Towards an “Enterprise n+ 1” through the Use of Web 2.0 Design ...

Proceedings of I-KNOW ’07 Graz, Austria, September 5-7, 2007

Towards an “Enterprise n+1” through the Use of Web 2.0 Design Patterns Enriched by Semantic Web Infrastructure Peter Reiser, Henry Story, Franz Novak (Sun Microsystems Inc. {peter.reiser, henry.story, franz.novak}@sun.com)

Andreas Blumauer (Semantic Web School, Austria [email protected])

Abstract: In many respects Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management (KM) are strongly related to each other. From a KM perspective the Web 2.0 evolution can serve as a pool of ideas for new ways of knowledge sharing, knowledge organisation and for the development of new architectures of measurable knowledge management systems. KM projects are usually developed in a process-oriented, goal-driven environment, embedded in complex organisational structures, whereas typical Web 2.0 applications like del.icio.us, flickr or friendster are building “their own context”. This paper will examine Tim O´Reilly’s eight generic Web 2.0 design patterns in terms of their applicability for a measurable KM System in an Enterprise 2.0. Two use cases will be presented and it will be discussed which of the design patterns could be enriched by technologies from the semantic web which will be summarized as a concept named “Enterprise n+1”. Keywords: Web 2.0, Semantic Web, Social Semantic Web, Knowledge Management System, Social Capital, Knowledge Organisation, Social Tagging, Web 3.0 Categories: H.3.1, H.3.3, H.5.3, J.4

1

Introduction

The increasing use of Social Software in the context of the World Wide Web shows, that members of knowledge- or tagging communities like del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) are ready for new paradigms of virtual collaboration, even if the motivation of each user to share knowledge through these platforms can vary quite strongly and the majority of Web 2.0 users are still rather passive consumers [Trump, 07]. Furthermore, the underlying business models of Web 2.0 platforms are quite often not clear, and only a small percentage of new start-ups have succeeded so far. Nevertheless, many ideas throughout the Social Software Community have been transferred into Knowledge Management Systems Architectures in the last few months. In this new context expectations on social software vary from technical aspects like “easy to use”, “no need for integration into existing systems”, “web-based software and no more installations necessary” [Fraunhofer, 05] to rather economic considerations like “increasing revenues through acquiring new customers, better customer service and support” or “reducing costs through a more efficient way for employees to interact with each other” [The Economist Intelligence Unit, 07].

72

P. Reiser, H. Story, F. Novak, A. Blumauer: Towards ...

Stimulated by those new developments in the World Wide Web, many scientists and practitioners are working on what may be called Knowledge Management 2.0 with the aim of transferring principles acquired from social software into an organisational context supporting business processes [Tochtermann, 07]. This raises its own set of questions. Some that come to mind are for example: under which circumstances is “social tagging” accepted and integrated by employees into their daily business? Or how can the impact of such additional knowledge work be measured? This paper will examine which of the principles of Web 2.0 can be applied in a company’s knowledge management processes, and how their limitations can be extended by the use of semantic web technologies. This thinking will lead us to two use cases revealing how the creation, exchange and reuse of semantic data (as described in [Ankolekar, 07]) can be realised in an Enterprise 2.0 setting with the aim of moving towards Enterprise n+1 [Reiser, 07].

2

Web 2.0, its design patterns and relevancy to KM systems

In 2004 O'Reilly Media Vice President Dale Dougherty coined the term “Web 2.0” during a conference planning brainstorming session, which quickly attained global buzzword status, being applied by any and all to every product that needed a little extra shine. Even serious attempts at nailing down the term, such as Tim O´Reilly’s well known paper [O’Reilly, 05] did little to focus public enthusiasm. “Web 2.0” veered dangerously close to becoming an attitude rather than a technology, making it somewhat difficult to build a serious IT strategy on. So to better understand what impact this phenomenon may have on measurable KM systems, we need to revisit O´Reilly’s original Design Patterns: 1. The Long Tail In “The Long Tail” [Anderson, 04] Andersen pointed out that information technology is turning mass markets into a million niches. As the incremental costs of making goods available are lowered, companies can offer massive variety in their catalogue instead of the one size fits all blockbusters. This effect is even more true for knowledge, which by its essence is diverse and which benefits most by the information revolution. As more and more people participate in the knowledge process, making more information than ever available, as we move from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance, the problem also shifts from one of finding information at all to being completely overwhelmed by it. The key to increased information productivity is therefore to improve the match making process. Now the Long Tail in an organization is not so much the documents that encode the knowledge as the people who know. By making it easy to share information, you not only expose the hidden knowledge, you also expose the knowers themselves. The benefit comes from seeing who knows what, in being able to engage them in more effective roles. Just as companies try to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head, so must more decentralization in KM System be strived for. These must work with the decentralised nature of knowledge, linking individuals to individuals, picking up data wherever it exists, and linking it

P. Reiser, H. Story, F. Novak, A. Blumauer: Towards ...

73

together. The universal linking nature of the semantic web infrastructure, with its ability to relate globally dispersed resources, clearly points to a very central role for this technology. 2. Data is the Next Intel Inside Tim O’Reilly states that “Every significant internet application to date has been backed by a specialized database”. Indeed, enterprises are not only facing an unforeseen growth of complexity of data, content and knowledge, they are also challenged by the always increasing need for integrating data. Classification and semantic annotation (by a combination of user-driven, expert-driven and automatic measures) of all the information in an enterprise is the key for a successful implementation. While the use of RDF is not usually part of the Web 2.0 story, it is clear that this plays especially well to its strengths. Being designed for data integration world wide, with the use of the well known URI to create a global information space, RDF is perfectly suited to be the new Intel Inside for the global distributed corporate database. 3. Users add Value „Involve your users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application.” From a KM-perspective this means, that any metadata users add to a knowledge object (by tagging, rating, commenting, and even clicking on things) the more precisely important aspects of any asset can be calculated and evaluated. Amazon.com for example, ranks products by computing the "most popular" ones not only on sales but also factors some call the "flow" around products. In order to describe these actions or preferences, which take place on the WWW of information resources identified by URLs; one needs to describe them as actions on, preferences for, tags on resources identified by URLs. RDF, the Resource Description Framework, which uses the Universal Resource Identifiers as its corner stone, clearly serves as the enabler for the above mentioned Web 2.0 design pattern. 4. Network Effects by Default The demand to “set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side-effect of their use of the application” is one of the most obvious options how to transfer this design pattern straight into a Knowledge Management System: For example, each user tag improves the tag recommender system of a KM system which eventually helps to get better search results. Network effects can take many shapes or forms. Tags for example can also be disambiguated by linking them to a wiki, and allowing the wiki page owners and users to vote on their precise meaning. “The service automatically gets better the more people use it”, but the service needs not be a single service. Interacting services (such as a wiki and a tagging engine) can use the distributed knowledge of the enterprise in completely unsuspected ways. 5. Some Rights Reserved For the most efficient data-sharing this design pattern demands to “follow existing standards, and use licenses with as few restrictions as possible”. Looking at today’s intranet solutions, content management systems or other systems where users usually generate or distribute content, it becomes obvious, that a strong culture of ownership

74

P. Reiser, H. Story, F. Novak, A. Blumauer: Towards ...

is making it a lot more difficult to merge information than it should be. Although more flexible ways to define IPRs exist (like creative commons, http://creativecommons.org/), this lesson has not been integrated in current KM systems. Data cannot flow if it siphoned off behind legal barriers. One structural way to help align corporate interests with individual ones would be to make the cost of secrecy in an enterprise apparent. 6. The Perpetual Beta The statement “One of the defining characteristics of internet era software is that it is delivered as a service, not as a product” reflects best what is meant by “perpetual beta”. When applying this design pattern, which is strongly linked to open source development practices, in a Knowledge Management System, we can support our knowledge intensive processes in a much more flexible way. Instead of storing all knowledge in a centralised database, we should provide smart services which are constantly developed on top of insights gained from monitoring user behaviour together with other users acting as co-developers. 7. Cooperate, Don't Control This design pattern has been discussed for years throughout the KM community. Neither Web 2.0 nor Knowledge Management is a technological revolution: “The transformations the Web is subject to are not driven by new technologies but by a fundamental mind shift that encourages individuals to take part in developing new structures and content.” [Kolbitsch, 06] The question in the context of Knowledge Management is: How can we stimulate this mind shift? In our first use case we will consider if measuring the value of user contributions could be an answer. 8. Software Above the Level of a Single Device The idea of the Web as a platform – “What applications become possible when our phones and our cars are not consuming data but reporting it?” makes technologies which support support semantic interoperability on top of metadata standards even more necessary. From a KM-perspective this means that knowledge generation and annotation must happen on top of standard formats like RDF. From a technical perspective Tim Berner´s Lee´s proposal of an RDF bus [Berners-Lee, 05] deploying RDF mapping tools like D2R [Bizer, 03] seems to be an applicable solution which is already at hand.

3

Use cases

3.1

CE 2.0 – Customer Engineering at Sun Microsystems

CE 2.0 is a KM project currently developed at Sun Microsystems which has defined the following goals: x x

Capture and Re-use of Intellectual Capital (IC) during a sales and delivery cycle Measure the efficiency of Re-use in the context of Business metrics (Win Rate, Revenue, Margin)

P. Reiser, H. Story, F. Novak, A. Blumauer: Towards ...

x

75

Create a Community Equity system to build a measurable Social Capital model for virtual communities.

CE 2.0 foresees the development of an adequate architecture, a community life cycle methodology and the Community Equity system. CE2.0 architecture is based on reusable web services, standard protocols and an extensible set of web widgets. All parts of the architecture are realised with the latest Web 2.0 technologies developed inside and outside of Sun. The CE 2.0 team identified four key services which an enterprise needs to control in order to build a scalable and measurable Community Equity infrastructure: x x x x

Security/IdM and Entitlement provides cross services Single Sign On (SSO) and role based entitlement across all services Tagging as a central metadata store with a strong Ontology & Taxonomy management Search as a service for dynamic mash-ups based on metadata and semantic technologies Community Equity as an aggregation of all Community Equity values of all communities, members and content, which we describe later in this section

User tagging based on an enterprise wide ontology (SwoRDFish) [Gupta, 02] was implemented as a first step in a few applications leading among other things to prove that re-use of content increases win rates, project margins and revenues [Reiser, 06]. As a next step tagging functionality is expanded to allow a combined folksonomy and taxonomy driven tagging of content. An enterprise wide tagging service is implemented which dynamically recommends user created and enterprise controlled tags. For the enterprise controlled tags a semantic data models is used, which will be implemented as RDF/OWL ontologies. Furthermore a metadata analysis service is implemented to extract metadata from various documents to complement the tag recommendation. User applied tags are dynamically written back to Open Office documents. The Community Life Cycle Methodology was developed to drive a consistent community model which is called “Community in a Box”. It describes the tools, roles and psychological dynamics of a community and provides a “cook book” how to build/sustain and archive communities. The objective of the Community Equity Measurement System is to build a dynamic Social Capital system by measuring the Contribution, Participation, Skills and Roles equity a person can gain by actively engaging in communities and social networks. x x

The Contribution Equity measures the contribution of a person related to his/her role(s) in a company e.g. the value of blog entries, mailing list contributions etc. but also includes Intellectual Properties (IP) like patents. The Participation Equity measures the active participation of a person especially the feedback a person has provided to other community contributions like ratings, comments or tags. In addition the re-use of

76

P. Reiser, H. Story, F. Novak, A. Blumauer: Towards ...

x

x

existing content can be measured through the tracking of documents tags [Reiser, 06]. The Skills Equity measures the skills a person has which is calculated based on data like enterprise skills provided by the enterprise HR system (e.g. formal skills assessment) and skills tags which are self declared skills of a person. The person can rate his/her skills tags. If the person decides to publish his/her skills, the community can rate/comment on a person’s skills tag (peer review) and the person can gain additional Skills Equity. The Role Equity (RQ) is the aggregated value of the business, formal and informal community roles of a person in an enterprise e.g. the formal job title and level, formal community roles (Project lead, PE) or informal community roles (Community of Practice participation, CoP).

CE 2.0 is an example for a project where several Web 2.0 design patterns were combined with technologies from the semantic web. As Schaffert [Schaffert, 06] pointed out, the Social Semantic Web is a coin with two sides: It can be “Semantically Enabled Social Software” or a “Socially Enabled Semantic Web”. CE 2.0 addresses the first strategy, since it is first of all a KM project built on principles of the Social Software. Existing Wikis throughout Sun, tagging behaviour and the heavy use of Weblogs are the basis for many KM activities. But, as mentioned above, the potential which user-generated content could offer for KM systems can be leveraged by the use of semantic web infrastructure. 3.2

Use case: Beatnik – Semantic Address Book

Beatnik [Story, 07] is a Semantic address book prototype that consumes and produces foaf and vcard files. It is designed to look very similar to a well known address book software in order to build on well established intuitions. The advantage of a semantic address book are numerous and simple to understand. Firstly adding new addresses is just a matter of dragging and dropping a foaf file onto Beatnik. With over fifteen million foaf files generated by LiveJournal (See: http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/15_million_foaf_files) alone more and more such information is becoming available. Beatnik will just increase the deployment of these files, making its usage even more appealing. Secondly, keeping up to date with one's contacts is automated. Since the foaf file is published at a well known URL all the author of the foaf file needs to do is to change his foaf file for all his contacts to have up to date information to work with. Change your address and you just need to update your foaf file using Beatnik and everyone connected to it will have their information updated the next time they do an HTTP GET on the URL. Thirdly, foaf has a relation (foaf:knows) linking a person to their acquaintances, thereby making it possible for a foaf file to become browseable. Starting from someone's foaf file one can explore a network of acquaintances, by simple clicking on someone's name. The Beatnik foaf user agent can help one add complete or partial information about the people one knows to one's foaf file, depending on some privacy policy. The strength of a relation can be calculated by the richness of the return links. If one’s foaf file says that person A knows person B, and person B's foaf file states the inverse relation, then this confirms the relationship.

P. Reiser, H. Story, F. Novak, A. Blumauer: Towards ...

77

Beatnik is the combination of Web 2.0 design pattern “Network effects by default”, a very easy to use interface and technologies from the semantic web. The usefulness of an Address Book like Beatnik grows with the number of applications that are able to make use of the information contained therein. Apple's Mail reader for example can communicate with the Apple Address Book and retrieve the particular image associated with an email author, and display it in the header of the email. This provides very useful mnemonic information. For Beatnik therefore to be able to make use of this information it needs to integrate well with widely used applications. Tools from the Semantic Desktop research area can be used here.

4

Conclusion: Towards an Enterprise n+1

No matter how the creation, exchange and reuse of semantic data will be realised, the success of any KM system relies heavily on the existence of semantic data which can be used corporate wide. The creation of semantic data can be done by users as heavily discussed in the Web 2.0 domain, by experts, or by machines using technologies like information extraction or natural language processing. The exchange of semantic data can be built on semantic web infrastructure, for example by setting up an RDF bus for the realisation of a semantic layer on top of existing databases and applications. However, concepts for an Enterprise n+1 should not only also consist of strategies for data integration but also of systems which stimulate the exchange of information and knowledge on a community-level, which was pointed out by use case 1 – CE2.0. Finally, the second use case has demonstrated, how important easy to use interfaces and tools are, which hide away the semantic web infrastructure from the users. x x x x x x x

“Enterprise n+1” is the next transformation of companies which have been incorporated already a majority of the Web 2.0 principles, and therefore make use of semantic web based information management: Networked, project-oriented collaboration will be transformed into semantically interlinked, community based collaboration. Mash-ups will not only recombine existing information but will also be coupled to business processes. Not only information will be open and linked to other resources but also people as social networks and therefore be able to rate available knowledge Software no longer will be available only as a service but as an open source service Web 2.0 design pattern “perpetual beta” will be replaced by “real time” services Enterprise n+1 will rely on a three-layered approach, like the A-O-I-Model [Blumauer, 06] combining smart applications built on user interfaces like the semantic desktop, the organisation level and Semantic Web infrastructure

78

P. Reiser, H. Story, F. Novak, A. Blumauer: Towards ...

References [Anderson, 04] C. Anderson, “The Long Tail“. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html (2007-05-18) [Ankolekar, 07] A. Ankolekar; M. Krötzsch; T. Tran; D. Vrandecic: „Two Cultures. Mashing up Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web”, In: Position Paper, WWW 2007 [Berners-Lee, 05] T. Berners-Lee, „Putting the Web back in Semantic Web”. http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/1110-iswc-tbl/ . In: ISWC 2005, Galway [Bizer, 03] C. Bizer. D2R MAP - A database to RDF mapping language. In: WWW (Posters), 2003. [Blumauer, 06] A. Blumauer; T. Pellegrini: „Semantic Web und semantische Technologien: Zentrale Begriffe und Unterscheidungen“, In: „Semantic Web – Wege zur vernetzten Wissensgesellschaft“, T. Pellegrini, A. Blumauer, Springer Verlag, 2006 [Fraunhofer, 05] Fraunhofer Wissensmanagement Community (Hrsg.), „Wissen und Information 2005“, Fraunhofer IRB Verlag, 2005 [Gupta, 02] R. Gupta; M. Risteff: „An Emerging Force in Knowledge Management“, Technical White Paper, Sun Microsystems. http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/whitepapers/pdf/Knowledge-Mgt.pdf (2007-0705) [Kolbitsch, 06] J. Kolbitsch; H. Maurer: „The Transformation of the Web: How Emerging Communities Shape the Information we Consume“, In: Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol. 12, no. 2 (2006) [O’Reilly, 05] T. O’Reilly: „What is Web 2.0?”. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html 21)

(2007-05-

[Reiser, 06] P. Reiser: “Messbares Wissensmanagement”, In: Mit Wissensmanagement besser im Wettbewerb, Proceedings der KnowTech 06, CMP-WEKA Verlag, 2006 [Reiser, 07] Peter Reiser´s Weblog, „Web 2.0 applied in an Enterprise – a huge business opportunity”. http://blogs.sun.com/peterreiser/resource/RWWeb+1.pdf (2007-05-20) [Schaffert, 06] S. Schaffert: “Semantic Social Software: Semantically Enabled Social Software or Socially Enabled Semantic Web?”, In: Semantic Systems – From Visions to Applications, Proceedings of the Semantics 2006, Verlag der OCG, 2006 [Story, 07] H. Story: “Beatnik – On the road to the Semantic Desktop“. https://sommer.dev.java.net/source/browse/sommer/trunk/misc/AddressBook/www/Beatnik.pdf (2007-05-21) [The Economist Intelligence Unit, 07] The Economist Intelligence Unit: “Serious business – Web 2.0 goes corporate”, 2007 [Tochtermann, 07] K. Tochtermann: “Neueste Trends im Wissensmanagement”, In: ÖGAI Journal 26/1, Jahrgang 2007, Nr. 1, 4-8 [Trump, 07] T. Trump; W. Klingler; Maria Gerhards: “Web 2.0 - Begriffsdefinition und eine Analyse der Auswirkungen auf das allgemeine Mediennutzungsverhalten“, result Gmbh und Medienforschung des SWR im Eigenverlag, 2007