FIMA London 2009

A busy week, last week. FIMA attendance was down a bit however we at least got back into the City. We missed attendees from Asia and Australia who participated last year however I suspect budget restrictions imposed in 08 had an impact on that.

It was a great pleasure for us to have Jeremy Ruston of Osmosoft spend a few minutes during the Avox presentation to give the audience insight into the power of open source software development. Jonathan Lister, an independent opensource software developer working with Avox pulled off the almost impossible by successfully demoing two live applications over the internet during the presentation (www.wiki-data.com and a custom app developed the night before using the wiki-data API - apps like these never work when you are doing live demos in front of large audiences!).

Thanks to all who joined the party at Prohibition on Tuesday night. The turnout was excellent (>200 people I'd say). Thanks to all the additional sponsors - Asset Control, EDM Council, Interactive Data, GoldenSource, S&P and SWIFT. The bash always makes our business a bit more tolerable.

Based on all the presentations, panel discussions and networking discussions last week, I see the potential for some substantial progress in the standardization and transparency around business entity data in 2010. Watch this blog over the next week or two. We've got some more things brewing.

Ken

Democratization of Data (or not?)

I had an interesting conversation with someone who manages corporate customer data for a major investment bank last week. She said that she had read our blog and developed the impression that Avox was attempting to democratize entity data. In her opinion (and as it turns out, in mine), this alone is likely to degrade the overall quality level of the content.

After this discussion, it dawned on me that we had better be clear about our objectives at Avox, particularly as they relate to wiki-data.com:

1) Maximize the amount of productive "challenges" received that help us to improve quality of the data in wiki-data.com. Every challenge to records with an AVID will be verified by our expert team of analysts before being applied (assuming, of course, the challenge is proven correct). The "democratization" element of this activity equates to the opening up of a chunk of our content on wiki-data.com for the world to see and for anyone to challenge. BTW, the quality improvement benefits all our data vendor partner offerings too.

2) Provide a platform for others to link to and from. Our next release of wiki-data will incorporate additional identifiers from other firms. The AVID will be part of a URI for each entity enabling the technology community to efficiently leverage a single version of the truth. This will in turn attract more usage, more challenges, lower latency and increased accuracy.

3) Create a forum for anyone to comment on data records, propose changes in public and ultimately to add "non verified" data records which Avox or other firms can verify for clients. This is the big stretch and, if I'm honest, it's the iteration of wiki-data we are least certain about.

To be clear, Avox will never provide to clients data that has not been verified according to the terms of their service level agreements. We do however regularly get asked for large volumes of business entity data to facilitate marketing campaigns for example where data quality is not as important as it is for credit risk management or regulatory compliance. This is where information on millions of entities is sometimes required but the budget for procurement of this content is meager. Perhaps in these cases it is not necessary to have an independent and rigourous analysis performed on every entity at regular intervals and the community self checking mechanism is adequate. Moreover, a global community maintained model may be a great solution for a free and universal yellow pages capability (for example). Over time, more and more of these entities will be verified by expert third parties such as Avox and assigned identifiers as the market demands.

We don't have all the answers however our aim is to give you, the user community, a platform to access and use the content cheaply and efficiently. We are looking for your views and guideance on how to shape wiki-data.com to make it a more market friendly service that represents real value for you.

BTW, keep your eyes open for v1 of wiki-data.com later in September. You can check out Jonathan Lister's blog for progress - the software is opensource.

Ken

Wiki-data development with BT/Osmosoft

It's been a while since my last post but we have been busy working on wiki-data. Some of you will know that we have been in discussions with the open source software group at British Telecom. It's a subsidiary called Osmosoft comprised of some frighteningly clever technologists with impressive credentials and serious talent.

A group of us from Avox including senior management from our Wrexham office, our sales team including Brett Hodge who came over from Australia and myself spent a day with Osmosoft last week. They affectionately refer to these as "HackDays".

Within the space of 10 hours, this team, led by Jeremy Ruston, the Osmosoft founder, put together a brand new (I mean built from scratch) version of wiki-data with some great interactive functionality. We provided the guys with a very large dataset which they used as a base. By the end of the day, we had a platform where every AVID had its own URI (uniform resource identifier) so that anyone can link to or from it, addresses of companies are now linked to Google Maps so you can visualize where firms are based (we quickly found one in Iraq!), anyone can begin a comment string on an entity and yes, we even had an online edit function (we are going to need to figure out how to govern that one before releasing it!).

If you are interested, your best bet is to have a look at Michael Mahemoff's blog where you will find detailed descriptions of the process and outcome as well as a video of me and Paul Downey of Osmosoft running you through the platform before we ran to the pub for pints. Just click on the link (embedded in the heading) at the top of this post.

Or if you prefer: http://softwareas.com/wikidata-hackathon-wikidata-a-wiki-of-companies-data.

I'll keep you posted on what will be rolling out and when. We are extremely excited.

Ken