Check out this cool map I just found!

World's Largest Cities - 2050 Predicted Values

This is some descriptive test of what I would like to tell you about. The map below is a creation that I came up with, based on Andrew Macurak's prior snapshot map. I wish there was a legend and more information about the visualization included here. Big oversight.

MAYA Launches Rhiza Labs to Bring Information-Sharing Technology to the Public Sector

Pittsburgh, PA (April 24, 2008) -- The MAYA Group has launched Rhiza Labs, LLC, a software company that builds web-based applications to unify community information and improve decision- making in the public sector. The new company is an outgrowth of MAYA’s unique business incubation process that encourages internal research initiatives to spin off as new companies when they become financially independent. “MAYA’s approach to nurturing new companies makes it much easier for innovation to bear fruit and impact society,” says Josh Knauer, Rhiza’s President & CEO and a veteran of several start-ups before he joined MAYA in 2003.

Rhiza Labs is the second company launched by MAYA. The first, MAYA Viz, was bought by General Dynamics C4Systems and now employs over 100 people in Pittsburgh.

To fulfill its mission of improving decision-making in the public sector, Rhiza offers two software products – the Community Catalog and Community Insight.

Rhiza’s Community Catalog enables organizations to create easy to use websites that help people find the community resources they need. The Community Catalog is used by Human Services organizations, School Districts, Cultural Groups and Regional Promoters to organize, track, analyze and promote community assets. Rhiza’s second product, Community Insight, creates websites where people with a common interest collaborate around shared collections of data using online mapping, graphing and storytelling tools. Both software products use the Information Commons as a data sharing platform, a database technology developed by MAYA Design, another MAYA Group company. The Information Commons unites all the facts and figures of the world into a resource available to everyone.

“Rhiza’s technology enables non-profits and government agencies to directly benefit from the Information Commons,” comments Peter Lucas, Chair of Rhiza Labs and founder of the MAYA Group.

InfoWorld magazine named the Community Catalog that Rhiza created for the Allegheny County Department of Human Services and 3RC as one of the Top IT projects of 2006. Other public sector clients with whom Rhiza has worked with include, the United Ways of New Jersey, the Conservation Biology Institute, the Heinz Endowments, the United Way of Allegheny County, and the Wilburforce Foundation.

Rhiza, which currently has six employees, will share space at MAYA’s SouthSide Works location. The MAYA Group will provide administrative support services to assist Rhiza in its growth.

Contact: Josh Knauer, Rhiza Labs • 412-488-2900 • knauer at rhizalabs dot com

How Google Might Fail?

Thomas Claburn has an interesting article that appeared in Information Week titled, "How Google Might Fail" that presents a fairly well-thought out analysis of some of the challenges Google faces. The Information Commons was mentioned in the "Distributed Databases" section in the following manner:

Distributed Databases
Search, at the moment, works best with a centralized index. That may not always be the case. Peer-to-peer networking and distributed database projects like the Information Commons may obviate the need for a centralized system.

Risk: Moderate. Efficient peer-to-peer searching requires significantly faster network infrastructure than currently exists — Google built that infrastructure from scratch and it will retain that advantage for some time. But it makes much more sense for companies to control their databases than to rely on Google's index as a pointer to their data. If the trend is truly toward disintermediation — removing the middleman — then Google has to think long and hard about how far into the future it can play that role.

It's really nice to see that the media is starting to pick up on the Information Commons concept on their own. Only time will tell if we are the disruptive technology others think we are, whether the market adapts well to the change from client-server to p2p architecture.

Just back from SciFoo, which was really an amazing experience. Tim O'Reilly and Nature invited just under 200 scientists and technologists to come together in the same space to see what happens. The result was a fantastic cocktail of innovative expression and thinking between the science and tech communities. My colleage, Mike Higgins, wrote a great summary of his experience there that reflects a lot of my experience there.

I'm going to start this blog up again to track some of our progress in our implementation of the Information Commons. A lot has been happening lately, here's a quick wrap up:

• In June we successfully launched HumanServices.net, an Information Commons-powered website serving the social service community in Allegheny County, PA. The launch received some positive media attention as well as great feedback from the user community.
  
• Our work with reaching out to the research community has also been going well. In July, two articles were published in different publications, BioIT World and BioTech International about our collaboration with Michael Barmada at the University of Pittsburgh.
• I spoke at the Ecological Society of America's Annual Conference in Memphis, TN. The session was standing room only and I was really encouraged by the positive response to the Information Commons message. Quite a few very promising research partnership opportunities were raised that I will be pursuing.
• Later the same week I attended O'Reilly and Nature's SciFoo Camp I will make another post devoted to this gathering, as it was one of the best professional gatherings I have attended.

More news as it happens (I'll try, anyway!)...

Google drowning in diplomatic waters?

It seems that the government of Taiwan is upset with Google over the fact that Google Earth lists Taiwan as a province of China. I am not going to enter the messy debate over whether Taiwan is or isn't a part of China, but this is a clear illustration of inflexible database technology forcing geeks into the role of diplomats (which is always a bad idea). Google Earth and other GIS-based systems are inflexible in that they force one world view to be presented at all times. The creators of these systems have to pick one naming convention or world ontology to describe geographic areas due to the way they store geographic data.

What if every user was allowed to make their own assertions about specific geographies? The likelihood is that most of us would agree on about 99.9% of the names used throughout the world, but for the 1% where there is disagreement users could literally see their own world view. This would require a database that allows for multiple (and potentially conflicted) ontologies that may all refer to the same geographic entity. Further, user interfaces would need to be developed that allow users to make these assertions and then remember them going forward. Potentially ever user's view of the the middle east (or Kashmir, Somaliland, Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Ethiopa/Eritrea, etc. etc. -- the list is endless) could appear differently.

This type of anarchy of information might rub some information scientists the wrong way, but at least it is a start towards getting people to agree on the 99.9% of the world's geography where there is little contention. Further, if the information system is well designed, then we can use all of the diverse assertions about the organization of political boundaries, associations, what cities belong to what political entity, etc. (referred to as ontologies in database speak) to still refer to the same geophysical concepts. In this scenario, it doesn't matter whether you believe the city of Quetta is in Pashtunistan or Pakistan, we can all agree that it is a city that exists in a disputed region.

I would assert that having a dynamic map of the world that clearly shows where there are serious disputes about geographies would be a great educational tool. We are only going to resolve conflict once we understand it better. Sweeping it under the rug like Google has (and many others, too) in the name of monoculture "standards" is bad design and worse helps to fan the flames of conflict around the world.

The Information Commons project I am involved with is implementing a better solution to this problem by separating out the identity of a place from ontologies that describe it. You can read more about our approach at the preceding link. More info to come...

Nat Torkington from O'Reilly just blogged about the Harbor Info Commons white paper. I really liked his take on our work, specifically defining what he sees as the benefits of the VIA Repository approach:

The MAYA database system is designed by looking at the problem of identifying related information in different databases. In a sense, it's a loose federation system (with migratory caching and all sorts of other stuff built on top) for databases, solving problems that you don't encounter when you implement a single database, but the ones you encounter when you try to deal with dozens of different ones from different organizations.