Recently in Information Management Category

Today I stumbled over the report from Techcrunch and had a quick look on the new search engines mentioned there.

Whereas Bing is running a big ad-campaign to promote itself, Wolframalpha is just there and provides a nice knowledge database.

I think both portals are well done, but have a slightly different focus. There is just so much rumor going on about Bing, that Wolframalpha can profit form the press coverage (as I do promote both sites here as well).

Well maybe it is a little bit late to write about "Web 2.0" now, since it is dying, at least does one gain the impression when looking at some posts. But my point is, that "Web 2.0" is a nice concept for niche-players and start-ups, but not really for big companies. I came to write this post, because I have recently read another (old) article about an economist research paper here. There the author states, that the economist does not mention "Web 2.0" or other word combinations containing the suffix "2.0" and thus is incomplete. This is clearly not my point of view for this topic and I will tell you why.

Pipl.com a new search engine for "People Search" has gained some attention in a few blogs (e.g. styropor.ch). Not because they are specialised in searching information related to people in the web, this is well known from other People Search Engines like Yasni.com or Spock.

But the really new thing about Pipl is, that it searches also sources from the deep web. For example can you search for an ICQ-Nickname and you will probably find your own old identity, that you nearly had forgotten about. And there are some other nice features I like about this search engine. It has fields to search for email-addresses, username and also for phone number (but only for the US now).
A short test has shown, that the results are really good. And i therefore like it more than Spock or Yasni.

Building ontologies for the semantic web is from a technological point of view (meaning to put all available data into one ontology) nothing great. But there are a few critical challenges to build a really good, useful ontology. I could gather some experiences in a small project at my university, where we (the students) have tried to build an ontology from scratch by ourselves to gain some insights for the problems and challenges on the business side. The conclusion is, that there are mainly two, interlinked "obstacles" on the way to a successful ontology.

Define a domain

As already mentioned in the abstract, an ontology has to be concrete enough to provide some value for the user, which means essentially that it allows the users to gain on the one side a rough overview of a topic but on the other side to dig deeper into special aspects of a domain.
This then is clearly an optimisation problem, where the designer of an ontology has to decide for his individual case how wide and deep the domain should be outlined. Thanks God, has been thought about this problem when the OWL-Standard has been created. A designer can link to already existing ontologies (which can be found for example with Swoogle).

I would like to illustrate this with a simple example: Think about the domain of "Travel / Travelling". There are a lot of things involved in this domain. When somebody plans a journey, he or she first searches a destination. To get to the desired destination this person needs transportation. Transportation can happen by train, plane, car, bus and so on... Then you need an accomodation, want to make some sightseeing and go out to a restaurant for dinner and many other things more.
This rather incomplete example shows how many concepts can be found in one domain. And all this concepts, if they already exist as ontology, can be used from your own ontology. That is great, isn't it?

The second good news is, that the most information about a domain, is already available on the internet. Some may talk there about the Deep Web and thus discriminate between the "Surface Web" and the underlying databases / data storages. But to put this short: what can be found on the internet can be crawled (Google is maybe the best example for this). So there is already a possibility to gather the data in an automated way. Which saves time and thus costs.

But what you never should forget during your project, is the focus of your domain. How wide should it be and how deep should it go? To answer this question correctly you should always think about your future customer/user of the ontology. And you can maybe test this by yourself.

The first post in this year is about digital identities in the internet and the threats upon the privacy of internet users imposed by changes in the structure of our digital society. It is based on a seminar paper for the course "Digital Technology and Society" at the University of St. Gallen. You will find the paper at the end of this article for the download.

But first of all a little overview on the topic. The IT-magazine iX (german) has had an issue on this social networks and presents on the homepage a rich collection of links to this topic.

First of all, we need to know what digital identities are. Everybody talks about the digital identity management and in connection to this, there is another buzzword: social engineering. Since many internet users have multiple accounts and profiles on different so called social communities, a digital identity is, at least for me, the sum of all available data to one human being available on the internet. Specialised search engines around the topic of persons and/or names have been popping up in the recent years (e.g. Yasni).

The old pattern of a project-based information management, has shown some weaknesses, especially when it comes to outsourcing. Thinking about new approaches, Prof. Dr. W. Brenner from the Institute Of Information Management at the University of St. Gallen has written in 2006 together with R. Zarnekow and U. Pilgram the book "Integrated Information Management. Applying Successful Industrial Concepts in IT", which takes a look at the state of the art and the future of information management.

During the master's course "Information Management" I and my dear group colleagues had to deal with this book, with the special focus on the product-based approach (which is in fact, a more precise model of the Framework of Zarnekow, Brenner and Pilgram).

Briefly explained, Integrated Information Management is an approach which looks at the complete value chain of a company. There is, in contrast to the purely on IT focused "Plan - Run - Build"-Pattern, a more generic pattern, derived from well known patterns and concepts of the manufacturing industry. This is the heart of the model and consists of the steps "Source - Make - Deliver". On top of this the "Govern"-Task is responsible for the alignment between corporate strategy, IT-strategy and the operational level. This implies, that everything starts with IT-Governance, otherwise no integrated information management can be established. This core-pattern can be repeated for every process step / business unit along the value-chain.

The product-based approach is, as already mentioned, a more concrete way to implement the integrated information management. First we have to shed some light on the role, which the IT Service Provider plays in such a environment. Traditionally he has been a project partner and has done project management. Now ithe IT department is transformed to a service provider, which negotiates on based on products. This shifts the focus away from technical language and implementations to business speaking respectively to business support. This implies several changes, which you can see in the presentation.
And as usual, change has its own challenges. We have outlined them too on the presentation.

You can download the file here:

IM_Productbased.pdf