to achieve a goal and
ACCIDENTAL: where you interact with something of mine and I am never aware of your interaction

While intentional collaboration is good it is not where the bulk of untapped collaborative potential lies. Accidental collaboration is. But the challenge is to intentionally facilitate accidental collaboration. For the full list of 10 requirements see the original post. Last time I wrote about requirement #4: why we must be sure to enable the humans. While it is great if humans are empowered to consume, we must keep it easy for them to do so. Therefore enter requirement #5: the importance of data portability and ability to be referenced. After all, if we go to all that work to identify and extract data from content containers then it is a simple next step to ensure that the data is located where we want it when we need it.

Well here we are. If you have followed along, we have identified data residing inside of documents, we have exploded content items, we have jail-breaked data-and-relationship assertions and made it easy for people to add their own experiences and expertise to those growing data sets. That is all well and good if and only if there is a consistent way to move that data around, to relate it to other data that may be and usually is in a different schema, and finally to address and obtain that data. This is practically taken for granted with traditional relational databases and on the web. After all, the primary key uniquely identifies a record, the URL uniquely identifies a document on the web. We can get it, move it and relate it to other bits of information.

But isn't it curious that we reference items differently depending on where they're located. We need to know the structure of data first before we can even think about trying to reach it. Web pages have URLs, DB Records have primary keys, filing cabinet files have a physical location, you and I have a postal address. That makes it awfully hard to combine data sets, perform meaningful comparisons or combine expertise with the confidence that we're not leaving out the most important information available simply because it is addressed differently.

Continue reading "Ten Requirements for Achieving Collaboration #5: Data Portability & Referencing" »

Call it Semantic Web, Web 3.0, SemTech or just plain cool, it is coming to business. It is no secret that I am unabashedly bullish on the role of semantic technology in enterprise information management. THIS STORY on the combined OpenCalais extraction and semantic document indexing capabilities of the newly released 11.2 Oracle Spatial database is proof positive that this thinking is on the right track.

Continue reading "OpenCalais and Oracle" »

First I have to say thanks to my sort-of-random-name-selector-helper Sarah who you see there to the left. She's just one of the great people in our office who is ready to lend a helping hand (literally) to her colleagues. Thanks Sarah!

Now, the Winners:
Getting the sweet black ORACLENERD t-shirt is VijayKumar who liked the "alternate perspective" of FusionEM. I'm not sure if that is a compliment or a veiled jab but at least you'll be able to easily spot VijayKumar in his smokin' black ORACLENERD T!

Walking away with the fitted and lovely white ORACLENERD T is Olivia who was the first commenter and liked how FusionECM helps give her ideas for her college work on KM. Brazil will never be the same now that ORACLENERD is there.

If either winner sends me pictures of them in their new sweet ORACLENERD threads, I'd be happy to post them to the blog. Meanwhile, Y'all get yer own!

Congratulations to both of you! The rest of you keep checking back for great Fusion ECM, E20 and Semantic Web information and new contests.

We are in the midst of a series investigating collaboration. We previously wrote about the two types of collaboration - intentional and accidental.
INTENTIONAL: where we get together to achieve a goal and
ACCIDENTAL: where you interact with something of mine and I am never aware of your interaction

While intentional collaboration is good it is not where the bulk of untapped collaborative potential lies. Accidental collaboration is. But the challenge is to intentionally facilitate accidental collaboration. For the full list of 10 requirements see the original post. Last time I wrote about requirement #3: why usage and context patterns of information are so important.

This week we continue the series investigating requirement #4 where we change gears a bit and move from our previous automation focus and consider the humans. After all it is we-the-meat that actually create and use information. It is the meat part of life which can transmogrify data to information to knowledge to action. So our topic is how and why human revisions of information, annotations to and classifications of information must be enabled and preserved.

Continue reading "Ten Requirements for Achieving Collaboration #4:Enable The Humans" »