Beyond The Tipping Point: Interoperable Exchange of Provenance Data

Introduction

This is our fourth "tipping point" publication.

The first was The Tipping Point Has Arrived: Trust and Provenance in Web Communications. We highlighted there the significance of the roadmap laid out by the Wikidata Project - in conjunction with the W3C Provenance Working Group - to provide trust and provenance in its form of web communications. We were excited by proposals to granularize single facts, and to immutabilize the data elements to which those facts are linked. We opined this to be critical for trust and provenance in whole chain communications. But at that time, the Wikidata Project was still waiting on the W3C Provenance Working Group to establish the relevant standards. No longer is this the case.

The second post was The Tipping Point Has Arrived: Market Incentives for Selective Sharing in Web Communications. We there emphasized the emerging market-based opportunities for information sharing between enterprises and consumers. We were particularly impressed with Google’s definition of "selective sharing" (made with GooglePlus in mind) to include controls for overcoming both over-sharing and fear of sharing by information producers. Our fourth post, below, includes a similar discussion but is this time skewed relative to the increasing needs for data interoperability among web-based file hosting services in the Cloud.

The third post - Why Google Must - And Will - Drive NextGen Social for Enterprises - introduced common point social networking which we defined as providing the means and functions for the creation and versioning of immutable data elements at a single location. Github was pointed to as a comparative but we proposed that Google would lead in introducing common point networking (or similar) with a roadmap of means and functions it was already backing in the Wikidata Project. We identified an inviting space for common point social networking between Google's Knowledge Graph and emerging GS1 (i.e., enterprise) standards for Key Data Elements (KDEs). We identified navigational search for selectively shared proprietary information (like provenance information) as a business model in support.

This fourth post posits the accessibility of data elements (like KDEs) from web-based data hosting services in the Cloud providing content-addressable storage. This is a particularly interesting approach in the wake of the recent revelations regarding PRISM, the controversial surveillance program of the U.S. National Security Agency. The NSA developed their Apache Accumulo NoSQL datastore based on Google's BigTable data model but with cell-level security controls. Ironically, those kind of controls allow for tagging of a data object with security labels for selective sharing. This kind of tagging of a data object within a data set represents a paradigm shift toward common point social networking (or the distributed social networking envisioned by Google's Camlistore as described below).

The PROV Ontology

The W3C Provenance Working Group published its PROV Ontology on 30 April 2013 in the form of "An Overview of the PROV Family of Documents". The PROV family of documents define "a model, corresponding serializations and other supporting definitions to enable the inter-operable interchange of provenance information in heterogeneous environments such as the Web."

The W3C recommends that a provenance framework should support these 8 characteristics:

1. the core concepts of identifying an object, attributing the object to person or entity, and representing processing steps;
2. accessing provenance-related information expressed in other standards;
3. accessing provenance;
4. the provenance of provenance;
5. reproducibility;
6. versioning;
7. representing procedures; and
8. representing derivation.

These 8 recommendations are more specifically addressed at 7.1 of the W3C Incubator Group Report 08 December 2010. In effect, the W3C Provenance Working Group has now established the relevant standards for exporting (or importing) trust and provenance information about the facts in Wikidata.

As we observed in our first tipping point, the Wikidata Project was first addressing the deposit by content providers of data elements (e.g., someone's birth date) at a single, fixed location for supporting the semantic relationships that Wikipedia users are seeking. The export of granularized provenance information about Wikidata facts was on their wish list. Now the framework for making that wish come true has been established. Again, the key aspect for us about the Wikidata Project is that it shouldn’t matter - from the standpoint of provenance - how the accessed data at that fixed location is exchanged or transported, whether via XML meta-data, JSON documents or other. But the fixing of the location for the granularized data provides a critical authentifying reference point within a provenance framework.

Interoperably Connecting Wikidata to Freebase/Knowledge Graph

On 14 June 2013 Shawn Simister, Knowledge Developer Relations for Google, offered the following to the Discussion list for the Wikidata project:

"Would the WikiData community be interested in linking together Wikidata pages with Freebase entities? I've proposed a new property to link the two datasets .... Freebase already has interwiki links for many entities so it wouldn't be too hard to automatically determine the corresponding Wikidata pages. This would allow people to mash up both datasets and cross-reference facts more easily."

Later on in the conversation thread with Maximilian Klein, Wikpedian in Residence, Simister also added "we currently extract a lot of data from [Wikidata Project] infoboxes and load that data into Freebase which eventually makes its way into the Knowledge Graph so [interoperably] linking the two datasets would make it easier for us to extract similar data from WikiData in the future."

See the discussion thread at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata-l/2013-June/002359.html

This is non-trivial conversation between agents of Google and Wikipedia about interoperably sharing and synchronizing data between two of the largest data sets in the world. But we believe that the marketplace for introducing provenance frameworks is to be found among the data sets of file hosting and storage services in the Cloud.

The Rise Of File Sharing In The Cloud

Check out the comparison of file hosting and storage services (with file sharing possibility) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_hosting_services. Identified file storage services include Google Drive, Dropbox, IBM SmartCloud Connections, DocLanding and others. All provide degrees of collaborative and distributed access to files stored in the Cloud. New and emerging services include allowing users to perform the same activities across all sorts of devices which will require similar sharing and synchronization of data across all devices. This has huge ramifications for not just the sharing of personal data in the Cloud, but also for the sharing of proprietary, enterprise data. And when one is talking about proprietary information, one has to consider the introduction of a provenance framework.

The Next Logical Step: Content-addressable Storage In the Cloud

"Content-addressable storage ... is a mechanism for storing information that can be retrieved based on its content, not its storage location. It is typically used for high-speed storage and retrieval of fixed content, such as documents stored for compliance with government regulations." Github is an example that we mentioned in our third tipping point blog. CCNx (discussed a little later) is another example. Camlistore, a Google 20 Percent Time Project, while still in its infancy, is yet another example.

"Camlistore can represent both immutable information (like snapshots of file system trees), but can also represent mutable information. Mutable information is represented by storing immutable, timestamped, GPG-signed blobs representing a mutation request. The current state of an object is just the application of all mutation blobs up until that point in time. Thus all history is recorded and you can look at an object as it existed at any point in time, just by ignoring mutations after a certain point."

Camilstore has only revealed they are handling sharing similarly to Github. But NSA's Apache Accumulo - and a spinoff called Sqrrl - may currently be the only NoSQL solutions with cell-level security controls. Sqrrl, a startup that is comprised of former members of the NSA Apache Accumulo team, is commercially providing an extended version of Apache Accumulo with cell-level security features. Co-founder Ely Kahn of Sqrrl says, "We're essentially creating a premium grade version of Accumulo with additional analysis, data ingest, and security features, and taking a lot of the lessons learned from working in large environments." We suspect that Camlistore is similarly using security tags (though we can’t say for sure because it is a newly emerged feature not covered in Camlistore's documentation). Camlistore calls what is doing as decentralized social networking. This kind of activity (and more, below) gives us increasing reason to expect that content-addressable products will arise to break the silos of supply chains.

Surveying the Field

Global trade is a series of discrete transactions between buyers and sellers. It is generally difficult – if not impossible – to determine a clear picture of the entire lifecycle of products. The proprietary data assets (including provenance data) of enterprises large and small have commonly not been shared for two essential reasons:

1. the lack of tools for selective sharing, and
2. the fear of sharing offered under "all or nothing" social transparency sharing models.

We believe that with the introduction of content-addressable storage in the Cloud there will occur a paradigm shift toward the availability of tools for selective sharing among people and their devices. In that context it would be interesting to see the new activities and efforts of Wikidata, Github, Camlistore and Sqrrl connected with the already existing activities and efforts made in supply chains.

Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, formerly Nike’s first Code for a Better World Fellow, and now Staff Engineer at New Relic, has innovated a paragraph level wiki for curating sustainability data. Ward shows how data and visualization plugins could serve the needs of organizations sharing material sustainability data. Cunningham’s visualization, below, once paired with content-addressable storage, simplifies greater authenticity and relevancy within the enterprise.

Leonardo Bonanni started SourceMap as his Ph.D. thesis project at the MIT Media Lab. Sourcemap’s inspiring visualizations are crowdsourced from all over the world to transparently show "where stuff comes from". Again, SourceMap, when paired with content-addressable storage, simplifies selective sharing in the cloud.

There is an evolution of innovation spurring new domain specific solutions. We've put together the following table to emphasize the technologies that we find of interest. The table represents a progression toward solving under-sharing in supply chains with content-addressable storage in the Cloud. Entities in the table below are not specially focused on supply chains and but some are thinking about supply chains. No matter. We are attempting to join the dots looking forward based on a progression of granular sharing technologies (i.e., revision control, named data networking, informational objects).

product	wikidata	git	sqrrl	CCNx	smallest federated wiki	pardalis	camlistore
creator and or sponsor  notes	google, paul allen, gordon moore	git by linus torvalds	extends nsa security design to enterprise	parc, named data networking	wiki inventor ward cunningham	holcombe, boulton, whole chain traceability consortium	google 20 pct project
user experience	public human machine editable	revision control, social coding software	tagged security labels	federates content efficiently avoiding congestion	wiki like git paragraph  forking	sharing, traceability, provenance	personal data storage system for life
selective sharing	hub data source	public / private	authorization systems	public by default	merging like github	hub data access	private by default
content addressable storage	xml api	32-bit unix hashing	cell level security	content verifiable from the data itself	paragraph blobs	CCNx like informational objects	github-like json blobs, no meta data
database	mysql	above storage	apache accumulo nosql	above storage	couchdb, leveldb	above storage	sqlite, mongodb, mysql, postgres, (appengine)

We'd like to take this opportunity to make special mention of the CCNx (Content-centric Networking) Project at PARC begun by Van Jacobson. The first CCNxCon of the CNNx Project is what brought us - Holcombe and Boulton - together. We were both fascinated with prospects of applying CCNx to the length of enterprise supply chains. In fact, the first ever "whole chain traceability" funding from the USDA came in 2011 in no small part because author Holcombe - as the catalyzer of the Whole Chain Traceability Consortium - proposed to extend Pardalis'  engineered layer of granular access controls using a content-centric networking data framework. It was successfully proposed to the USDA that the primary benefit of CCNx lay in its ability to retrieve data objects based on what the user wanted, instead of where the data was located. We perceive this even now to be critical to smoothing out the ridges of the "bullwhip effect" in supply chains.

Interoperability, Content-addressable storage and Provenance

Stonebraker et al. postulated the "The End of an Architectural Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite)" in 2007 by stating the hypothesis that traditional database management systems are no longer able to represent the holistic answer with respect to the variety of different requirements. Specialized systems will emerge for specific problems. The NoSQL movement made this happen with databases. Google (and Amazon) inspired the NoSQL movement underpinning Cloud storage databases. Nearly all enterprise application startups are now using NoSQL to build datastores at scale to the exclusion of SQL databases. The Oracle/Salesforce/Microsoft partnership announcement in late June, 2013, is well framed by the rise of NoSQL, too. Now we are seeing this begin to happen with an introduced layer of content-addressable storage leading to interoperable provenance.

In our third tipping point blog, we opined that Google must drive nextgen social for enterprises to overcome the bullwhip effects of supply chains. Google has been laying a solid foundation for doing so by co-funding the Wikidata Project, proposing the integration of Wikidata and Knowledge Graph/Freebase, nurturing navigational search as a business model, and gaining keen insights into selective sharing with Google Plus (and the defunct Google Affiliate Network). Call it common point social networking. Call it decentralized social networking. Call it whatever you want to. The tide is rising toward "the inter-operable interchange of provenance information in heterogeneous environments."

Is the siloed internet ever to be cracked? Well, it is safe to say that the NSA has already cracked the data silos of U.S. security agencies with its version of NoSQL Apache Accumulo (again, based on Google's BigData table model). Whatever your feelings or political views about surveillance by the NSA (or Google), it is an historical achievement. Now, outside of government surveillance programs, web-based file sharing is just beginning to shift toward content-addressable data storage and sharing in the Cloud. That holds forth tremendous promise for cracking the silos holding both consumer and enterprise data. There are very interesting opportunities for establishing "first mover" expectations in the marketplace for content-addressable access controls in the Cloud.

The future is here. It is an interoperable future. It is a content-addressable future. And when information needs to be selectively shared (to be shared at all), the future is also about the interoperable exchange of provenance data. Carpe diem. 

_______________________________

Authors: 

Steve Holcombe
Pardalis Inc.

Clive Boulton
Independent Product Designer for the Enterprise Cloud
LinkedIn Profile

Update on Thursday, August 8, 2013 at 9:39AM by Steve Holcombe

Accumulo Secret to Real-time Performance | Published on 7/15/2013 | Sqrrl Co-Founder and CTO Adam Fuchs explains in this whiteboard session how Accumulo provides granular and scaleable security to noSQL database environments in this session with Wikibon's Dave Vellante | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RPaDzOwqQ8

The Tipping Point Has Arrived: Market Incentives for Selective Sharing in Web Communications

By Steve Holcombe (@steve_holcombe) and Clive Boulton (@iC)

A Glimmer of Market Validation for Selective Sharing

In late 2005 Pardalis deployed a multi-tenant, enterprise-class SaaS to a Texas livestock market. The web-connected service provided for the selective sharing of data assets in the U.S. beef livestock supply chain.  Promising revenues were generated from a backdrop of industry incentives being provided for sourced livestock. The industry incentives themselves were driven by the specter of mandatory livestock identification promised by the USDA in the wake of the 2003 "mad cow" case.

At the livestock market thousands of calves were processed over several sessions. Small livestock producers brought their calves into the auction for weekly sales where they were RFID tagged. An affordable fee per calf was charged to the producers which included the cost of a RFID tag. The tags identifiers were automatically captured, a seller code was entered, and affidavit information was also entered as to the country of origin (USA) of each calf. Buyers paid premium prices for the tagged calves over and above untagged calves. The buyers made money over and above the affordable fee per calf.  After each sale, and at the speed of commerce, all seller, buyer and sales information was uploaded into an information tenancy in the SaaS that was controlled by the livestock market. For the first time ever in the industry, the livestock auction selectively authorized access to this information to the buyers via their own individual tenancies in the SaaS.

That any calves were processed at all was not possible without directly addressing the fear of information sharing that was held by both the calf sellers and the livestock market. The calf sellers liked that their respective identities were selectively withheld from the calf buyers. And they liked that a commercial entity they trusted – the livestock market – could stand as a kind of trustee between them and governmental regulators in case an auctioned calf later turned out to be the next ‘mad cow’. In turn the livestock market liked the selectiveness in information sharing because it did not have to share its confidential client list in an “all or nothing” manner to potential competitors on down the supply chain. At that moment in time, the immediate future of selective sharing with the SaaS looked very bright. The selective sharing design deployed by Pardalis in its SaaS fixed data elements at a single location with authorizations controlled by the tenants. Unfortunately, the model could not be continued and scaled at that time to other livestock markets. In 2006 the USDA bowed to political realities and terminated its efforts to introduce national mandatory livestock identification.

And so, too, went the regulatory-driven industry incentives. But … hold that thought.

Talking in Circles: Selective Sharing in Google+

Google+ is now 1 year old. In conjunction with Google, researchers Sanjay Kairam, Michael J. Brzozowski, David Huffaker, and Ed H. Chi have published Talking in Circles: Selective Sharing in Google+, the first empirical study of behavior in a network designed to facilitate selective sharing:

"Online social networks have become indispensable tools for information sharing, but existing ‘all-or-nothing’ models for sharing have made it difficult for users to target information to specific parts of their networks. In this paper, we study Google+, which enables users to selectively share content with specific ‘Circles’ of people. Through a combination of log analysis with surveys and interviews, we investigate how active users organize and select audiences for shared content. We find that these users frequently engaged in selective sharing, creating circles to manage content across particular life facets, ties of varying strength, and interest-based groups. Motivations to share spanned personal and informational reasons, and users frequently weighed ‘limiting’ factors (e.g. privacy, relevance, and social norms) against the desire to reach a large audience. Our work identifies implications for the design of selective sharing mechanisms in social networks."

While selective sharing may be characterized as being available on other networks (e.g. ‘Lists’ on Facebook), Google is sending signals that making the design of selective sharing controls central to the sharing model offers a great opportunity to help users manage their self-presentations to multiple audiences in the multi-tenancies we call online social networks. Or, put more simply, selective sharing multiplies opportunities for online engagement.

For the purposes of this blog post, we adopt Google’s definition of "selective sharing" to mean providing information producers with controls for overcoming both over-sharing and fear of sharing. Furthermore, we agree with Google that that the design of tools for such selective sharing controls must allow users to balance sender and receiver needs, and to adapt these controls to different types of content. So defined, we believe that almost seven years since the Texas livestock market project, a tipping point has been reached that militates in favor of selective sharing from within supply chains and on to consumers. Now, there have been a lot of things happen over the last seven years that bring us to this point (e.g., the rise of social media, CRM in the Cloud, the explosion of mobile technologies, etc.). But the tipping point we are referencing "follows the money", as they say. We believe that the tipping point toward selective sharing is to be found in the incentives provided by affiliate networks like Google Affiliate Networks.

Google Affiliate Networks

Google Affiliate networks provide a means for affiliates to monetize websites. Here’s a recent video presentation by Google, Automating the Use of Google Affiliate Links to Monetize Your Web Site:


Presented by Ali Pasha & Shaun Cox | Published 2 July 2012 | 47m 11s

The Google Affiliate Network provides incentives for affiliates to monetize their websites based upon actual sales conversions instead of indirectly based upon the number of ad clicks. These are web sites (e.g., http://www.savings.com/) where ads are the raison d'etre of the web site. High value consumers are increasingly scouring promotional, comparison, and customer loyalty sites like savings.com for deals and generally more information about products. Compare that with websites where ads are peripheral to other content (e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/) and where ad clicks are measured using Web 2.0 identity and privacy sharing models.

In our opinion the incentives of affiliate networks have huge potential for matching up with an unmet need in the Cloud for all participants - large and small - of enterprise supply chains to selectively monetize their data assets. For example, data assets pertaining to product traceability, source, sustainability, identity, authenticity, process verification and even compliance with human rights laws, among others, are there to be monetized.

Want to avoid buying blood diamonds? Go to a website that promotes human rights and click on a diamond product link that has been approved by that site. Want to purchase only “Made in USA” products? There’s not a chamber of commerce in the U.S. that won’t want to provide a link to their members’ websites who are also affiliates of an incentive network. Etc.

Unfortunately, these data assets are commonly not shared because of the complete lack of tools for selective sharing, and the fear of sharing (or understandable apathy) engendered under “all or nothing” sharing models. As published back in 1993 by the MIT Sloan School in Why Not One Big Database? Ownership Principles for Database Design: "When it is impossible to provide an explicit contract that rewards those who create and maintain data, ‘ownership’ will be the best way to provide incentives." Data ownership matters. And selective sharing – appropriately designed for enterprises – will match data ownership up with available incentives.

Remember that thought we asked you to hold?

In our opinion the Google Affiliate Network is already providing incentives that are a sustainable, market-driven substitute for what turned out to be unsustainable, USDA-driven incentives. We presume that Google is well aware of potential synergies between Google+ and the Google Affiliate Network. We also presume that Google is well aware that "[w]hile business-critical information is often already gathered in integrated information systems, such as ERP, CRM and SCM systems, the integration of these systems itself (as well as the integration with the abundance of other information sources) is still a major challenge."

We know this is a "big idea" but in our opinion the dynamic blending of Google+ and the Google Affiliate Network could over time bring within reach a holy grail in web communications – the cracking of the data silos of enterprise class supply chains for increased sharing with consumers of what to-date has been "off limits" proprietary product information.

A glimpse of the future may be found for example in the adoption of Google+ by Cadbury UK, but the design for selective sharing of Google+ is currently far from what it needs to attract broad enterprise usage. Sharing in Circles brings to mind Eve Maler’s blog post, Venn and the Art of Data Sharing.  That’s really cool for personal sharing (or empowering consumers as is the intent of VRM) but for enterprises Google+ will need to evolve its selective sharing functionalities. Sure, data silos of commercial supply chains are holding personal identities close to their chest (e.g., CRM customer lists) but they’re also walling off product identities with every bit as much zeal, if not more. That creates a different dynamic that, again, typical Web 2.0 "all or nothing" sharing (designed, by the way, around personal identities) does not address.

It should be specially noted, however, that Eve Maler and the User-Managed Access (UMA) group at the Kantara Initiative are providing selective sharing web protocols that place "the emphasis on user visibility into and control over access by others".  And Eve in her capacity at Forrester has more recently provided a wonderful update of her earlier blog post, this one entitled A New Venn of Access Control for the API Economy.

But in our opinion before Google+, UMA or any other companies or groups working on selective sharing can have any reasonable chance of addressing "data ownership" in enterprises and their supply chains, they will need to take a careful look at incorporating fixed data elements at a single location with authorizations. It is in regard to this point that we seek to augment the current status of selective sharing. More about that line of thinking (and activities within the WikiData Project) in our earlier “tipping point” blog post, The Tipping Has Arrived: Trust and Provenance in Web Communications.

What do you think? Share your conclusions and opinions by joining us at @WholeChainCom on LinkedIn at http://tinyurl.com/WholeChainCom.

Update on Saturday, July 14, 2012 at 6:26AM by Steve Holcombe

@NZN: @Steve_Holcombe well-stated.I'd like more on undrlined element,last paragraph:"fixed data elements at a single location with authorizations"

@Steve_Holcombe: @NZN Foundational #OO design - http://tinyurl.com/76a4jtm  | Livestock project model - http://tinyurl.com/7sb9x37  | Also see #Wikidata project.

Update on Monday, July 16, 2012 at 11:07AM by Steve Holcombe

Coincidentally, see:

WebCollage Takes Ad Copy Mobile for Top Retailers
[WebCollage posts consistent ad copy on multiple retailers’ sites]
Arlene Weintraub | 7/16/12 | Xconomy.com
http://www.xconomy.com/new-york/2012/07/16/webcollage-takes-ad-copy-mobile-for-top-retailers/

http:

The Tipping Point has Arrived: Trust and Provenance in Web Communications

By Steve Holcombe (@steve_holcombe) and Clive Boulton (@iC)

"The Web was originally conceived as a tool for researchers who trusted one another implicitly. We have been living with the consequences ever since." Sir Tim Berners-Lee

"One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don't … There are no programmes that I can run on my computer which allow me to use all the data in each of the social networking systems that I use plus all the data in my calendar plus in my running map site, plus the data in my little fitness gadget and so on to really provide an excellent support to me." Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

The tipping point has arrived for trust and provenance in web communications. And it is not just because Tim Berners-Lee thinks it is a good idea. The control of immutable data in the Cloud by content providers is on the verge of moving out of research projects and into commercial platforms. The most visible, first-mover example known to us is provided by the Wikidata Project.

The rapidly emerging Wikidata Project, the next iteration of Wikipedia, will in its first phase (to be finished within the next 6 months) implement the deposit by content providers of data elements (e.g., someone's birth date) at a single, fixed location for supporting in Phase 2 (targeted to be completed by the end of 2012) the semantic relationships (i.e., ontologies) that Wikipedia users are seeking. Paul Allen's Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Google are two of the three primary benefactors of the Wikidata Project. And it is no surprise that the base of operations for this ground-breaking work is in Germany. The European Commission proposed in January, 2012 a comprehensive reform of data protection rules to strengthen online privacy rights and boost Europe's digital economy.

This blog site exists to discuss whole chain communications between enterprises and consumers. Along that line the Wikipedia folks aren't really thinking about the Wikidata Project in terms of supply chains. But that is what they are backing into. Daniel Matuschek (@matuschd) would seem to agree in his blog post, Wikidata - some expectations. Here's an excerpt:

"Some ideas for open databases that could make our live easier or better [include] Product data: Almost every product has an EAN code. There are some companies building and selling databases for specific products (e.g. food, DVDs), sometimes generated with community support .... The Wikidata project is currently not addressing [this kind of database], but if a platform is available, there’s a good chance that users start creating databases like this."

And granular permissions (in the hands of content providers) over individual data elements are on Wikipedia's wish list to be introduced later this year during Phase 2:

• O2.5. Add a more fine granular approach towards protecting single facts instead of merely the whole entity.
• O2.6. Export trust and provenance information about the facts in Wikidata. Since the relevant standards are not defined yet, this should be done by closely monitoring the W3C Provenance WG.

We suspect that as the Wikidata Project begins to provide "trust and provenance" in its form of web communications, they will not just be granularizing single facts but also immutabilizing the data elements to which those facts are linked so that even the content providers of those data elements cannot change them. This is critical for trust and provenance in whole chain communications between supply chain participants who have never directly interacted.

What are the other signs of the "tipping point"?

Another sign is the shift to forecasting demand certainty directly from a consumer interest graph. Walmart purchased Kosmix in 2011 to push into social commerce and to integrate products with social identity. This ia an important new way to give shoppers information, and get information from them. Analysts at the research firm Booz and Company said in a 2010 report.

“Social media, or places where people congregate to share information and mutual understanding, are replacing broadcast media as the primary way many people learn about products and services.”

"Doc" Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and a former Fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, calls this a shift to the Intention Economy, Where Consumers Take Charge. Here is an excerpt from his May, 2012 publication:

Today, Walmart and Tesco and other global grocers have to wait for the checkout register to record a sale and pass the product sale information through a network of EDI processing to reforecast demand. Imagine the improvements when Walmart can see supply chain intent before the sale. Unlike Walmart, the FT calls Tesco tired.   

Indeed, Keith Teare on Tech Crunch posits Facebook's purchase of Instagram (and Google's falling earnings) signals the end of the Web 2.0 era. In the Web 2.0 era we consumed services on a web browser monetized by display ads. Now we are moving to a mobile app-centric world without desktop display ads. This is fertile ground for a shift into sharing at the identity and granular detail level via trust and provenance.

Does the Instagram purchase signal that Facebook will become a "trusted site" for granular information saved and shared in immutable objects? Facebook has to aggregate more and more data to build better services and makes its post IPO numbers. Will Facebook services come to provide W3C-type trust and provenance? We will see. But it is interesting to imagine that the Wikidata Project will be a "tipping point" for Facebook and other Web 2.0 providers toward granular trust and provenance in the Cloud.

What do you think? Share your conclusions and opinions by joining us at @WholeChainCom on LinkedIn at http://tinyurl.com/WholeChainCom.

Update on Thursday, July 12, 2012 at 11:02PM by Steve Holcombe

The Tipping Point Has Arrived: Market Incentives for Selective Sharing in Web Communications
By Steve Holcombe & Clive Boulton | 11 July 2012

Summary: Google+ recognizes the value of selective sharing in providing information producers with controls for overcoming both over-sharing and fear of sharing. The Google Affiliate Network is providing sustainable, market-driven incentives for supporting selective sharing. The dynamic blending of Google+ and the Google Affiliate Network could over time bring within reach a holy grail in web communications – the cracking of the data silos of enterprise class supply chains for increased sharing with consumers of what to-date has been "off limits" proprietary product information. But, first, a careful look should be made at providing selective sharing which incorporates fixed data elements at a single location with authorizations.