2008-3-12 Silo Busters Jumper Platform provides a Web 2.0 Knowledgebase
With the introduction of Jumper’s next-generation software platform for enterprise knowledge management and collaboration, Co-Founder and Lead Software Architect Steve Perry sat down with Data Storage Magazine at the Oracle BIWA Summit 2008 to discuss the features and benefits of this new Web 2.0 software platform.
Voler: What is Jumper?
Perry: Jumper is Web 2.0 software. It is a revolution in managing, organizing, sharing, and searching structured data. We’ve built a next- generation collaborative knowledgebase software platform for enterprise knowledge collection and data management that makes data easier to find and use. It is a web-based Intranet portal where users publish references to structured data. Other users can search the knowledgebase for this data. In addition, they can directly contribute what they know about this data to the knowledgebase. Users build a collective intelligence by sharing what they know about the data across your organization. It provides a host of new and innovative tools for sharing knowledge about data—such as notes, annotations, derivations, context-maps, and linked data graphs—all from your browser in a single, fully integrated solution. It is available at www.jumpernetworks.com as open-source software.
Voler: Why do we need a new platform?
Perry: Organizations have thousands of databases and image repositories across the global enterprise with limited or no visibility of these assets. This data is typically isolated in application silos, dispersed across a variety of systems, and stored in a wide variety of different formats. Effectively searching or re-purposing this data is difficult, time consuming, and expensive. There had to be a better way to search this data that wasn’t constrained by schema or metadata. And there needed to be a way link it to other related data and to the knowledge about the data so that this data had broader meaning, context, and validity. In this way search results could have real value to the researcher or clinician. Most of the knowledge about this data was isolated on laptops, in spreadsheets, in notebooks, or just in user’s heads. The real power of Jumper is unleashing this collective intelligence that exists across your organization and putting it at the finger-tips of all your knowledge workers.
Voler: Many vendors claim to be Web 2.0 is Jumper truly participatory?
Perry: Jumper offers two-way communication with the user, one that involves both searching and contributing. It is the power of the participatory web unleashed across your organization via a Web-based, portal-like application. Jumper consists of the collective interests of the entire community. Jumper is the sum of the content that users contribute. User-created data profiles identify quality data resources, user-contributed information adds real-world knowledge about the data resources, and user-created reviews sort out the worthy resources from the inadequate. It allows the participants to act as a filter for what is valuable. Jumper builds upon mainstream pursuits, but also uncovers valuable data assets hidden at the edge of your organization. When combined, both these mainstream and niche interests deliver insight in the most unexpected places. Consequently, Jumper is about using the wisdom of your organization, leveraging the know-how of those who do the work, providing simple and straightforward responses to user inclination, and sharing that knowledge so that others can build upon it.
Voler: How does Jumper improve search?
Perry: Traditionally searching structured data was limited by schema or metadata. Federated search required and intimate understanding of the schema, aggregating data in a warehouse was constrained by a common model, and images were limited by the applied tags or keywords. The simple reality is that this restricted your visibility across the data horizon. There had to be a way to free search from these limitations. Jumper provides search with greater breadth and depth. It represents a fundamental shift in the paradigm of how we think about and use search. It uses a bottom-up community, or social networking approach, rather than the more traditional top-down editorial approach. A data profile can reference any data in any location, regardless of format, and deliver a wealth of knowledge about that data. This type of community-based publishing increases both the richness and timeliness of information, allows users to determine what is important, and aggregates the knowledge that resides in abundance across your organization.
Voler: Does Jumper provide access security to the data it shares?
Perry: We’ve developed Jumper with a number of access controls. We designed the product from the beginning to support robust security and compliance needs with respect to data access, and collaborative contributions. Users access a public area for search and a separate admin area for contributions and editing. Whether or not a user has to log in to view the public view depends entirely on how you have set up your Jumper. It can be set up to allow everyone who accesses your site can read the knowledgebase, or users who want to read the knowledgebase can be required to register and login, or some combination where part of the Jumper is available to anyone who visits your Intranet while you must log on to view other parts. In addition, individual data profiles that reference specific database tables or image files can be configured with similar access restrictions. Ultimately Jumper provides a secure, scalable, and highly-available platform.
Voler: Do organizations have to run on specific database platforms to take advantage of Jumper?
Perry: Absolutely not. We designed Jumper to coexist with any legacy solutions. Jumper is an enterprise-class collaboration and search platform that integrates with and supports Oracle, DB2, MS SQL, MySQL, or PostgreSQL. It provides the benefit of unified visibility across all your storage environments from a centralized web-based platform. Jumper connects to any relational database using a standard JDBC-Connection. It converts a database schema automatically into a suitable RDF/OWL ontology and represents the corresponding data items as its instances. It also processes schema and metadata associated with the columns to present a holistic representation of both the column names as well as the system data that formats the transactional data.
