The context engine

I recently read a terrific book about translation, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, that has inspired me to think about social business collaboration (SBC) in a new way. Amongst the wide range of topics covered by the author, David Bellos, is the relationship of words, context and meaning. He states something that we often take for granted "… For translation, and for us all, meaning is context." David goes on to say:

"The expression "One double macchiato to go" – an expression I utter most days, around 8 a.m. – means what it means when uttered in a coffee shop by a customer to a barista. The situation (the coffee shop) and the participants (customer and barista) are indispensable, inseparable parts of the meaning of the utterance. Imagine saying the same thing at 2 a.m., in bed, to your partner. … The words would be the same, but the meaning of their being said would be entirely different."

I believe that it is possible to relate David's assertion on the relationship of context and meaning to the world of information technology and social business collaboration with my own assertion that context is the bridge between data and information.

In my blog posting, Too Much Buzz?, I referred to a piece on Social Media that appeared in The Economist on December 31, 2011. They concluded the article with the following:

"As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz."

There has been talk of late of the convergence of three separate but related emerging technologies – Social, Local and Mobile (SoLoMo). It is my contention that a fourth component, Big Data, will join with the other three to form "SoLoMoDat". By combining contextual information, such as who, what, where, when, why and how, SoLoMoDat will provide the basis for a context engine that will enable us to easily "…extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz".

We are already seeing commercial examples of this type of capability. Consider the value generated by intelligent recommendations made by services such as Pandora, Netflix, Amazon, Google Translate and Eureqa. If the context engine knows all about me – my skills, my interests, my projects, and my network of colleagues (and their skills etc.) then how far away is the capability to consider context when generating a social business activity stream that is meaningful to me?

For example, if I have the task of planning a project to solve a particular customer's business problem, then wouldn't a context engine be able to recommend the people to reach out to that have solved this problem before? My stream would become much more relevant and collaboration would become more agile and effective.

This may sound like fantasy, but I think that given the accelerating rate of technological advancement we will be working with these types of tools in a few short years if not months.

The real question is not the technology, it is the human element. Are you ready to do things differently?