I just ask myself why there are no initiatives to develop standardized data models for customer  and organizational data - maybe I didn’t find it yet. But, wouldn’t it be such an improvement to not just talk about databases or data stores but about MDM stores. Don’t get me wrong, I do not think about building another CRM system with another “best data model“. I think about finding something in between providing applications and infrastructural engines. An commercial computing infrastructure which implicitly contains all the basic data models such as “Customer”, “Organization“, “Product” and so on. This would lead to a boost in interoperability of systems, data quality, …

What do you think. Right now its just a thought while listening to a talk of Adrian Cole of jcloud….

Some weeks ago, I participated in a workshop about the Semantic Web at the FU Berlin, which was quite interesting. During that day I begun to ask myself how it could be possible to connect the systems used for Managing Business Master Data with the idea of the semantic web to build a corporate data web which solves all the integration and retrieval problems Data Warehouses, OLAP, ETL (…) EAI, SOA, and Idenity Resolution Systems shall solve.

The more I thought about that idea the more I was confident that this will be a huge trend within the next 5 to 10 years. With RDF, Tripple Stores and their brothers and sisters enterprises will be able to connect the data within silos with the data of other silos. They will be able to retrieve external data and connect it on the model level by just extending and or transforming the underlying moder graphs. This idea, as any other idea isn’t new, as this link of IBM Research shows, but its still the very beginning of a fundamental swith in thinking about and handling corporate data: Humans and Maschines will be able to walk the graphs of data, identify relations between unknown entities and generate hypotheses and assumptions about the real world facts by just allowing the data to be connected by meaning and relationships; its just like it is in the real world.

To complete this post, I wanna give you an impressive List of videos and podcasts about the semantic web. Happy Watching:

http://www.semanticfocus.com/blog/entry/title/302-semantic-web-videos-and-podcasts/

Sorry, this entry is only available in German.

Microsoft is definately not the kind of software company where I woukd see any future innovations, but this video is made quite nice:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

At Web2.0 Expo Tim O’Reilly makes an interesting Key Note speech where he anticipates what Web3.0 will be all about. He compares the Web’s life cycle with the growing of a new born baby. As for the baby for Web1.0 there were loads of information that couldn’t be understood or connected. After a few month the oral phase makes the world interactively plumbable, i.e. the baby sticks things in it’s mouth and discovers that there are differences between materials and so on. This is where Web2.0 started. Today the Web is a child that can play - having fun discovering things, enjoy the information….

Web3.0 is the phase of going to school. The Web will really understand the matters of the world by adding sense throug the semantic web and related technologies. There is the mobile web and the social web…. It’s interesting where the Web will beam us in the near future. O’Reilly says: Web2.0 + The World = The World squared. We’ll see…

See the video here

What is an opinion? Wikipedia says that “an opinion is a belief that may or may not be backed up with evidence, but which cannot be proved with that evidence. An opinion is neither right nor wrong. It is normally a subjective statement and may be the result of an emotion or an interpretation of facts; people may draw opposing opinions from the same facts.”

However. Understanding and analyzing opinions is fine for geeky twitter-blogosphere-analysts, marketing soldiers (who want to know how their products perform in the public) or, somehow more evil, for political governments to check the people’s opinions about public topics. The last approach could should be inverted: Analyze political publications, quotations in the media and parliament protocols to really understand the opinion and intentions of individual politicians or parties. This can be a tool for positive democratic development.

In November 2009 there is an interesing workshop about this field: http://sites.google.com/site/tsa2009workshop/

The suggested topics are:

• Opinion retrieval, extraction, categorization, and aggregation
• Topic and sentiment alignment in opinion analysis
• Applications of topic-sentiment analysis, e.g. corporate reputation measurement, political orientation categorization, customer preference study, public opinion study
• Issues in using topic-sentiment analysis as a new research method for mass opinion estimation, such as reliability, validity, sample bias, etc.
• Sentiment identification and filtering at various text granularity
• Domain-dependency of sentiment analyzers
• Evaluation methodologies
• Performance issues, scalability and efficiency
• Web-based system demonstration
• Novel algorithms, tools and systems
• Construction of benchmark data sets

I think that Passion is one of the vital skills a software developer should possess. Passion for technology, passion for solutions, passion for progress. Mike Peters has pointed at this tellingly precise in his blog aritcle “How to pick a GREAT Software Engineer“. He writes, that passionate developers are characterized by reading DZone or TecCrunch, testing new software, or writing code in their sparetime:

Love what you do and pass that love to everyone you deal with. Always be positive, energetic and make progress, no matter what. What do you do in your spare time? If you’re not writing code, installing a virtual machine, reading TechCrunch/Slashdot/DZone or testing out the latest version of Windows 7, you are not passionate about technology.

I completely aggree with that. Of course there are things much more important then technology (family, friends, health etc.) but I think that passion in this context just means that technology is not just a job but also a hobby, a hobby which serendipously became ones job. And as a hobby it affects the daily life, the character and thinking. Maybe I can express it that way: A triathlet, a football fan and a technologist (to use a name which expresses the passion more then the title software developer) are on beach holidays with their kids and spouses. The triathlet will go on a beach run as soon as his kids are playing in the water and his wife is relaxing in the sun. The football fan will inform himself about the results of his favorite team. And he will buy newspapers, search the internet, call friends at home or ask other tourists until he knows how the match ended. And so is the technologist. He will pleasurably read a book about an interesiting field of technology at the beach (my beach lecture last year in south africa was The Big Switch written by Nicholas Carr). Maybe he actually will have his laptop with him to check his RSS subsrictions in the evening as soon as his family fall asleep; and some will start eclipse to try a  tutorial about the new framework or SDK. Those three guys have one thing in common: While doing their stuff they feel an inner satisfaction which is motivated completely intrinsic. Friends or their partners only have little understanding and will wonder how one can be that passionate about such an apparantly unimportant thing. But this question is not really important to the triathlet, the football fan an the technologist. Especially for the technologist its just a neat sideeffect that he can make a living with his hobby. To come back to the article I mentioned above: I think that its really important to be passionate about what you do when you work as a software developer or engineer. I made experiences that there are a lot of developers who understand their occupation as nothing more as a 9 to 5 job. In a lot of cases this will be enough. A lot of projects will succeed and they will implement some beautiful systems. But at the end of the day there is no fun and little innovative potential. They will mark time without making progress for theirselfs and on the team they are working in.