Lampitt or Leave It

Metadata is the New Application

“The more I think about it, the more I like the concept: #Metadata is the new
software.”
- @GartnerTedF, Ted Friedman, Gartner Analyst for Data Management and Integration

I was excited and inspired upon reading this tweet. I think Ted is pointing out that the real key to any enterprise information solution, rather than any innovative client presentation or visualization layer, is about getting and managing data as usable information. Rather than a fancy GUI of the application/software, the right data is the the ultimate goal, and the path to that is a metadata-driven approach. Of course I may going off in another tangent than what Ted was intending. I do not believe he has yet provided more detail, but I look forward to his elaboration.

At any rate, I will continue with my interpretation and ideas. My view is that metadata is key to this, but it’s only part of the story. That’s because mapping concept X in System 1 to concept Y in System 2, using metadata is only a “dumb connection.” And the mission is more than about data; the true goal is information. So really, we need more than even just metadata. The mission is about CONNECTING systems and CONTEXTUALLY retrieving ONLY appropriate content. That's quite a challenge today since you need to map, in a point-to-point fashion nearly every permutation of metadata connections in order to answer any ad hoc question that might arise, or to deliver any contextual content. That’s a lot of spaghetti integration to manually code and certainly it's impossible to maintain with any realistic budgets today.

Unless an ontology is used for the specific business domain(s) at hand.

For those unaware, ontology in the information sciences domain, according to Wikipedia “is a formal representation of the knowledge by a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain, and may be used to describe the domain.” Therefore, an ontology goes far beyond the concepts simple metadata, or even a dictionary or taxonomy.

With an ontology, metadata, business rules, processes, behaviors, relationships are embedded together. And the ontology acts as an overlay for existing systems without being invasive to those systems. Therefore, the ontology now becomes the heart of powerful new applications, in the spirit of Ted's quote above. Of course a client layer GUI is required to interact with the ontology which then interacts with the source systems (tools and applications). But most of the logic, business rules, and metadata are indeed within the ontology.

All sounds great theoretically, but can a solution really exist? Actually it already does. zAgile Teamwork illustrates just such a solution. With an ontology, using semantic web standard technologies, based on an industry standard metamodel for software engineering, zAgile Teamwork integrates not just the metadata but the concepts of Projects, Requirements, Tasks, Isses, Test Cases, Check-ins, Customer Support Cases, and more. Therefore, ad hoc queries, faceted searches, and contextual content can all be served in a consistent fashion.

With zAgile Teamwork, powerful new metadata driven applications are possible thanks to the software engineering ontology and framework under the covers. The real magic is indeed this middleware of the solution and the GUI can be any new or existing application or tool. For example using a template within a wiki, now Requirements can be captured in a structured way inside the wiki and tied to Projects, Issues, and Tasks in an issue managment system. Likewise Test Cases can be created in the wiki and similarly and automatically tied to appropriate concepts. And for example, do you want to know what Customer Cases in Salesforce.com are connected to a Task, or Issue in JIRA or a Requirement in the Confluence wiki? Yes, there’s a Connector for that too. In fact, all you have to do is add a Connector for whatever tool or application you have, and you can INSTANTLY integrate all knowledge of all connected systems. Too good to be true? Learn more here and give zAgile Teamwork a spin today and see for yourself.

zAgile Teamwork v1.2 is Generally Available

zAgile Teamwork v1.2 is now generally available for download here*.

*Note: Please make sure to email your Confluence and JIRA server IDs to 'sales at zAgile point com' so that we may provide the evaluation or customer license for your specific environment.

zAgile Teamwork includes three main components, and the new features are listed under each of the following sections. (for an overview of other features, check out the zAgile product feature table):

1) zCALM (zAgile Cohesion for Application Life-cycle Management): integration infrastructure, including semantic framework and software engineering knowledge model (other knowledge models, or "ontologies" can be plugged in for different domains)

•    Background reasoning and indexing
•    Inferred model is separate from base and is persisted in the database
•    Significant performance and scalability enhancements 

2) Wikidsmart Connector (wiki connector): semantically enables Confluence wiki from Atlassian.

•    Additional macros for improved template/form layout
•    Support for Table-Plus macro for improved rendering of query results
•    Improved user interface for "Smart Search", to instantly find precise content. Check out the video (requires log-in).
•    Confluence 3.0 Support
•    Support for ARQ extensions

3) JIRA Connector: JIRA issue tracker from Atlassian.

For a review of zAgile Teamwork and a 10 minute video, check out my last blog.

Presenting to Hundreds, Beers with Tim Berners-Lee, You Know, the Usual

Last night was a good night for zAgile on both coasts of the States.

I presented, along with other vendors, to the PAWS (Palo Alto Semantic Web) group as part of its first semantic web demo session, held at Microsoft's Mountain View offices. Standing room 100-200 folks, nice turn-out and great reactions. Mark Johnson of Powerset semantic search acquired by Microsoft) blogged good notes.  Many thanks to PAWS organizer Peter Berger,

Kayla and Devon at SHIFT, Katie from Powerset, assistant organizer Shamod, and Microsoft!  This was a speed demo of 10 minutes per vendor, and you can see my overview slides here.  I handled the demo straight from the regular zAgilie hosted sandbox that anyone may use to take Wikidsmart for a test spin.

(Slides from the longer version of the zAgilie presentation from the San Francisco Meet-Up last week
are here, and the video is to be posted on YouTube / zAgile.com within some days. )

Also last night, zAgilie CEO Sanjiva Nath presented to about 30 people at the Boston / Cambridge Semantic Web Meet-Up. Many thanks to Kingsley Idehen and Marco Neumann for the invite and management of the meet-up. In attendance was none other than Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself! And many folks went out for beers afterwards at a nearby watering hole.

Indeed, a night to remember...

zAgile Kicks off Roadshow by Hosting Semantic Web Meet-Up at Atlassian in San Francisco

Last night, we had a great turnout for the Semantic Web Meet-Up in San Francisco at the Atlassian offices in San Francisco. (The San Francisco meet-up is now the fastest growing semantic web meet-up group in the State; thanks to Marco Neumann, founder of the original 700+ strong group in NYC for driving the success of the groups across the country!) zAgile brought in Sorrano's pizza (highly recommended), and it was a crowd pleaser. Many thanks to Atlassian for agreeing to host at their location and particularly Trisha Hong for her great organization and work on logistics.

Sanjiva Nath , zAgile founder and CEO, delivered a presentation on the promises and tangible benefits of the semantic web. Importantly, he described that a "semantic approach" does not necessarily mean that semantic web technologies are being used. He described how you can practically apply semantic-web driven solutions today in your organization. Sanjiva presented some examples with Wikidsmart for Confluence, which turns the Confluence enterprise wiki into a semantic wiki allowing the ability to capture information in a consistent way, automate content and links generation, and find precise information quite quickly.

In addition you can "plug in" any other tools and applications with Connectors to the underlying zAgile infrastructure, called zCALM, and have a coherent semantic search across all applications and tools as well as deep interoperability amongst all applications.

We look forward to the upcoming Semantic Web meet-ups during the April zAgile USA Roadshow including an astounding 160+ signed up for the PAWS meet-up in Palo Alto on Tuesday. We look forward to seeing you there, and after the USA roadtrip is complete, we want to organize the same for Europe. Drop us a line at info at zagile point com to learn more.

zAgile Wikidsmart - Coming to a City Near You

zAgile is hitting the road and will be at the following 8 cities in the USA during April. Folks elsewhere, please email info at zagile point com if you would like a zAgile event to be held in your city.

Many thanks to Marco Neumann and the Semantic Web organizers in each city below for their help and organization with the events. Attendees will learn about the benefits of the semantic web and how to practically apply the semantic web benefits to their organization today.

April 9,   San Francisco 
April 13, Los Angeles   
April 14, Palo Alto, CA 
April 14, Boston       
April 16, Washington, DC 
April 20, Austin          
April 22, Chicago        
April 23, New York   

Open Source zAgile Wikidsmart Goes GA - Testdrive It Online or Meet-Up With zAgile

It was great coverage from SD Times a couple weeks ago on how zAgile enables ALM 2.0, and now we just put out a press release on Wikidsmart.  Seems like word is getting out. With Wikidsmart, the ability to pull information from across an organization's tools and applications goes well beyond the confines of the engineering team. Now you can bridge the information gap between engineering, product management, sales, and marketing.

zAgile Wikidsmart just went GA last night, and it's available on SourceForge. I recommend going here for the download instructions. But before you download, you might want to learn more at the Wikidsmart overview page, see some videos of it in action (application interoperabilty or smart search - on the lower right), or even test-drive a hosted version on our sandbox.

When you add Connectors for tools and applications to Wikidsmart, your Confluence wiki will even become an enterprise information dashboard, allowing you to expose any information - and infer informtion - across your tools and applications.

If you would like to learn more in person, we have several events coming up in the Bay Area:
- March 19: Co-Sponsoring the Atlassian User Group in San Jose this Thursday
- March 25: I will be on a panel at OSBC
- April 9: Semantic Web Meet-Up at Atlassian offices in San Francisco

In addition, founder Sanjiva Nath has been asked to be a panelist at Enterprise Data World on April 8 in Tampa Bay, to discuss how enterprise data integration professionals can leverage semantic web technologies for rich information integration across the organization.

March 19, San Jose: zAgile Co-Sponsoring Atlassian User Group

We hope you can join us and our friends at CustomWare in San Jose, CA on March 19 at the San Jose Art Museum. Already looks like a great crowd signed up.

Please make sure to register here.

Achieving an Enterprise Information Portal with Social Networking and Deep Contextual Integration

I read with great interest an article from eWeek, authored by Pringo's Majid Abai, entitled "How Enterprise Information Portals and Social Networking Are Converging."  I think Majid is right on the money, and his comments are quite close to zAgile's vision.

In the past, I recognized how zAgile's vision matches up well with emerging trends including: Unified Collaboration, information sharing, semantic discovery, social networking, contextual computing, and the surge in mash-ups.

The thing that intrigues me is that it seems that not many people are putting together the critical idea, that comprehensive, contextual, enterprise collaboration requires a mastery of data and more specifically, that's about semantic data. Certainly SOA / web services are great for connecting data from point A to point B, but if every time you must define all the meta data characteristics of A & B and how they are related, you waste a lot of time, you will get inconsistencies, and you still won't be able to infer meaning with respect to A & B concepts, let alone how they relate to C.

This is why ontology-driven solutions for any kind of enterprise collaboration will become so obviously critical in the coming couple years. The point-to-point hacks will no longer be enough. What is required is an enterprise, contextual, structured foundation, which semantically plugs together all collobartion tools, social networking tools, engineering tools, CRM, and other applications. Ideally, the solution should use semantic web standards and be open source with an open source ecosystem of stanadardized connectors. This is what zAgile delivers.

Learn How to Apply the Benefits of the Semantic Web to Your Organization Today: Atlassian HQ, April 9 in San Francisco

We are on the cusp of an exciting new era with the Semantic Web. Just as we recall how the web popularized the internet, we are all just about to experience "the new web", one that recognizes the content within any given web page and how it is related to other information on the web. The Semantic Web promises to revolutionize the accessibility of information on the World Wide Web. But until the Semantic Web is a fully implemented and adopted by consumers like "Joe User", how can the benefits of the Semantic Web be applied to your organization today? Semantic wikis hold the answer!

Just as one might argue that Wikipedia is a microcosm of the web, a semantic wiki within your own organization is a microcosm of the worldwide semantic web. Semantic wikis add structure to the wiki enabling the traditional, unstructured content to be complimented with meaningful structure. Now Atlassian Confluence has become an intelligent semantic wiki thanks to an open source semantic web infrastructure called zCALM and a Confluence plug-in called Wikidsmart for Confluence, both from zAgile and free to download from www.zAgile.com. This means the promises of the semantic web can be immediately applied within your organization today, and with open standards and a flexible open source ecoystem.

At the Atlassian headquarters (375 Alabama St in SOMA, cross street 17th) in San Francisco on April 9, 6.30-8.30pm, zAgile will discuss tangible benefits of the Semantic Web and practical ways it can help you to become more efficient, automate processes, and empower your organization. As an example we will discuss and demonstrate zCALM, an open source semantic infrastructure. You will see how zCALM may be used to semantically enable your enterprise wiki (Atlassian Confluence), achieve "intelligent mash-ups" -- deep interoperability and exchange of context-sensitive information between applications (eg, Confluence, Jira, and Subversion - including WANdisco multi-site/cluster versions for Jira and WANdisco for Subversion, Perforce, IBM tools, HP tools, and Salesforce), and even act as a powerful search across your applications and tools.

So come by to learn how you can realize the promises of the semantic web internally in your own organization.  If you cannot make it til later, afterwards, we will move over to a nearby bar called Circolo (500 Florida Street, between 18th St & Mariposa St), around 8.30pm to continue discussions.

We look forward to meeeting you! Please make sure to reserve your spot here. Many thanks to Jessie Curtner, Trisha Hong, and Todd Revolt at Atlassian and Marco Neumann from the New York City Semantic Web Meet-Up for enabling this!

zAgile Goes Open Source - Announces Public Beta of Wikidsmart v1.0 for Confluence

I am pleased to announce that zAgile is going open source with its first publicly available product, the v1.0 Beta of Wikidsmart for Confluence, under the GNU Affero GPL v3.  Wikidsmart turns Confluence into a "semantic wiki." The Wikidsmart v1.0 Beta is available here for download. This entitles you to download and use Wikidsmart freely within your organization. Any time a modified version of the binary product is made available to the public, the code with its modifications needs to be also made available to the public.

Whereas a wiki provide an easy mechanism for users to collaborate, develop, and maintain documentation and other content within an enterprise, its inherent wiki characteristics also come with some natural limitations:
- Content organization is limited to mostly page-level hierarchies (though Confluence can help alleviate this with Spaces)
- Content Categorization may be implied in the page hierarchy but there is no inherent structure to support it
- No wiki page attributes or meta data
- Limited interoperability with other applications
- Static versus Dynamic Content

This open source license is great for your organization because there are no obligations to purchase a license, and you can prove out Wikidmart’s use in your organization, risk-free, to:
-    Use semantically enabled forms to capture information in a consistent way across your user base. This ensures easy, consistent data entry that is “semantically” understood for easy cohesion across all systems other than the wiki
-    Automate content exchange between systems rather than manual updates which can create bottlenecks in engineering operations and outdated and/or erroneous information
-    Turn your Wiki into a Knowledge Repository that captures information across your tools and applications

A detailed description of Wikidsmart and its approach may be found here.

Today, the Wikidsmart Beta v1.0 is available for the Atlassian Confluence enterprise wiki. Please contact us if you would like to use zAgile with other wikis including MediaWiki, Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS) Wiki, MindTouch Deki, SocialText, or others.

Wikidsmart is the first of three zAgile products; the others include zPortal and zComposer which are both available as early adopter releases upon request from zAgile at info@zagile.com