Mark Logic User Conference 2009 Blog

The second post-lunch session I attended today was called “Real-time Alerting of Time Critical Data” by Mike Fagan of Booz Allen Hamilton. It was a bit technical in nature and kind of vague. But, if I understand the concept correctly, the idea is that rapid access to certain types of information can provide unparalleled business benefits, including the ability to make an intelligent decision based on actual data, not the psychic power so often utilized by organizations today. And, by alerting users when information of interest to them is available, organizations can increase productivity and eliminate unnecessary manual tasks.

The application created by the company runs on MarkLogic Server and performs time-critical alerting (often via email), preventing government employees from wasting time looking for time-sensitive information that is not available until later. This problem (searching for information that is not available) escalates when a user cannot find the information needed. When this occurs they waste time and resources running additional searches

To avoid “alert overload” (getting too many alerts and making all alerts seem less critical) the system allows users to control ‘match definitions’ (rules) based on their current environment. The examples provided by the presenter were difficult to understand, so I’m going on a hunt to find a great example that will fully illustrate the possibilities of real-time alerting of time-critical data and will report back here at a later time.

If should be noted that the presenter did a great job of addressing what they did in their particular situation, but I was unable to fully-grasp exactly what they did and communicate it to you.

After lunch, I attended a great presentation from Ian Williams of John Wiley & Sons, a publishing firm that serves the higher education arena and differentiates itself from the competition by providing a customized publishing solution called Wiley Custom Select. The solution, which runs on MarkLogic Server, provides professors with an online portal where they can create custom textbooks for their courses by remixing both content from previously published books in the WIley catalog and materials provided (perhaps created) by the teacher.

From the perspective of the instructor, the site works much like SafariU, another MarkLogic-powered custom publishing tool.

Williams started the presentation with a hysterical video demonstrating the old school way of reusing content from previously published books to create custom textbooks. In the video, innocent books have their spines sliced off, their guts ripped out, and then the dreaded 3 hole punch! LOL You get the picture [and I’ll post the video here later].

Customization is a drag-and-drop function, no coding or specialized knowledge is needed. The service provides a cover-building feature that allows teachers to design a book cover, preview it in near real-time.

Content is output to a variety of formats, and styles and the site supports both black-and-white and full color printing options. Completed books can be printed or delviered as e-Books to the students.

XML guru Norm Walsh, whom I interviewed recently, also addressed the audience briefly, explaining exactly how Wiley Custom Selects works behind the scenes. He made it clear that much, if not nearly all, of the processing takes place with XQuery and MarkLogic Server and does not rely on some of the many tricks others use to attempt to accomplish similar feats.

Need additional information? You can reach Ian Williams at iawillia@wiley.com or via telephone at +1 201-748-8703.

In this first round of breakout sessions, I decided to atttend “Content Applications Being Developed at the LDS Church” with Mike Bowers. I selected this session because The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the steward of generations worth of content, in an increasingly wide variety of formats. And, legacy content — yes, indeed — they got plenty. As a result, they have some interesting content challenges that span the entire lifecycle of content.

LDS is using MarkLogic Server as their platform for developing interactive web sites, content applications, single source repositories, and basic content management systems. Bowers said they’ve only had the system for just under a year, but they are using it in some pretty innovative ways. But, not without some confusion by the users. Is it a content management system? Is it a development environment? Is it a file system? Is it a search engine? Is it an app server? What is it, exactly? These are typical questions of folks who stuggle to find a category in which to put MarkLogic Server.

[Find answers to these questions here.]

LDS, Bowers said, has created a Java application using MarkLogic as a database to maintain their Handbook for Temporal Affairs (PolicyPoint). LDS users drop Word documents (section of a larger document) into a file folder, then a document appears in the larger document, the handbook. For those familiar with technical communication, think of the Adobe FrameMaker book model. In this example, each Word document is like a chapter or section in a FrameMaker book, but once it’s processed, it’s displayed as a virtual document. It allows the church to present the right sections of the document to the right people, in the right format, at the right time. And, it does it all without semantically-enabled structured content. It relies on the power of MarkLogic to hone in on relevant unstructured content.

The church website, LDS.org, will soon be replaced by a next-generation internet application. It will integrate social media-related techniques including: folksonomy-based content tagging, content personalization, polling, quizes, feedback/comments, etc. They’re even adding the ability for younger congregants to upload and manage user-generated content: video files, music, and games. And, they’ll be able to manage their own profiles, like they do on most social networking sites.

Using the MarkLogic Web Architecture, the church estimates that it will be able to support 10,000 concurrent users with a repsonse time of 2 second per page.

Bowers said that they were just now getting their feet wet with MarkLogic and that they’re figuring out how to use it, what works best, and they’re finding new and exciting content challenges to solve. He said he’d be happy to return next year to provide an update on their progress.

Unfortunately, he had too many examples to discuss in the time he had to present. He rushed through some examples at the end, providing some high-level descriptions:

• Gospel Library Search - Dynamically generating the content and the application interface using MarkLogic and Microsoft Silverlight
• FamilySearch Help Center

“We really like MarkLogic Server because it allows us to quickly get up and running and create applications fast,” Bowers added, commenting that his co-workers, who have no experience with XQuery, are empowered to solve challenges without much specialized knowledge.

He said the church is also exploring how understanding how natural document structure can improve search relevance. They’re using XLink for Google-like searches.

“Everyone at LDS wants a piece of MarkLogic,” Bowers said.

Overall, it was an interesting session that helped attendees understand the issues an organization may experience when moving to MarkLogic. Its reliance on XQuery and its ability to handle both unstructured and structured content makes it a confusing proposition for some IT pros, who are used to the way things worked in the relational database and document-centric worlds most knowledge workers come from.

But, as LDS has discovered, change can be good — even if you don’t fully understand the impacts of the changes.

James Surowiecki, the author of the best-selling The Wisdom of Crowds, talked to the audience about the theme of his book: avoiding reliance on individuals or small groups of elite employees to solve problems. He provided several examples of why this approach is not usually going to give you the best answer, and may, more often than not, give you totally wrong answers.

One example of how the crowd is usually right is the show Who Wants to be a Millionaire, where individual contestants who get stumped can use a “lifeline” — one of which is to trust the wisdom of the audience. As it turns out, the audience is right 90% of the time.

Wikipedia is a fascinating example of trusting the crowd to provide you with the right answers, and the majority of the time, they do. NASA has also used crowd-sourcing to accelerate the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project timelines. NASA discovered that the crowd was able to solve their challenge faster and as accurately as they would expect if they hired professional scientists to tackle the task.

“The more diverse a group is, the smarter and better their results will be,” said Surowiecki.

Surwiecki provided numerous examples of how organizations in the pharmaceutical, political, science and information technology companies are using crowdsourcing to predict outcomes, develop new ideas, find solutions to existing problems. And, it’s not that new. Companies like Eli Lilly has been doing it for years (for research and development) with great success.

Crowdsourcing is especially useful in big organizations, because there’s so much information and it’s so hard to get to (including information locked inside of the brains of employees, partners, customers).

“Diversity is the key to crowdsouring success,” says Surowiecki. “It makes sense to take diversity of training, perspective, experience, geography, age, gender… into account.” When you do, he says, you’ll find much better answers to your challenges.

Diversity will help you avoid group-think. When members in a group get too comfortable with one another and the more they discuss, the more the start to agree. There’s a need for a voice of dissent - a devil’s advocate of sorts. “You’ll have more conflict and it will be harder to manage these groups,” Suroweicki says, “but the benefits are worth the effort.”

He talked a bit about the human problems behind knowledge sharing. Because information is power, some folks are reluctant to share for fear they could be replaced. He also discussed the problems associated with corporate cultures that support the notion that everyone should get along and come to consensus, which doesn’t lead to the best answers.

“Crowds are smartest when people in them act as individuals as much as possible,” he says. He also warned about talkative people, those who dominate discussions.

“Talkative people have an inordinate impact on group discussions. This would be okay if talkative people were smarter, but there’s no evidence to support the contention that talkative people are any more intelligent than the rest of us.” The audience found this comment, particularly humorous.

Surowiecki was an excellent addition to the roster of this event and captivated the audience. His examples will provide valuable food for thought for those attending the event (and those of you who couldn’t make it) who are attempting to tackle complex content and data challenges.

Learn more about crowdsourcing.

The crowded auditorium of 500+ XML content professionals erupted with applause as MarkLogic CEO, Dave Kellogg took the stage. Dave’s presentation started by providing an overview of the search engine/database divide (the no man’s land that used to exist between the document-centric folks and the database-centric people). He used various examples to help the audience understand how we got to where we are today — in most organizations, not fully able to leverage all of the information available to us in meaningful ways. Specifically, he talked about the reasons why these two worlds — data from databases and content from documents — are colliding.

Dave talked a bit about MarkLogic Server, and the company as a whole, which is in the enviable position of having tremendous growth and profitability. According to Kellogg, the company has experience 60% grow in revenue during Q1 of 2009, something most companies could only dream about.

MarkLogic is serving organizations with lots of unstructured information, not always books and documents, as one might expect, says Kelogg. “You might be surprised to learn about some of the other types of content our customers need help with  — email, spare columnal data, recursive data, metadata, and even, content scraped from websites.”

“Generally, customers use the system to ‘slice-and-dice’ information and analyze it for critical business reasons,” says Kellogg. “They also use the system to build custom applications [often for 100 TB or more of data] for a wide variety of purposes.”

XQuery is the technology that makes MarkLogic such an important and game-changing tool and Kellogg touched briefly on this. You can learn more about XQuery in Norm Walsh’s article (for Data Conversion Laboratory) entitled Making the Case for XQuery.

Dave provided a great example of the search for meaning: Wolfram Alpha. It’s a computational knowledge enegine that answers queries from users. Give it a whirl.

Disruption is happening all around us. Open source. Software-as-aservice. Cloud computing. Kellogg says these and other changes are inevitable and will need to be addressed.

“Pure, technological disruption is less in vogue today,” Kellogg shared. “It’s the delivery model that is being disrupted.”

He’s a very quotable individual and a great writer. His award-wining blog (CODie 20009 Award for Best Corporate Blog), is loaded with useful posts, heavy with insight and loaded with context — and useful hyperlinks. Stop by and subscribe to his RSS feed.

It’s May 12, 2009 the first day of the MarkLogic User Conference. Welcome, to those of you who just arrived. And, hello to those of you keeping tabs on us from elsewhere. Here’s a brief conference update to get things rolling today.

Yesterday, Monday, May 11, attendees from all over the globe arrived for this, the largest XML conference in North America. Day 1 attendees convened for a pre-confernece day of training, which included, among other things, an introduction to MarkLogic, XQuery, XPath, and more.

“The class was game for a challenge,” said MarkLogic’s Matt Turner, “and, with the help of 6 teaching assistants, we completed a lab where each student executed a series of queries building from one liner xpaths to a full query to return HTML search results.”

“I try to mix it up the class a bit and we had a look at some live applications like Springer’s Authormaper, Cooking with the Bible and BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange as well highlighted some of the sessions like the feature previews from the server team,” Turner said. “The class was also very forgiving of my telling bad jokes (including the only XQuery joke that qualifies as funny:  “An XQuery engine walks into a relational database bar and the bartender says, ‘we don’t serve your kind here’.  The XQuery engine says ‘I node dat!’”  Badda boom!).”

The course also included several pop quizzes and a few folks walked away with iPods as prizes.

Later in the day attendees were provided an overview of the MarkLogic Server architecture provided by scalability and performance guru, Michael Blakeley.

The day ended with the official Opening Reception where attendees mixed and mingled and a few lucky folks got to meet up with author of the best selling book, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki.

Today, the conference roster is jam-packed with really great sessions. I’ll be blogging from the event all day (and into the night) on both the official MarkLogic User Conference Blog and I’ll be posting tidbits from each session via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and a host of other social media sites.

For those of you tracking my commentary via Twitter, you can easily do so here. And, don’t forget, if you are taking photos of the conference and uploading them to Twitter, or writing blog posts or Tweets about the event, use this tag: #mluc09. That way, those wanna be attendees who could not, for one reason or another, escape from their cubicle farms will be able to see what their missing from the comfort of their workstations.

Okay, now to find some coffee.

If you’re heading to San Francisco for the MarkLogic User Conference 2009, don’t be surprised if your co-workers are a teeny bit jealous. After all, you’ll be visiting one of the most beautiful and diverse cities on the planet, while they’re stuck back at the office. Not only is San Francisco located smack-dab in the middle of the technology capital of the world, but it’s also a popular tourist destination offering myriad opportunities for tourists and business travelers alike. The MarkLogic team has prepared a few suggestions you may find interesting.

Here’s a few tips to ensure your visit is a great experience.

• Dress for comfort! There’s no need to break out your three-piece suit, unless that’s what makes you feel most comfortable. Dress is business casual. Blue jeans are not only okay, they’re encouraged. A light jacket or sweater is always a good thing to bring with you, just in case the conference center gets a little chilly. It’s also good idea to bring a wrap with you during the evenings when temperatures outdoors drop to 50-60°F.
• The weather - Expect mostly sunny skies, with temperatures ranging from 55-80°F.
• Parking - If you’re driving to the event or plan to use a rental car during your stay, the host venue, the Intercontinental Hotel San Francisco, provides parking ($25 a day; $35 for overnight). Make sure to mention you are with the MarkLogic User Conference.
• Getting to the hotel - It always helps to know how to get to where you’re going — in advance! Here are directions to the hotel from a variety of locations. For reference, the Intercontinental Hotel San Francisco is located at 888 Howard St, San Francisco, California 94103.
• The neighborhood - The name of the area surrounding the hotel is South of Market, which locals refer to as SoMa. Learn more.
• Emergency contact - When you travel, it’s often good to provide family and co-workers with contact information for the venue. Here are a few useful numbers:
  • Front Desk: +1-415-6166500
  • Fax: +1-415-6166581
• Photocopies, printing, and overnight package delivery - You never know when you may need these services, so it’s helpful to know that there are 2 FedEx Office (formerly FedEx Kinkos) locations less than a half mile away. The first is located at 726 Market Street; the second is located at 1155 Harrison Street. Hours of operation: 8:30am - 8:00pm weekdays.
  • Market Street location +1 (415) 391-0951
  • Harrison Street location +1 (415) 552-4628
• Pharmacy - Forget your razor? Need some sinus medication? Or, perhaps an emergency prescription refilled? There’s a Walgreen’s Pharmacy located nearby at 1301 Market Street (southwest corner of 9th and Market). Hours: 6:00am - 9:00pm weekdays.
  
  • Pharmacy: 415-861-4010
• Coffee - If you find yourself craving a cappuccino or other caffeinated beverage, head to Blue Bottle Coffee Cafe, where, according to locals, you can find the best latte in town. Located one half mile from the hotel — 66 Mint Street (at the corner of Mint and Jessie) — this local hangout is highly recommended. For those of you who prefer Starbucks, don’t fret, you can get your fix just around the corner at 120 4th Street (corner of 4th and Mission).

That’s it for now. If you find that you have other questions or concerns, let me know. I’m happy to help. See you at the conference!

I’m really looking forward to the MarkLogic User Conference 2009 for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, the roster is outstanding — especially, the keynote presenters. But, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I have a favorite.

That person is James Surowiecki, a rock star in the crowdsourcing arena, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and the author of the much-acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds. In this, now 5-year old work, part sociology text, part business book, Surowiecki explores why it’s better to trust groups of people to solve problems, make smart decisions, and foster innovation, than it is to trust even the most brilliant individual (or, small groups of smart individuals, for that matter). It’s loaded with examples and lots of common sense. It touches on concepts every content professional should understand today, including the division of cognitive labor (why science operates the way it does and the benefits of such an approach), coherent flow (useful to understand traffic jams and related information flow challenges), and much more!

“The crowd’s judgement is,” Surowiecki writes, “going to give us the best chance of making the right decision, and in the face of that knowledge, traditional notions of power and leadership should begin to pale.” And, as these examples show us, the crowd is working wisely — and likely, overtime — in organizations around the globe.

Also on the keynote roster are three equally brilliant individuals: Whit Andrews (Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner), Stephen Arnold (President of ArnoldIT and a technology and financial analyst ), and Dr. Daniel J. Clancy (Engineering Director for Google Book Search). Each of these gentlemen are experts in their chosen fields and will no doubt provide outstanding food for thought.

Whit Andrews, a research analyst, specializes in Digital Asset Management, the Hostile Information Ecosystem (a really interesting topic!), and componentized content (the management of which is one of my areas of specialty). I’m keen to hear his talk about the future of information access. I’ve got some ideas on that myself, but I’ll wait to see what he’s go to say!

Stephen Arnold, a search and content processing guru, has a great blog, where he covers all sorts of topics related to search, text mining, and content management — including some great interviews. He specializes in helping organizations move “beyond search”, something that’s needed in today’s business world. His presentation, “Multi-Dimensional Content: Enabling Opportunities and Revenue” explores ways we can use real-time search utilizing what he calls, “no friction slicing and dicing” of content. I expect this presentation to generate lots of ideas.

Dr. Daniel J. Clancy has an ultra-cool job. He’s involved in the Google Book Search project. Its goal is to digitize the world’s books and make them searchable online. A huge time-saver for students and a great resource for bloggers like me. I used the service to find content for this blog post. Clancy’s presentation at MarkLogic User Conference 2009 is entitled, “Impact of the Google Book Search Settlement” in which the search giant settled a class action lawsuit with authors and publishers. This is certainly an interesting topic and it brings up all sorts of issues. I am interested in his views and can’t wait to hear the questions that will come from the audience.

Of course, the keynoters are extraordinarily good at this event. And, the breakout sessions are equally noteable. But, don’t take my word for it, download the conference program and see for yourself.

Hello, I’m Scott Abel, the offical blogger for the MarkLogic User Conference 2009, the largest conference in North America devoted entirely to leveraging XML and related technologies (including my favorite, XQuery). This year’s conference takes place May 12 - 14 at the InterContinental Hotel in San Francisco, CA.

As the official conference blogger, and an event organizer myself, I aim to provide helpful and interesting information about the conference and those participating in it. For conference participants, I’ll provide tips for making your experience (and your visit to San Francisco) a big success. For those of you who can’t escape the confines of your cubicle farm or client engagements, I’ll update you on what’s happening at the event here on the official conference blog and via Twitter.

[Note: The official conference tag is #mluc09]

If you have yet to register for the event, do so today. Seating is limited and the response to this year’s event has been outstanding. There’s a special offer you might want to know about. Buy three tickets and you’ll get one free. That’s a great deal!

For those of you who have never participated in a MarkLogic User Conference, expect a top quality event, smart (really smart) people, lots of opportunities to network with your peers and chat up the Mark Logic team. You’ll learn about innovative — often surprising — uses of XML technologies, attend presentations and case studies provided by folks who really know their stuff, and be one of the first to get the scoop on what’s coming down the pipeline from MarkLogic. You’re also likely to have a really good time, meet some great people, and enjoy the magesty of San Francisco, one of the most beautiful cities on the planet. Not bad, huh?

Signing off for now. Back with more soon!