Mike’s Digital Laboratory

A good read: Paul W writes on automating CMS metadata

In a previous post I asked the question, “What if a web service could automatically provide the CMS metadata when you go to check-in a new topic?” In this post I’ll discuss why you would want to do that, some of the candidate technologies, and what is necessary to make it real.

The interesting back story to Paul’s new blog is this;  while Paul writes about CMS metadata I was on the phone with him yesterday brainstorming about how the heck we are going to get more metadata into his blog?  Being a new blog we have to pump up the Google juice as much as we can. While the best way of course is to keep writing and connecting with people it doesn’t hurt to add metadata to your blog.  Here’s the rub; If you run your own server, like I do, you have much more  control of your blogging software. I run Wordpress so I can experiment with the latest tools like Tagaroo or whatever comes along next that provides the Natural Language processing needed to suggest new tags that I can feed ito the semantic web. With Paul’s blog and others that use a hosted blogging service like Wordpress.com, Typepad or Blogger, you get only what the service provides you.  It’s not your car so you can’t add those hot rod components. So in this case something like Tagaroo won’t work.

So the conversation starts to diverge at this point. But I ask which CMS systems are open and extensible extensible enough to allow for the  next generation “beefed up” semantic gizmos to be bolted on as needed.  For example simple tagging out of the box is good but rich RDF metadata is even better. So as better NLP services come along I’d like to be able to swap out the old parts and put in better ones.  In my case I’ve already bolted on a plugin to generate SIOC metadata which gives me real RDF and FOAF on my site,  and every post is processed with NLP from Calais (Tagaroo) Not to mention a new version of Calias is now out that I can be immediately plugged into.  But I should be clear my point is that It’s not that these are better or worse than any other semantic solutions for my blog, it’s that I have the choice.

This leads to a broader and possibly more improtant conversation around open archtiectures and how they often come along with open source software. This why back a few years ago I switched from Movabale Type to Wordpress. The Wordpress plug in archtiecture is open and anyone with a good idea can get in on the game and we can all play.

Last week I attended the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. Although it was a little heavy on the vendor presence there were some great case studies offered by presenters from several organizations who are actually implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions.  The Westin hotel got a real raw deal from their ISP so most of the time the internet connectivity was down.  If you want to really piss off an entire population of technology conference goers that’s how to do it.  Because of this I did zero blogging while I was there, and I don’t have time now except I wanted to point out one real nugget from the conference.

Sean Dennehy from the CIA and Dave Fountain from the NSA gave an outstanding talk about Intellipedia, and how they have implemented MediaWiki in the intelligence community.  The hidden gem here was a paper I found linked from the Intellipedia Briefing Sean posted on the E 2.0 conference web site.  The paper is The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community by Dr. Calvin Andrus, December 2004.  It’s a very good read and it summarizes very clearly all the theory of why and how wikis (and blogs) can work to create systems expressing all the characteristics required for complexity theory to operate on “on the edge of chaos”.  It is this balance on the edge that keeps the dynamic environment continuously adapting and growing in a pragmatic way.

Interestingly enough the formula for creating Intellipedia is very similar to the formula we have crafted for creating Excellupedia.  That is to say; MediaWiki tailored to the closed community that makes up our company. Sean also mentioned the importance of establishing an “attribution” policy for contributors to the wiki.  The idea is that all posts to the wiki must be attributed to a source, must be verifiable.  In our wiki we have done the same, we even went so far as to refine the policy statement through a group consensus process that took place directly on the wiki.

At the end of the conference I offered some feedback to the organizers that they really should pay a little more attention to the message of those who are actually building social software solutions for the next generation enterprise. And that is this; many solutions today, especially these first generation solutions are built on open source software like MediaWiki and Wordpress.   Although it’s nice to have so many vendors present. (they really are very nice people) they all seemed to have the same story. And this story seemed to drown out the very important story that open source has brought us.  I suggest next year they offer some more sessions on open source solutions and also add a richer technology track.  There is a growing breed of new social software technology components emerging today that while not out right solutions, will enable enterprise developers to rapidly “build in” social software components to new and existing systems.

I believe the ease of use of these new tools is (will be) staggering. I have already seen demos that operate at the speed of cut and paste.   I will even go so far as to predict that “extremely rapid” social software development will be the next exciting phase for internal corporate solutions developers.  This is application development that takes place on the order of seconds and minutes.  Hey, let’s coin a new acronym, how about XRSS?  Um, never mind, I think not.