Contextual intranets by @roojwright #congressp

I recently posted my notes on the 1st masterclass of the SharePoint conference we organize. The 2nd masterclass of the SharePoint conference is by Andrew Wright. His talk is about ‘contextual intranet’. I'm sharing my summary of the masterclass below. I think I'll also post one or two more posts on the conference itself.
But first Andrew Wright's masterclass about 'contextual intranets'.

What is a contextual intranet?

Wright’s definition is:

An intranet that facilitates the development of content – both qualified (signal) and unqualified (noise) – that supports continuous improvement, efficient operations and employee engagement and delivers this content in a meaningful context to the employee.

Characteristics of the contextual intranet
The contextual intranet exists of the following elements:

1. Content development
2. Business imperatives (continuous improvement, operations (tasks), employee engagement)
3. Content delivery (context provided by meta data, like LinkedIn Today does and Amazon)

Andrews shows with actual examples how business imperatives can be achieved using SharePoint. For instance: by using a SharePoint wiki and ‘related content’ (using look-up fields).

How do you implement a contextual intranet?
Andrew explained how we can achieve a 'contextual intranet. He detailed the following steps:

1. Set a baseline. What do you want to achieve and what is the situation now?
2. Technology (which elements of SharePoint do you need?)
3. Set-up
4. Prototype
5. Roles and tasks
6. Content plan
7. Governance
8. Collaboration

Discussion
We discussed to which extent this list goes for all intranets, not just contextual intranets. We thought there would be more time spent on roles and tasks, and content (tagging) to make contextualization work.

Would you say you have a contextual intranet? If so, let us know how it works and what value it brings to employees and your organization?

What is Web Squared?

If you've been reading my blog for some time you'll know I'm very interested in 'web 3.0' or 'the semantic web'. We'll it seems this will not be the name for the new web. It will be: Web Squared.

Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle recently published a report telling us what 'Web Squared' will look like. It's a fascinating report with great examples and ideas.

Some nice quotes:

Web 2.0 is all about harnessing collective intelligence. (...)

The web is the world - everything and everyone in the world casts an "information shadow", an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mindbending implications. (...)

What we see in practice is that meaning is learned "inferentially" from a body of data. Meaning is taught to the computer. (...)

The real world objects have information shadows in cyberspace. (...)

A person has information shadows in a host of emails, instant messages, phone calls, tweets, blog postings, etc. (...)

Our devices extend us, and we extend them. (...)

Data analysis, visualization, and other techniques for seeing patterns in data are going to be an increasingly valuable skillset. Employers take notice. (...)

Evidence shows that formal systems for adding a priori meaning to digital data are actually less powerful than informal systems that extract that meaning by feature recognition.
Mapping from unstructured data to structured data sets will be a key web squared competency. (...)

Even without sensor-driven purchasing, real-time information is having a huge impact on business. When your customers are declaring their intent all over the web (and on Twitter) - either through their actions or their words, companies must both listen and join the conversation. (...)

The web is no longer an industry unto itself - the web is now the world. (...)

Web meets World - that's Web Squared.

Love the concept 'information shadows'. And how unstructured and structured information is being approached integrally.

Now, go ahead and read it for yourself!

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Tags van Technorati: web 3.0,semantic web,web squared

Semantic Proxy

It's been way to long ago. But I was invited to try SemanticProxy. ReadWriteWeb recently had a nice overview post on Semantic web applications and Calais was one of them. Calais is:

...a toolkit of products that enable users to incorporate semantic functionality within their blog, content management system, website or application.

Since launching the Open Calais API early this year, over 6,000 developers have registered with it and the service is doing more than 1 million transactions a day. We wrote about the launch of Calais' easiest-to-use service yet, called SemanticProxy, at the end of September. Version 3.0 was released earlier this month and version 4 is expected by January 09.

RWW verdict one year later: Calais has really blossomed over the past year and it is one of the most promising Semantic services around today. We can't wait to see what's next!

I finally had time to play around with SemanticProxy. I first tried the demo using the 'Knowledge Management' Wikipedia entry. The extraction of key phrases is impressive (also for the other entries I tried). It also categorizes the terms/phrases, distinguishing 'industry terms', 'technologies', etc. It didn't get the term in the 'organization' categorization right.

The demo is pretty limited (- it's beta, I know). I didn't go into the API stuff. But it's not hard to see this kind of smart functionality being useful in the near future. For instance, I'd love to use this semantic analysis to sifts through our internal document management systems, connect unconnected information together and build a network of information using tools like Semantic Proxy. I'm really curious if this will also work for the Web. Using this kind of technology inside the enterprise seems to be easier due to the limited data and term set.

Good luck, Semantic Proxy. I'll be following your steps and hope to experiment more internally with your tools as well. When I have results, I'll let you know.

Tags van Technorati: semantic web,web 3.0