messen? Wie können Mitarbeit motiviert werden, aktiv in Communities mitzuarbeiten? Ein Fallbeispiel von Sun Microsystems (Oracle) zeigt, wie mit «Enterprise

Communities» messbare Resultate erzielt werden.

We already had extensive [...]]]> Introduction

Over the last three years, Oracle/Sun participated in a research project called Kiwi which ended in March 2011.
KiWi is an open-source development platform for building metadata-driven Semantic Social Media and Social Networking application and is part funded by the European Union under the European Union 7th Framework Programme.

Use Case: Enterprise Metadata Management

Our main goal for the Enterprise Metadata Management was to design, develop and deploy technologies and practices suitable for managing user-defined folksonomies and controlled vocabularies together.

Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise

A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content – simply put it, is a collection of tags created by users in the context of one or more content management systems. Folksonomies are usually associated with Web 2.0 services, which allow masses of users to create and annotate content (photos, videos, blog posts, etc.) freely, in an open manner.

In the enterprise environment, controlled vocabulary is a system of record for naming various things and concepts related to the company business – a typical example of it would be a ‘Product vocabulary‘, containing a list of all official names for all products produced and sold by the company. Such vocabulary is usually defined centrally, in a top-down manner, by a responsible department or a by group of individuals, as opposed to folksonomies, which are defined by ‘the wisdom of crowd’ with nobody clearly responsible for their creation and maintenance.

If products in the Product vocabulary were put into appropriate categories, they would make up a simple example of ‘Product taxonomy’. Compared to simple (flat) vocabularies, taxonomies represent richer structures, allowing hierarchical categorization of things contained inside them. When built, such hierarchies form structures of trees, each having a single root node representing the top-most (most general) concept in the hierarchy.

Managing folksonomies and taxonomies together means finding the right balance between the two worlds – openness and freedom on one side, with responsibility and control on the other.

Use Case implementation

We focused our evaluation on a typical Metadata lifecycle model which is composed of the following three states:

Regular user annotates some content item (document) with yet non-existing tag – such a tag is called a free tag, it has no codified meaning and thus belongs to the unstructured folksonomy. It can be freely reused by other users of the system. Reuse of tags is enforced by tag recommender UI, which recommends users with already existing tags.

Manage Metadata
User responsible for metadata management within the system evaluates newly created free tag and if appropriate, turns it into controlled concept which is described with richer information – it is assigned with various types of labels (f.e. synonyms in different languages) and it is put to the appropriate place within one or more taxonomy hierarchies.

Exploit Metadata
Now controlled tag becomes part of the controlled metadata space, which is used also for enhancing other content management system services, such as the Personalized Semantic Search.

Apply Metadata – Tag Recommender/Information Extraction

The goal of this use case was to allow users to tag both free and controlled tags within one UI while providing them with advanced tag recommending/suggesting functionality. KiWi platform was extended with a set of light-weight (JSON) web service endpoints, serving dedicated UI widget component which was designed and developed using standardized web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript).
The Natural Language based text extraction Kiwi service was extend to recognize Oracle taxonomies (controlled tags). This allows invocation of the Information Extraction functionality right from the tagging UI. The invocation returns a list of free tags and controlled tags extracted from the document and let’s the user to apply them.

Usability of the developed widget and tagging process was evaluated in an internal usability study with technical and non-technical users. The usability study covered also the information extraction functionality, which additionally went through separate internal evaluation, resulting in several requests for enhancements.

Key Findings

• Usability study has shown, that the concept of free and controlled tags is understandable for new users. Users highly valued the implemented tag recommender UI, which allowed them to navigate through taxonomy hierarchies easily.
• It is possible to implement more advanced taxonomy modeling, allowing for example the system-wide definition of business rules for required taxonomies and also support for the taxonomy prefixes.
• Natural Language based Information Extraction combined with Semantic Taxonomies is very promising – specially the continuos improved tag suggestion results through the “self learning” capability of the system.

Manage Metadata – Concept Model Management

KiWi platform was deployed and integrated together with PoolParty, a commercial thesaurus management product,  using a set of Linked Data interfaces.
Both systems were filled with data from the internal legacy systems. 19 Sun and Oracle taxonomies with almost 6000 concepts in total were created.

The whole solution was evaluated by dedicated expert(s) contextually, during creation of the above mentioned taxonomies. The solution was also evaluated in the set of internal evaluation sessions with subject matter experts from various departments.

Key Findings

• The envisioned goal to implement, deploy and test solution for merging bottom-up and top-down metadata management practices was successfully met using KiWi platform and PoolParty taxonomy management tool
• Resulting metadata structures (hierarchies) can be used to provide enhanced metadata suggestions to the system users
• Allowing users to navigate through individual taxonomies and to apply concepts from these taxonomies along with folksonomy tags helps to improve structure and consistency of metadata in the enterprise content management systems
• Essential factors for implementing effective open metadata governance models within large enterprises are:
  • Management support- successful implementation of metadata governance requires substantial change in various content management processes within organization. These changes are impossible without clear leadership and guidance provided by responsible organization leaders.
  • The involvement of appropriate subject matter experts – in order to achieve one its main goals – proper structuring of organizational knowledge models – the direct (community) involvement of appropriate subject matter experts is needed.
  • Measuring quality and relevance within open collaborative systems – in collaboration systems with low barrier for participation (e.g. wikis) it is important to have the ability to measure the quality and relevance. For that reason, the Community Equity system was successfully integrated with the KiWi platform.
• Although difficult to calculate precisely, the cost of newly created controlled tag (taxonomy concept) can be measured based on the time needed for:
  • resolving the free tag meaning, which is often accompanied by costs of communication with tag author or with one or more subject matter experts.
  • placing the concept into the appropriate taxonomy.

Exploit Metadata- Search/Browse Use Case Summary

The goal was to verify the usability and accuracy of the search results. Subject matter experts performed a set of search queries and compared the results against the internal search.

Key Findings

• Taxonomy based synonym matching is efficient and improves the search results
• Personalized search based on Social Analytics algorithms looks very promising
• The faceted search functionality is highly configurable using RDF facets and superior to the existing search functionality

Conclusion

The implementation of the Oracle/Sun use cases in the KiWi/PoolParty system has been very useful. The development of the Metadata Management Process and its application in the environment of controlled taxonomies and folksonomies was significant. We learned how to optimize our metadata management processes, how to technically implement such service and how to improve the user interaction. The application of natural language processing combined with semantic technologies has also improved the quality of metadata. Since people naturally use different labels for same things, it is essential to relate multiple synonyms (implemented as alternative or hidden labels) to taxonomy concepts.

We have also explored the requirements of the system to the organizational structure, resourcing and processes and proved viability of the system in the existing enterprise. Furthermore, we have concluded that the system is sufficiently extensible by implementing extensions in the Oracle use cases. Specifically, customized tagging user interface realizing the custom concept of taxonomy prefixes has been integrated.

Listen to the Innovation@Sun podcast and visit the blog

but already adopted by Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft and others.

Why is this relevant to Community Equity ? Well – to calculate the social value of a content object, person, [...]]]> Activity Streams (http://activitystrea.ms/) is a extension of the Atom feed format to express what people are doing around web. This standard is still in Beta

but already adopted by Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft and others.

Why is this relevant to Community Equity ? Well – to calculate the social value of a content object, person, community or tag we need to capture all activities of a person on whatever site the activity happens. Activity Streams seems to be a perfect fit.

The article below explains the concept of the activity streams standard and provides a mapping between the activity streams verbs and the Community Equity activities.

List of Basic Activities (enclosed sections have been co-authored by Josef Holy and Max Wegmüller)

All activities are described with a user, a verb and object.
Applications implementing this standard, needs to map there specific activities to the verbs and objects defined through Activity Streams.

Let’s start with a listing of basic (general) set of activities which users perform on some Content Object (CO), in the context of the Social Web. Content object can be literally anything – document, file, another user, community etc. Simply put – on the Web, content objects correspond to resources and are identified by URLs (persistent identifiers, which can be accessed and their representation retrieved via HTTP).

The following table contains a very basic list of activities, which can occur between basic entities of the Social Web – People, Content and Groups. These entities and their relationships form a mesh, where people, groups and content are interconnected. Cross-application distribution of activities then means notifying of changes done trough this mesh.

The main focus will be around:

Happy reading and Feedback/Comments are always welcome

At Sun we have a community called Onestop. This is a community of around 300 subject matter experts who voluntary maintain a page around a topic like a product, a technology or a best practice. The people in the [...]]]> Recently I got a lot of questions on how to build trusted content with communities.

At Sun we have a community called Onestop. This is a community of around 300 subject matter experts who voluntary maintain a page around a topic like a product, a technology or a best practice. The people in the field are really trusting this content.

As example I got some feedback from a user who told me

” If its not on Onestop it does not exist.”

This is pretty cool and probably the dream of any online marketeers. Community created content is TRUSTED by the community !

But how can you build trusted “bottom up” content?

Its all about how you facilitate the communities !

Content and Trust

As more process you add to the content creation/maintenance as more its get trusted by the user.

Example: Wiki content might be pretty untrusted but a product page maintained by the product group is a highly trusted as it is the System of Record for the product description.

Reputation and Trust

As higher the reputation of a person is as more people trust the content

Example: In this example we look at the overall Java community. If John Doe, a newbie in the Java world blogs about a Java topic the trust is pretty limited but if James Gosling blogs about a Java topic the trust is likely pretty high

Community model and Trust

When we look at the community model e.g. a completely open and unmoderated community versus a facilitated community we discover that well facilitated communities have more trust then open and unfacilitated communities.

Example: A wiki were everybody can publish whatever she/he want is less trusted then a highly facilitated wiki like Wikipedia

Lesson learned for SunSpace

ok – what did we learn when we build and deployed SunSpace internally ?

1. We need to build a content trust model

We learned a lot from our existing Onestop community and applying these best practices to other communities
(read the Onestop blog for details)

2. We need to build a reputation model

People want and need to be recognized for the contribution and participation in communities. With our integrated Community Equity model we now can evaluate the reputation of a person based on their Tag equity related to their contributions.

3. Facilitated community facilitation

Community need active community management !!!

As part of the SunSpace Community methodology we facilitate the facilitation of communities trough our Community Driver community

more about this in a future blog …..

Feedback is always highly appreciated !

During the summit Atlassian announced their Charlies awards.

SunSpace won the The “Not just another wiki” Award: Best use of Confluence.

Thanks to Atlassian and big cudos to the SunSpace team !

This report collects best practices for how to design social features for intranets, including:

The report also [...]]]> The Nielsen Norman Group has just released a new report called

Enterprise 2.0: Social Software on Intranets

This report collects best practices for how to design social features for intranets, including:

• Blogs
• Microblogging (intranet equivalents of Twitter)
• News feeds (RSS)
• Wikis
• Social networks (intranet equivalents of Facebook)
• Tagging and social bookmarking

The report also covers:

• integration of these features with the overall intranet
• adapting Web 2.0 to a company’s culture
• community management
• governance issues

Read Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox about the report

Sun actively participated in the report and following topics will be covered

SunSpace – Sun’s social community platform for customer engineering

Sweet – Sun’s internal microblogging pilot

Community Equity – Sun’s innovative value system for Online communities

Onestop – Sun’s most valuable technical community

SLX – Sun’s online video sharing platform

This is an excellent and valuable report and will help you to turn our old fashioned Intranet into vibrant communities

Now you can and it is sooo easy !

You just need to download Netbeans version 6.7

Steps:

1. Login / Register on Kenai

2. Request for a membership in the Project Communit Equity by “bookmark” [...]]]> Do you want to load the Community Equity project from Kenai to Netbeans with a few clicks ?

Now you can and it is sooo easy !

You just need to download Netbeans version 6.7

Steps:

1. Login / Register on Kenai

2. Request for a membership in the Project Communit Equity by “bookmark” the project.

3. In Netbeans, login to Kenai (Menu Team > Kenai > Login)

4. Get the Community Equity (Open Source) code from Kenai, use /trunk to get the latest version

5. Open the 6 downloaded projects. After opening, you may be need to correct the JDK plattform version (to 1.6) in all project properties to a version you have available.

6. Build & Run the project ceq

(Thanks to Max Wegmueller for providing the description)

That’s it …

…and btw Kenai und Netbeans support chat rooms as well – join the Community Equity chat room if you have questions or if you want to meet the Community Equity Community members.

Joining a chat room is easy. Download your favorite jabber client (Pidgin, Adium, etc…) and use the following settings:

Protocol: xmpp or jabber

Username: your kenai username

Password: your kenai password

Domain: kenai.com

Chat room name: community-equity