Mini:Strobili
Strobili is a new concept for the creation and organization of virtual content in a socially-driven manner.
Strobili is intended for making the most out of the latest advances in the Internet arena which are commonly referred to as Web 2.0 and are focused around a shift from a mostly static content that is composed by few and used by many, to highly dynamic and user-contributed content. There are already several quite successful applications of socially-driven content management, such as RawSugar and JetEye. But Strobili is going to take this concept one step further – from merely organizing and tagging virtual content in a collaborative manner, to the creation of a new powerful social process.
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[edit] What is Strobili?
The main idea behind Strobili, is to enable a socially driven process of self organization of knowledge. What this means in practice is that when users use a Strobili based application to search for specific knowledge, their search is aided by the previous searches in the application's knowledge space.
To understand how this kind of self organization can be achieved, consider one of the possible uses of Strobili, the one of a call center management system. In a typical call center, each service attendant is handling customer calls in a sequential manner, that is each attendant handles a call to completion and then (at least in the busy hours) immediately take another call. In this kind of working manner, with all attendants acting in parallel, it is clear that some attendants are more efficient than others and are handling more calls per a given period of time. If we will look at the reason that some of the attendants are more efficient, we will find out that this is because they use better working policies. Thus, more effective working policies are used more often than less effective policies because attendants that use the more effective policies are handling more calls.
The meaning of this phenomenon is that if we could somehow break the service calls handling process into individual steps, and track the policies which are used in each step, we could learn how effective (and thus recommended) each policy is, by simply measuring how much it is being used. Furthermore, by linking the individual steps in a way that will represent the whole chain of actions that is taken in the handling of each type of service calls, we could even recommend the best way (or ways) to handle each such type.
Strobili is based on harnessing this principle by creating a network of cones, which are actually miniature silos of content items, called seeds. The seeds are also linked to other cones, and so a network of cones is created. The working manner of Strobili is such that the more effective trails trough this network are being emphasized as users use them more than other trails, which brings to even higher usage of these trails, and in this manner, a self-organization process is created.
[edit] Strobili applications
A typical Strobili application is based on a thin client front end - the Strobili session manager, and a possibly distributed back end Strobili server. The front end simply enables users to browse trough the network of cones. The seeds in each cone are associated with a small number of Descriptive indicators, which are simply fields that can take certain values. When users enter a certain cone they can sort the seeds (and the next cones) according to a combination of their proximity to a certain set of indicator values, and their popularity. When users browse trough seeds and cones, their sequence of selections is recorded by the session manager, that at certain points checkpoints the sequence by increasing the popularity rank of the visited cones and seeds. The result is a set of trails in the cones network that represent the recommended selections of users – and create Strobili's unique active recommendation process.
[edit] Usefulness and revenue opportunities
Main article: Freedom and money - The Strobili approach
The intention is to distribute the software of Strobili implementations freely under GPL license terms, and to leverage on the concept's high usefulness to create service-based revenue opportunities. Here are the three that seem to me as the most promising:
[edit] Pay-to-play in Strobili based networks
Main article: Strobili content realms
Because it is very easy to distribute the storage of cones over many servers with various access rights, etc., many Strobili applications can be tied together into one super-application. This opens a huge opportunity for new revenue channels over the web which are based on information from various sources that is combined to create an integrated recommendation system.
It is easy to see how this integration may empower each of the information sources. In addition, since Strobili can recommend its users on actions and not just on information sources, it is quite clear that participating in a Strobili network may have actual commercial value for the participators. Hence the first possible revenue channel that Strobili creates, that of pay to play. Strobili's internal rating mechanism, can be easily adopted to several pay to play methods.
[edit] Strobili based virtual shops
Main article: Strobili and E-commerce
One of the things that any shop owner is trying to do, is to get people exit the shop, after they bought more things than they intended to when they entered. Strobili's active recommendation process is very useful in this manner. Furthermore, implementing a virtual shop over a network of Strobili cones can be much quicker than setting up a website and can provide shop owners an excellent tool for analyzing their customers' shopping habits and thus better manage inventories, orders, etc.
[edit] Nimble organization enabler
Main article: Strobili enterprise applications
Another revenue channel may rise from using Strobili as a nimble organization enabler. Strobili can be used to create a new kind of enterprise empowering solutions. While more and more organizations become open to adopt this kind of solutions, the main problem remains with the assimilation of the new working paradigms that they represent. Strobili will enable taking on this challenge in a graduate mesh-up manner, but still, successful assimilation will require that the process will be fostered by specially trained advisers. This actually creates a revenue opportunity because the value for the organization is still big enough to cover for the assimilation expanses.
[edit] Further reading
- Strobili in more detail - A deeper look into Storbili's concept and theoretical basis
- Semiotic Wiki - A description of a Strobili-like extension of MediaWiki. More a proof of concept for Strobili's main principles than a real Strobili application
[edit] External links
- If you are not afraid of theoretical research stuff, have a look at the Symbiotic Intelligence Project website of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Their research is one of the main inspiration sources for Strobili.