Posted:October 16, 2014

AI3 Pulse

Peg, the well-being indicator system for the community of Winnipeg, recently won the international Community Indicators Consortium Impact Award, presented in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 30. Peg is a joint project of the United Way of Winnipeg (UWW)  and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). Our company, Structured Dynamics, was the lead developer for the project, which is also based on SD’s Open Semantic Framework (OSF) platform.
Peg Project
Peg is an innovative Web portal that helps identify and, on an ongoing basis, track indicators that relate to the economic, environmental, cultural and social well-being of the people of Winnipeg. Datasets may be selected and compared with a variety of charting and mapping and visualization tools at the level of the entire city, neighborhoods or communities. All told, there are now more than 60 indicators within Peg ranging from active transportation to youth unemployment rates representing thousands of individual records and entities. We last discussed Peg upon its formal release in December 2013.

Congratulations to all team members!

Posted by AI3's author, Mike Bergman Posted on October 16, 2014 at 3:24 pm in Open Semantic Framework, Structured Dynamics | Comments (0)
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Posted:October 8, 2014

AI3 Pulse

I have been dazzled by what Stephen Wolfram has been doing with Wolfram Alpha since Day 1. The mathematical capabilities are exceedingly impressive, the backing knowledge base is exceedingly impressive, and the visualization has also come to be exceedingly impressive. The problem: no open source or anything.

I’ve never met Wolfram and acknowledge he has seen success many times greater than most. But, putting on my VC cap, I see an old school adherence to closed and proprietary.

I would not presume to suggest where the Wolfram folks should draw these lines on open and closed, but I definitely do counsel they work hard to open up as much as they can; it is in their own self interest. The business model of today is premised on leveraging the network effect in various ways. Total proprietary is a turn off and drives the compounding basis for the network effect into the dirt.

Maybe their recent pricing initiatives with Mathematica online are a wink toward this direction. But, better still find a core of functionality and knowledge base and release it as open source. The world will beat a path to what created all of this impressive stuff in the first place.

Posted by AI3's author, Mike Bergman Posted on October 8, 2014 at 11:33 pm in Pulse | Comments (0)
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