ORB Visualization
(soon)
2/28/2004 10:42 AM
catalyzing fundamental processes of the knowledge economy.
This is a marketing and resource inquiry.
We know perhaps 35 companies that could be direct competitors for large contracts being awarded by government and business enterprises.
There are perhaps 1,500 companies where some business or technology innovation makes them a category. Then in each of these categories there are many other companies who depend on a known technology and a known business model. So a topology exists over the knowledge discovery, knowledge creation, knowledge management, and enterprise resource management etc sectors.
Let us look at some specific issues.
One of <companyA>’s competitors is <companyB> Inc.
I guess that <companyB> spends 80% of its time and resources on marketing. They have six or seven big customers and no little customers. The technology is excellent, and outperforms SAIC's LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) even if LSI is properly used (which it likely never is).
I claim that the <companyB>’s technology, if used globally, would increase the quality of knowledge discover, knowledge creation and knowledge sharing. Certainly this would transform the intelligence communities' performance. This would be true of any of 35 categories of companies.
So in addition to the technology that they have, compensation has to be sought from client relationships. Client relationships involve the development of custom resources - such as subject matter taxonomy and in some cases even business ontologies (developed most often in KIF, OWL, RDF - but rarely in Topic Maps and Orbs are not even known by anyone). Cyc Corp's primary business is in developing ontology, but this is a first order predicate type knowledge representation that is very DC (not oriented towards Human Information Production generally speaking, but rather requiring that people be trained to develop (what are natural) first order predicate logics and Cyc Ontology).
In the current business environment the customization is where the profit is at and without the need to customize the current business model fails completely apart. The customization is competitive only if the company has a de-facto monopoly on “truth”.
The same is true of other knowledge creating and knowledge sharing technologies. One important example is <companyC>.
I was science advisor to <companyC>.’s board for about a year while they were finishing their software. The vision, and the software capability was exactly perfect and the vision was that by now <companyC> would be the leader in a billion dollar industry. The fact is that <companyC> has a total revenue of less than one million dollars per year, and more than half of that is stock sales.
The critical mass was never achieved to do anything other than slow painful growth and survival.
If one is able to move to a Human Information Production (HIP) paradigm, then the knowledge work evolves to the individuals in that community of practice.
Actually, only consultants can do the very first steps of this knowledge work. The very first steps are also constrained to be those that fit within existing business models and which to not ask the user’s to do anything different from what they have done in the past.
If the consultants do these first steps, then the real users cannot pick up, what is done FOR them, easily. This can and is observed. The observation is important explained because of the mistakes made by the consultants and also because the software is an encumbrance. For example, Oracle databases (or any relational database) places a structure on the encoding of data. This structural encoding forces the measurement of the "real world" into boxes that cannot accept natural indeterminacies. This is partially due to the limitations of early computer science and partially to support the Oracle business model.
<companyA> does not use a relational database, but developed something similar and yet simpler and more powerful than the Berkeley Database, and Open Source Software system. The Prementia patent (2003) shows how to take the next step in simplification and power (but they also have not found a business model that works to overcome the cultural resistance to destructive technology.) I-RIBs and Orbs take a related step, but a different one while gathering together what is learned from the CCM patents (1992-1994).
So our proposed business innovation is to reduce the consulting and marketing expenditures, while at the same time decreasing the cost of the core technology and simplifying the underlying enterprise architecture.
Your comment? portal@ontologystream.com
How might we allow those who might bring the simplification technologies together to work together to produce the first knowledge-sharing core:
http://www.bcngroup.org/area2/knowledgeSharingFoundation.htm
How might we take a next step? My proposal to In-Q-Tel is one way:
But I will consider any one investor with the insight into this emerging market.