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Matthew Theobald, Founder, Internet Search Environment Number (ISEN) and CEO, Internous LLC. Interview April 25, 2009.
A Database of Databases [46:13]
Introduction Hi, it’s Matt Theobald, Founder of Internous.com. the database of databases, which is governed by the Internet Search Environment Number, is like an ISBN number for books except that it is for databases or search environments. And a search environment can be any structured set of information with its own algorithm, like a |
database, a library catalogue, a peer-to-peer (P2P) environment, a blog, in a searchable environment. A search environment is one of these types of things, and the search environment is all of them in concert. So what we attempt to do is to identify each one, catalogue and classify it, and make it searchable and make it therefore, a database of databases.
What Are You Most Passionate About? [00:01:06]
What I’m most passionate about is connecting people’s minds with the body of knowledge and the body of knowledge would be this search environment and the many search environments that are on the Internet and the human mind; so, a cognitive interface between minds and databases. So, if you think of social networks as being interactions between communities of individuals with minds that are in some ways very sophisticated databases, exabytes of information, and then you’ve got large and small databases which could be in some cases maybe exabytes of information, terabytes of information, or just kilo bytes of information, and connecting the databases that interest and inform and reward the knowledge that people desire to help them make decisions to improve their lives and their communities.
What would you like people to know, think, feel and do? [02:06]
Being asked what I would like people to know, think, feel or do: what I want people to know is that there is a deep, hidden, darker, invisible and structured web of information that is in databases that is vastly larger than any contemporary search engine and it exists right now. The current search engines index the surface web, which is purportedly by best statistics, .2% of the information that is available on the Internet. So Google, Yahoo and the rest only skim the surface of the surface. What I want you think about, is the number of databases that are out there that the content is not indexed by any of the contemporary search engines. There could be several hundred in your community, there could be several hundreds of thousands in your state, there are definitely millions in the U.S. and there are probably tens of millions around the world. When you think of URLs in Google for example, passing the trillion URL mark what we’re talking about is about ten million URLs that are database interfaces that contain 500 – 650 times the information that is on Google or Yahoo. What I want you to feel is the depth of knowledge that is already out there that is hidden, in a sense, but it is already there. You can find these things through Google by adding the word “database” to your search. But still that is not going to be that accurate because the word database has to be on the page you are searching to find it. I want you to feel empowered by the knowledge that no brand of search utility has a total grasp or no near a total grasp of the amount of data, the amount of information that’s out there on the Internet right now. What I want you to do, is I want you to consider the information at Internous.com, on the blog and on the websi-te, and think about it. Some it is obtuse and future oriented and intentionally vague, that will become more clear, and as it becomes more clear, what we will be ready to do is ask you to find the databases that are of interest to you and begin book marking them, and then once we are ready to begin cataloging them, you can contribute those as suggestions for the overall collection to share with people who have similar communities of interest and communities of purpose.
What do you see for the future? [05:10]
For the future, the future is already here in a lot of ways in the sense that social networks have humanized technology a lot more and I think there’s been a separation between computer culture or technical culture and techies and the rest of the world and as people in the rest of the world become more technical, the technical people have to become more human and I think that gap is closing faster and faster and a generation from now it may be accomplished. But I think the task for information literacy for people that are less literate regardless of age or generation as far as information literacy is the most important issue to be able to sort out where you’re information is coming from, what’s important for the task you are trying to do and be able to sort out the vast amount of information that is coming on to the network, so as there is more and more information coming on to the network and there is more and more people coming on to the network, it presents a problem, but it is also more of a solution than it is a problem. So I have a very bright view of how technology will be humanized and how humans will be technologicalized – or a synthesis between the real world and the Cyber world and how the Cyber world is just a tool to enhance reality and reality is much more important than sitting in front of a computer screen. The computer screen is going to become more mobile, more transparent, there’s going to be enhanced data access from a visual point of view just from wearable computing and access to technologies to enhance your mobile existence in the real world. So I think that as usability becomes more practiced and more embedded in devices and as the cognitive interfaces I was talking about before that cognitive enhancement or cognitive augmentation would occur in the Internet user widely and rapidly.
How did you prepare for this project? [07:51]
The idea first came in August of 1996 in the end of graduate school in a standards workshop where my Professor Carol Hurtz said that standards were very important and very powerful and were very valuable financially. So I thought that I should come up with a standard and, like I said before, I just kind of combined the ISBN and DNS idea and assigned it to search engines and thus was born the International Search Engine Serial Number, or ISESN number, replacing the “SE” for the “B” and the “S” in the “BS” in ISBN and ISSN. I went to Rick Worley who was Webmaster at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPI) and working on the early job site on an online career center, which became Monster.com – the first job site on the Internet – started by Bill Warren, he said, “Well, why don’t you just call it the “ISEN” number? Well, that’s a better idea. So Rick and I had been dialoguing about this concept of cataloging databases and registering them like web pages like a DNS registry, since 1996. Rick went on to spend 12 years at Monster as Vice President, and the last half of that career there was the Vice President of Analytics and Traffic Monitoring as well as commoditization and monetization of basically resume content, the descriptive content about a human being as an individual, which is not that far of an idea from a descriptive resume about a database. We’ve always talked about connecting the mind to the body of knowledge that if you look at somebody’s resume you might be able to glean what kind of databases they are willing to look at and be able to map that professional interest to resources that fit that professional need. So, Rick has been involved since then. When I graduated in 1996 I took a job working with the National Information Consortium, which is a parent company of several companies, including Indiana Interactive which at the time and still runs IN.gov - Access Indiana. I was involved in registering the IN.gov domain and was the third non-Federal dot com domain to my knowledge after New York and the state of Massachusetts, Indiana was third. The first job I had at Access Indiana was to organize all 92 counties into a template system that would offer a template web page to every county in the state. Since they didn’t have web servers they’d be able to dial in and add information to this template. Then eventually they got web servers that would migrate that template off of our site and turn it into their own thing, so we started off as a template system to guide them along. It unified – you can search each county in the state of Indiana with the same subject category so you can know where you were no matter what county you were in. But once the counties took them over they made them into their own nomenclatures and that cohesiveness was lost, but independence was gained. At the time in California had thirty-eight out of fifty-two county websites and Indiana had ninety-two out of ninety-two and was the first state in the country to have a full web presence for each county. I ran out of work to do there and decided to offer to redesign the state home page and was able to get a graphic designer and a programmer and about three months to do it. At the time we had about 80,000 pages of static information, but some very basic principles like alphabetization of departmental agency, proper alphabetization, which I think requires a Masters in Library Science, or some library experience, Education, Department of, Department of Education, being able to index things very simply provided a way for people to get to the same information very easily. That design was approved very quickly and went up and lasted in a very static way, non-dynamically delivered HTML, just static HTML, for about three years without changing. After I completed the Indiana project I was asked to move to Iowa to start the Iowa Access project and they already had a website, but out of forty, fifty agencies they knew where about twelve URLS were and they were the big agencies, The Department of Transportation, The Department of Education and each agency had been given a sum of money to start their own web presence but there was no overarching governing of standards for what government web pages should look like. My job as Information Architect of the Citizen’s Information Network was to create a single portal to all state government information. The challenge was out of the forty, sixty agencies we had twelve URLs. So I started to develop a community of webmasters and the ones who showed up were the ones we already had. Meetings weren’t working, trying to hunt people down wasn’t working, no one seemed to know who the Webmaster was, where the web page was, there was suspect there was one out there and eventually just kind of relied on Divine intervention. I sent a letter to the woman who is head of the government’s side of the Iowa Access project, she was able to get the Governor to mandate a Declaration of some sort that said if you own a website in the Iowa state government enterprise then you are required to report it to Matt Theobald by Friday or you will not be included in the new state homepage. Now that wasn’t true if they sent it a day later or a week later we would still put it in there, we just gave them a deadline and said you will not be included in the state homepage if you don’t tell us where you are. We got the majority of the urls and was able to do the alphabetization and the basic subject stuff and in just a matter of hours put together the website that took six months of searching and the Divine intervention was really the key that helped. The day after the Iowa Access project was approved I was also out of work again. I moved back to Indiana to work for the Higher Education Telecommunication System where Rick Worley had just left to go to Monster full time. I took Rick’s old position as the Head of the Information Network Center Web Development Group serving all the Colleges and Universities, state government agencies as far as the backbone or the Network Architecture infrastructure for the Access Indiana backbone. Previously I had been involved with the county stuff and the Access Indiana Network which was the website, but this was more the guts of the routers and the network nodes. It was growing rapidly from eighty-one Colleges and Universities and then being expanded to all public libraries, all the K through twelve’s, prisons, police stations, DOT hubs, every public building in the state of Indiana. We had three small websites that I helped re-architect and then passed on to Interns to change the content and then got into knowledge management which is where the trouble started. I learned a lot about where we were tracking and verification and water cooler information gathering and quickly became frustrated about being so deeply embedded in every aspect of office politics that I had the opportunity to move on and start my own company and start to work on ISEN full time. That was 2001. I formed the company in 2002. That was pulling together all my documentation for about a year and a half and there was a group I had come across through a conference I went to I had to pay for called NKOS (Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (+ Services)) it was a network knowledge organization information systems and services group and it was a group with people who deal with building thesauri and sub-classification systems from everything from the Getty Art Thesaurus to the military and geographic information systems and just really a wide variety of ways of organizing knowledge. I didn’t meet Paul back then, but I did put a request for a consultant out up on the NKOS list and three candidates emerged all of which were Ph.D.’s and all of which were consulting, all of them had been in either in and out of academic, corporate or government work, but Paul stood out plus he was from Hanover, New Hampshire where Hanover College, my Alma Mater was from so that was a connection there, kind of serendipitous choice but Paul’s credentials are what stood out and brought him to Indianapolis for five days as a consultant to hone up my documentation to make sure that what I was saying was said in the proper language, properly cited, that I was not just making things up or needed to nail it down as an academic, cited, and vetted document. That resulted in a technical plan that was passed to an attorney, the attorney put it into patent-ease, and so it was another version. Paul is the co- author of the patent and we filed the (provisional) patent in November 2004. We filed the actual patent application in November 2005, it was published in July 2006 and has been pending since. This is a seven-year process that patents are especially scrutinized. So Paul is the artificial intelligence and information retrievable and search person and Rick Worley is really the expert on monitoring traffic and commoditizing it and analyzing traffic patterns and user behavior. So those are the three core people. I had Paul Alsop who was a programmer who developed the database of network nodes; had already developed a database that quasi cataloged what the IP address of what every node was, what are the location physically was of each building, the directions on how to get to the router, who had installed it; this was just building and building and reinforcing the idea of ISEN being a database of databases and talked a lot about ISEN at IHETS (Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System) but it wasn’t really ready for prime time and I wasn’t really ready to give it away to – prior to engaging with both Nick, and NIC (National Information Consortium egov.com) and IHETS prior to that. So, I was still pretty protective of it and talking a lot about Meta data a lot; they used to call me “Meta Matt”. During the time I was at IHETS I hung out at a coffee shop that was the closest thing I could find in Indianapolis that you might find in Manhattan or San Francisco or New Orleans or somewhere and Goths and Hippies and techies and ballerinas and all kinds of different people occupied it. There was a group of computer enthusiasts that were meeting there one night and I had met with one guy before and he said, “Well, would you like to talk about your ISEN thing?” and I said sure and I go in front of about ten guys, one of them had a briefcase that had he had carved out and put a lap top into that was, he had built his own portable computer and was showing it off, and this was about 2001, and met Garrett Honeycutt, and turned out this group was called 2600. In the 2600 Hacker Quarterly you’ll find on magazine racks and was using 2600 to recruit for IHETS because IHETS was kind of famous for hiring people who’d been kind of rogue, white hat, grey hat kind of guys in a University environment, so I thought this was fertile ground for recruitment. Had interesting conversation years later about how I knew Garrett and why I knew Garrett because of the 2600 connection. But I guess that’s been cleared. So Garrett is a real systems wonk and I’ve known him since I was seventeen so he’s probably about twenty-eight now and has traveled the U.S. and done a lot of great work in the systems environment so he’s our systems administrator. Mark Alsop, the fella’ I mentioned who did the database of network nodes is really our Chief Programmer, Rick Worley is our Chief Analytics Officer, Paul Thompson is Chief Technology Officer, I’m currently Chief Executive Officer although I hope to find a new CEO and step down to CXO or Chief Variable Officer and have my hands in everything. Right now we’re all chiefs and no Indians and if there are Indians, the indigenous people of the Internet, the early pioneers, they are the librarians that we need. So, that’s what we’re searching for is a new tribe and a way to bring together the pioneers that I’ve found and continue on with the pioneering culture. In 1992 when I finished my undergraduate degree in History at Hanover College I was really thinking about what would be the next television or what would be the next railroad and I was fortunate enough to enter graduate school at the dawn of the release of the World Wide Web, early HTML, the fundamentals of domain name system and Internet fundamentals and technologies that haven’t really changed. The Library Science degree afforded me a knowledge of not just how things are organized, but how things are disorganized; more importantly, how they are disorganized. In order to make some order out of them but also to respect the serendipity of chaos and organizing information in a natural way. So, looking at the history of library science, the history of standards, I was thinking about the Dewey Decimal system and the ISBN number which came much later, it was only about forty years old, and the DNS system which came after the dawn of the Internet, and combined the ISBN and DNS systems, and then thought of my classification systems as more modern things than the something as antique as the Dewey Decimal system, which is still working well for many communities and resources. But looking toward how information was organized in the past, and respecting that and looking at the present and the exciting kinds of developments like the growth of the World Wide Web and the Internet and then taking a strong look at the future and not being held back by the past or held back by the present, really thinking of things in a quantum way as much as humanly possible and trying to get my head around that and I really arrived at databases as being the new medium. ISBN is for books, ISSN is for magazines, and the new medium is really the database and there was no standard and is no standard for organizing databases and its kind of a combination of a full cycle – a study of history, the theory of history, the theory of interpreting history in different ways in order to achieve knowledge of the present as well as anticipate, and to create the future.
What research areas interest you? [27:00]
There is research I am most interested in and that is artificial intelligence and cognitive aspects of interface development. I think that our group and our company have a firm grasp on how to catalogue the databases so they can be accessed by many different points of view. I am next most interested in, as far as the R & D horizon is how to create these cognitive enhancements and these cognitive augmentations to get the interface more immediately guiding the user effortlessly through, or with some effort, toward the solutions they are looking for and help them explore questions that come out of the answers that they are already finding. The question-answering research. Learning a lot about what Paul Thompson knows about really. Paul published an article several years ago back in 2004 about cognitive hacking which was really about how the interface can be changed to deceive someone without their knowing it, to enter in a credit card number or a social security number or to fake a news story in order to alter reality in some way or make the user do something in reality as a reaction to something the interface is showing them. I think the counter to that is cognitive augmentation, or cognitive enhancement, where you can actually fool the user into doing things that are beneficial. To make it easier to find difficult things or to cause them to do something that is going to have a more pro-active or more beneficial aspect, so kind of the counter intelligence to the counter intelligence of cognitive hacking. It’s a very meta-meta kind of idea. So, I think continued research in meta-data schemas, meta-data descriptive development is important to me, and maybe thirdly, community outreach in the real world by information professionals that would be connected to our company and our idea; whether it would be librarians, professionals or business analysts or information professionals that would be using the system and how they’re integrating it into their work life and that connects back to the cognitive enhancement idea of being able to serve the public not just data but an interface that is constantly adapting to new challenges and needs.
Who would you like to be connected to? [30:32]
What networks are you building? [30:50]
I think we focus most of our attention on developing relationships with experts in various aspects with the technologies that I see ISEN touches on and we’ve done a strong job at getting an understanding and buy-in initially for eventual adoption but more important than official standard adoption of ISEN technology would be a de jure standard, would be a de facto standard where people really realize they need to register their database or they need to register their friend’s database or they need to help us organize this knowledge so that everyone can have access to it. I’m often asked do you want a de jure or a de facto standard and I say well why not have a little bit of both? Why not have an official standard and why not push an official standard that already has a user base and applications running?
What’s the next enterprise opportunity? [32:00]
The next enterprise opportunity is the narrowing down of the kind of global total information cataloging of all the databases to one very specific area of urgent need, which is human health and life sciences. It’s a very hot area, it’s a very competitive area, but its clear that with more and more medical records, databases from hospitals to small doctors office’s emerging there is going to be a need to connect those with a robust security and privacy considerations – requirements, rather. We’ve been encouraged to look at things that are related to urgent needs, like homeland security, which could be tied to health and a wide variety of other things like transportation, and such. Right now we kind of have blinders that are open to a global view on the life sciences, which would include biology, and bio informatics and databases about human health.
What sense of time line is involved? [33:28]
ISEN is designed to be a long term, long scope, kind of a standard. The ISBN has been around since 1971 and has lasted forty years. ISSN followed shortly after the Dewey Decimal system came around in the late nineteenth Century and is a Victorian view of the way information should be organized but it is still very applicable and robust in some communities. ISEN is designed to be as permanent as it deserves to be. If an emerging technology comes up and there is something other than a database, and we kind of talked earlier about how we have the book, the serial publication and the database being the new kind of media, though databases have been around since the 60’s, late 50’s maybe, but it is only as valid as it deserves to be and if something comes along that needs to replace it than it would need to be replaced.
Who is your team? [34:41]
My technology team is comprised of Paul Thompson who is the Chief Technology Officer and his expertise is in information retrieval, otherwise known as search, artificial intelligence and legal informatics, but has expanded into kinetics and life sciences applications as well as intelligence community work. Rick Worley, who’s the Chief Analytics Officer who’s involved in measurement of traffic usage, monitoring traffic, commoditizing, monetizing traffic where it is applicable. The Chief Programmer is Mark Alsop who is a coder and those things. Garrett Honeycutt, who is the Chief Systems guy, he builds the database and keeps the servers running, provides security and houses the technology. And then myself, I am the Chief Variable Officer standing in as Interim CEO where I kind of have my hand in everything and getting better at making decisions about how to pull the team together in order to get the software actually built and running.
How do you share information? [36:24]
When I’m getting ready to talk about ISEN with someone I always ask them what their subject domain of interest is professionally. Whether they are academic, government, corporate, is you…what’s your, does your job title mean anything? Does it point to something or other? And then use that content around that job, be it insurance or education to use a kind of specific example of education databases and how they can be organized according to educational standards, for K through 12 – this would be the databases appropriate for kindergarteners, this would be the database appropriate for K though Y type standardizations, breakdowns. The same is true for there are always breakdowns for professional levels of informed-ness, I suppose. And then I’m told there is a kind of conversational whiplash, I tend to hit them with the idea of a database of databases and if in their mind a light bulb goes off or it goes dim, I try to adjust it there. But I believe I am pretty transparent; I don’t drill down into enough detail that somebody could do exactly what we’re doing but as far as the concept of what we’re doing – I think its pretty clear from the interview here – that I am giving away a lot of big picture stuff but the internal machinations of how we’re doing it are twelve, thirteen year development so it would be hard to do that. My rule about repeating things is if you repeat things that aren’t mean to be repeated you stop hearing things. So you need to be clear if you hear a piece of information that’s really good whether its worth repeating at the time or who its worth repeating to and be very respectful of the people telling you the information even if its about ISEN and its my right to talk as much about ISEN as I want to and my team member says,”Hey, here’s an idea…” Matt don’t talk about it because they know I will if they don’t tell me not to. Or, I’ll try to be on the look out and say, “Okay, do you want me to hold off, or should I tell Paul and Rick, or do we just tell Mark and Garrett, or how are we going to spread the information throughout the organization without undermining ourselves?”
The challenges of a virtual team. The value of face to face. [39:33]
The biggest problem as a team we have right now is also a very strong asset of ours, which is that we have all been working remotely and mobile for well over a decade, all of us have been. So, that’s a great thing for us to be that versatile and not have an office and be a very virtual company. The bad part about that is that not all of us have met in the same room at once. What I’m really looking forward to is Garrett coming in from Seattle and Paul coming in from Hanover, New Hampshire to meet with Rick and Mark and I and sit around and talk about everything other than ISEN and just bond. We can get back to ISEN when we’re back on line. But to be able to just get together and shoot some pool or have a few beers or to sit on my front porch and talk about war stories about information technology. I think periodic face-to-face interaction is very important, ultimately important because it humanizes the person that you’re working with. If it’s just a voice or a style of writing an email or a signature file then that’s not enough personality, in order for people to work together they need to come together and the basic knowledge management bait everybody talks about is food, and being able to eat together and break bread together and get together as fellows and enjoy each others company and that will carry on to working on line.
How will ISEN contribute to global sustainability? [41:22]
I think in the most ideal and very realistic way the kind of logistical operations that could be understood through a database of databases would be sustainable distribution of resources in a rapidly changing climate. The great thing about the kind of net centric idea coming out of intelligence military work is very decentralized, a very mobile way of delivering information that is actionable and precise. If we have a single incident of an environmental catastrophe we are looking at a systemic environmental change, then systems are going to have to learn to adapt on local levels as well as globally and the word I use for that is “glocal” You’ve got to act locally think globally but you also have to think locally but act globally. I think the systemic approach of saying what best practices are working for water quality, potable water quality projects in Viet Nam might soon be needed in Kansas, or Texas, or New Orleans or somewhere in the domestic continental U.S. That kind of information needs to be shared for emergency preparedness and homeland security not just for the United States but also for the world.
“All Your Databases Belong to You” [43:36]
As a postscript I would like to talk about one of our mottos, which is, “All Your Databases Belong to You.” It’s based on a very powerful, one of the most viral Internet videos ever called, “All Your Base R Belong to Us” a very menacing Japanese video game that was badly translated that ‘all your bases belong to us.’ I think this very scary idea of all the databases on the planet being made aware and connected to everyone. What has to be respected is that only the databases that are volunteered to ISEN would be part of ISEN publicly and if you were to use ISEN on an enterprise level you could secure permissions easily to make sure that only select audiences got the databases that you want to get them to. So, the idea that all your databases belong to you is that we’re not actually taping your data we’re just describing the database and what’s in it. You can represent that however you would like within reason because the librarian is going to make sure its not misrepresenting yourself its going to be more accurately represented so it can more easily be found. “All Your Databases Belong to You” also means that the ones that are publicly available would be available to you to pick and choose your own personal library of databases. So in a sense, “All Your Databases Belong to You” is that if you find one hundred or a thousand databases out of ten million databases that are relevant to you, you want to be able to manage that collection and then you’d also want to share it if you like. Now, if that database of databases has some value, you may even be able to sell it to someone, to sell your personal library, so you’d have your public library of your own that you share with people and then you’d have your own private library that you may want to keep to yourself or to sell as “this is a good collection of databases for a real estate agent in Indiana” and you’ve got 500 real estate agents in Indiana who would pay you fifty bucks for that library if you could market it. We would help you do that. So, All Your Databases Belong to You and, Connect Your Mind with the Body of Knowledge.
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