KnowNow combines and extends several technologies and concepts to produce a platform and services that deliver what we call instant information. This platform eliminates the latency we have accepted for too long - latency in enterprise applications, retrospective search models, and inboxes - ultimately, delayed awareness of key personal or business events that affect the decisions we make.
Key attributes of the platform are:
In the following sections we provide an overview of some of the key concepts, technologies, methods, and industry initiatives that are changing both the web and enterprise information models.
Content Syndication
The power of web content syndication is that users can subscribe to a web site or blog content and have updates delivered to them rather than needing to continually visit web sites to discover new content. The concept is simple but the implications are revolutionizing the way that people use the web and even consume enterprise information.
A web site, a blog, or an automated program produces a content summary in the form of a “web feed”, technically an XML structured document. The feed summaries include links to a web accessible resource, a webpage, an audio or video media file, or even enterprise database records. Using this process, the publisher of the web feed is said to be “syndicating” their content. The most common content syndicated on the web is news stores or the personal journal posts found in blogs, but the benefit of syndication extends to any type of dynamic information. Podcasts are an example of syndicating audio play lists. Online marketers have discovered the ability of web syndication to reach a vast new audience that they can’t reach via email, since it does not require disclosing personal identity to receive marketing information such as newsletters or product updates.
A desktop or sever-based program called an “aggregator” monitors the location of the feed, checks for new content, and displays a consolidated view of the content in a browser or desktop application. Desktop aggregators are also called “RSS readers”, “feed readers“, or “news readers.” Server-based aggregators such as KnowNow ESS provide shared feed management and views, security for syndication of internal content, synchronization across multiple interfaces or devices, content-based filtering, and perhaps prospective search (see definition below) or personalized notifications services.
There are two popular formats for the syndication of content, RSS and Atom. RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) was the first and currently most popular format for syndication. Atom is a similar but newer and more extensible web syndication format that will likely in time supersede RSS. Both are structured as XML machine-readable documents. Most desktop and server based aggregators, including KnowNow, transparently support both formats.
Publish/Subscribe
The publish/subscribe (or pub/sub) model is a superior technological approach to exchanging live information between people and systems. In this model a person or software publishes information into a “topic” or “channel” which then immediately delivers this information to all subscribers to the topic. A pub/sub system manages the relationships of publishers and subscriber through the topic, providing the advantages of “loosely-coupled” architecture. A capable publish-subscribe platform such are KnowNow also provides content-based filtering, aggregation, automated channel creation, automated topic lifetime and content expiration, complex routing rules, automated de-duplication, presence detection, security, transformation, and an extensible framework with APIs to create custom modules and solutions.
For example, an investment bank might use a pub/sub model to create a separate topic for each stock traded on the NASDAQ and NYSE. Information related to Wal-Mart (WMT), such as ticker prices, breaking news, new research reports, and whatever else is of interest would be published to the “Wal-Mart” topic, and all traders who subscribe to that topic receive the various pieces of information as they are published.
In addition to supporting file-based use of RSS/ATOM, KnowNow allows users to transform content published in RSS/ATOM into streaming information channels, accelerating the delivery of information from what might typically be an hour in a common RSS reader to sub-second awareness. This allows RSS formats to be used for many time-critical scenarios where latency has material impact on business or personal decisions.
In application publish/subscribe can be used to route information bi-directionally between services, programs, databases, and devices, letting people or systems subscribe to the information flow at any point. Syndication services based on publish/subscribe enable RSS formatted information to deliver real-time weather or geologic events, airport delays, current RFID tag or traffic locations, or business events.
The Active Network
KnowNow combines the benefits of web syndication, publish/subscribe and prospective search to deliver the “active network.” The active network maintains a “live” relationship between the information service and the subscriber and pushes new content, notifications, and business events over the network instantly. This is in contrast to the “passive network” method that relies on the user or client program to periodically request or poll for new content. In the active network model, users and programs do not need to submit redundant requests over the network to be made aware of new information. The active network removes latency or gaps in information awareness.
The active network is also always on. It’s an information discovery and delivery process that continuously works on behalf of user, matching new content to expressions of interests. The process may span multiple delivery interfaces (browser, desktop, mobile device) and may employ presence to intelligently route information between these interfaces. Users gain immediate awareness and the power to extract only relevant content from millions of sources.
Structured Blogging
Structured blogging is emerging as a practical way to finally deliver on some of the promises of the semantic web – specifically, a way to provide self-describing content that can be easily embedded in website (or blogs.) Structured Blogging gives bloggers the tools to create and syndicate structured information, such as reviews and events, and media. The difference between a typical blog post and a structured blog entry is that the content is published in machine-readable format. Other services can understand it and use it to produce calendars of events, job boards, book reviews, or movie ratings. It builds on RSS and Atom standards. Structured blogging is the process of leveraging structure content formats known as microcontent. An example of emerging standards for microcontent is microformats.
FeedMesh
FeedMesh is a group working to establish a "peering network" for decentralized web update notifications and content distribution. Major online services that use leverage web syndication, including PubSub, Feedster, Technorati, Bloglines and Yahoo are participating to define a standard shared service for weblog update notifications ("pings" notify aggregation services that a blog has been updated alleviating the need for blog search engines to regularly visit the blogs to discover changes.)
The primary benefits for bloggers and syndication publishers are faster dissemination of their content and the reliability of a common scalable notification service. The benefits for consuming online services are reduced bandwidth (by sharing the load) and lower latency.KnowNow and PubSub are committed to these initiatives and believe that they will deliver unprecedented richness to web content. Users and developers will realize immediate value from content they post to the web or the enterprise.
AJAX
AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a term describing a web development technique for creating interactive web applications using a combination of:
KnowNow delivers all the benefits of AJAX UI asynchrony, but goes beyond the server request/response model by communicating with a publish/subscribe model. This enables “push” channels that deliver data to the client the instant it is published to the server and displays it on the web page without requiring the user to request it. The result is more responsive applications, since the amount of data interchanged between the web browser and web server is vastly reduced and data traffic happens ONLY when there is new data to deliver.
All of KnowNow’s web user interfaces provide asynchronous updates to browser applications without reloading the web page, or requiring installed components. Furthermore, our publish/subscribe method eliminates the need for period polling or blind requests. This minimizes network traffic by only sending new and changed content over the network and thereby provides a more scalable solution to mass information delivery.
For a more in-depth discussion of pub/sub based AJAX we recommend the paper Beyond Ajax: Accelerating Web Applications with Real-Time Event Notification (PDF), by Dr. Rohit Khare. You can also read more about AJAX in wikipedia.
