Transcript Profitable Publishing: My journey from edge notch to semantic

Profitable Publishing: My journey
from edge notch to semantic edge.
RANDY MARCINKO
CEO, MEI
[email protected]
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM March 23, 2010
CINF: Luncheon
Esplanade Brm 304, Moscone Center
© Marcinko Enterprises, Inc. (MEI) 2010
Subtitles for today’s talk….
Can documents
be
disintermediated
Give
me
the
ANSWER!
Why
doSemantic
so
many of
chemists
Technology
with
in the
process
finding work
answers?
Information
Retrieval?
improves Retrieval!
© Marcinko Enterprises, Inc. (MEI) 2010
Randy Marcinko
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
undergraduate chemistry and physics, University of
Alberta (1973 – 1977)
graduate school at Stanford—Natural Products Organic
Chemistry (1978 – 1981)
founded Dynamic Information doing document delivery
and expert Searching (1981 – 1994)
sold Dynamic Information to EBSCO Industries (1994)
founded Information Canada Ltd. doing document
delivery and product sample sourcing (1990 – 1998)
So why am I up here?
© Marcinko Enterprises, Inc. (MEI) 2010
Randy Marcinko
founded MEI to help publishers monetize content
(1996 – present)
7. President of Nstein Technologies to help commericalize
their products (2001 – 2003)
8. CEO of Groxis, Inc. to move company into the publishing
world, using semantics to help publishers generate
revenue (2007 – 2009)
6.
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PROFITABLE PUBLISHING
IS IT POSSIBLE?
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Earnings?
needs
earnings?
WeWe
have
content!
Retrieval?Who
Who
needs
retrieval?
have
content!
InfoWorld 27 Sep 1999
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Profitability
Published Information is
inherently more valuable
when it can be retrieved
with high precision & recall
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Answers
are much more valuable
are much more valuable
than Digital Object
than
than
theTaxonomies
Semantic Web
Identifiers (DOIs)
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Documents
can be disintermediated in
the process of providing
ANSWERS
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When a chemist needs?
The Boiling Point of Benzene, is it better to have:
• 5 documents to read and search for the answer?
• A vetted source that says:
Boiling Point: 80.1 °C, 353 K, 176 °F
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When a librarian needs?
The year JJ Thomson disocovered the electron, is it
better to have:
• 15 documents on the history of particle physics?
• a vetted source that says 1897 (ref1, ref2)
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Publisher Profit
increases in proportion to how
close the enduser can be
brought to the answer
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The holy grail is the
Star Trek Computer!
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My career has been a
series of endeavors aimed
at finding answers,
improving retrieval and
helping publishers to
monetize their digital
assets.
© Marcinko Enterprises, Inc. (MEI) 2010
While a graduate student at
Stanford:
I was synthesizing a diterpene,
Andrographolide, and sought
organometallic reagents that had
been used on similarly substituted
lactone rings.
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Dig out the edge-notch cards
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Locate the shoe boxes of edgenotch cards from each of the:
• natural products organic labs
• organometallic labs
• analytical labs at another campus
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CONDUCT THE SEARCH
• for the appropriate ring structure
• for diterpenes with particular substitution
• for analytical methods
• do the cross-file search
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ANDROGRAPHOLIDE
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There had to be a better
method!
My advisor
allowed me spend money
on information retrieval to
save on our chemical
expenditures.
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In 1981, I founded Dynamic
Information Corp to:
1. retrieve documents
3. help Publishers monetize
2. do expert searching to find
their intellectual property
the answers from within 1
by selling documents
or 1000 documents
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Also while at Stanford
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ANDROGRAPHOLIDE
I needed a sample of Andrographolide. Botanists
had located plants from which chemists had
isolated the authentic material.
Online searching was futile and even the tried and
true edge-notch cards failed me. I resorted to
telephone, telex, fax and networking.
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Locate and extract a
sample:
Bottle of KALMEGH
Lab Sample
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Off to Jamaica…..
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There had to be a better
way!
My advisor had let
me spend money to fly to
Jamaica to save on our
chemicals expenditures.
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In 1990, I founded Information
Canada Ltd. to:
help scientists and others
located product samples and
to do expert manual searching
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New Technology
The dot.com boom & bust came
and went. Semantic Technology
finally came into its own…..
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New Technology: Old Problems
How can we discover the range
information available on a topic
without having to read and
digest countless documents?
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In 2007 & 2009 I was CEO of
Groxis Inc.:
we used Semantic Technology
to create tools that facilitate
Information Discovery
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The Problem
I am interested in scouring the
web as well as proprietary and
public databases to Discover
Information available on Alaskan
Malamutes….
I could use Grokker
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© Marcinko Enterprises, Inc. (MEI) 2010
© Marcinko Enterprises, Inc. (MEI) 2010
New Technology: Old Problems
At the end of the information
discovery process, we still have
scores of documents to review!
How can documents be
disintermediated when
answering questions?
© Marcinko Enterprises, Inc. (MEI) 2010
In 2001 & 2002 I was President
of Nstein Technologies:
we used Semantic Technology
to create tools to automatically
disintermediate documents
and improve Publisher Profits
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The Problem
I want to know the chemicals
spills during March 2008,
charted by region.
I could use Nstein’s Nretriever…
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Chemical
Location
Doc #
sodium
hydrosulphite
North Sydney, NS
111478
Waste Disposal
styrene monomer
Frederictonm, NB
43
Chemical Spill
sodium hypochlorite
Mallorytown, ON
12754
AgChem Production
xylene
Toronto, ON
225475
anhydrous ammonia
Red Deer, AB
72775
ISSUE
Chemical Production
Laws & Regulations
ATTRIBUTE
Location
SIC Code
Company
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THE ANSWERS
PROFITABLE PUBLISHING will results
from publishers who:
• enable quick and easy retrieval by the enduser
• utilize semantic tools for added functionality
• disintermediate documents whenever possible
• like the Star Trek computer, supply answers to
the enduser and not just intermediate documents
© Marcinko Enterprises, Inc. (MEI) 2010
My Career and my current company,
MEI (founded in 1996) has been
focused on:
Helping Publishers to
Monetize their Digital Assets.
© Marcinko Enterprises, Inc. (MEI) 2010
THANK YOU!
Randy Marcinko
[email protected]
415.264.7085
© Marcinko Enterprises, Inc. (MEI) 2010