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French window: Aggregation: a new horizon

Bill French, Information Age

04/12/2003 14:53:48

In many IT circles, the idea of aggregation began when enterprises realised the benefits of unified information views - for example a single screen that shows peripheral customer data in the context of a customer support help desk. This is not a new idea by any stretch, but in the past, there were few standards available to deal with unified presentation objectives such as these.

The landscape is quite different today with the availability of many standards to help us including HTTP, XML, XSLT, SOAP and RSS. As such, we've started to see many instances of the term aggregation in many contexts. The fact that this term has begun to appear more frequently suggests that we're more adept at the process of assembling disparate content sources for more productive uses. I certainly feel that way.

I co-manage a news site advocating the use of Weblog technology in knowledge management initiatives (commonly known as kLogs).

Most of the content at kLogNews.com is contributed by writers much more talented than I (not kidding). They are syndicated contributors, each writing in their own way about topics pursuant to ideas about kLogs in business and corporate environments. The nice thing about this site is that it maintains itself to a large degree. As writers create content in their own Weblog tools, the content magically appears at kLogNews as if it had intended to be there all along.

kLogNews is an example of aggregating knowledge about a specific subject on (and from) the public Internet. Imagine the benefits of doing this in a business or corporate environment. Using aggregation techniques, businesses are presently able to collect content from internal use of the same tools through XML standards, and the tools don't have to come from the same manufacturer. kLogNews aggregates content from Weblog tools such as MoveableType, Radio Userland, Blogger, and CityDesk, not to mention my own platform .

How is this idea any different from a corporate portal or an internal intranet? It's not, except that it provides IT organisations a greater degree of agility in assembling meta-data about content activity regardless of how it might have been captured or where it may be stored. This agility extends not only to portal Web pages but to other applications.

Consider these additional scenarios: - A desktop index and search utility such as Scopeware's Vision - this tool makes it possible to integrate RSS feeds from many sources and index them along with locally stored files and your own e-mail messages. This is the best of three worlds from a productivity perspective. - An integrated Outlook RSS reader such as NewsGator - this plug-in to Microsoft Outlook transforms collections of RSS feeds into a knowledge centre that requires no additional learning, and matches the way you already work with e-mail content.

XML and XSLT (the standards that largely responsible for these aggregation capabilities) are pervasively supported in open-source platforms, so there are many opportunities for experimentation without significant investment.

There are lots of technical issues to ponder when considering new aggregation ideas for your km initiatives, so give me a shout when you have questions.