Howard Ratner gave a presentation on living online in the digital age. He discussed how computing has evolved from centralized mainframes to personal computers to ubiquitous mobile devices. People now have constant connectivity and access information from any device. Ratner argued publishers should break up ("particleize") their content, semantically tag it, and build connections between articles and other datasets to allow for new ways of searching and interacting with knowledge on publisher-neutral platforms. This will help keep content useful as technology and user behaviors continue to change rapidly.

1. +
Living Online: Any Time,
Any Where, Any Device
Howard Ratner, Chief Technology Officer, EVP
Nature Publishing Group
Miles Conrad Lecture
NFAIS 54th Annual Conference
27 February 2012

2. +
Who am I?
 technology geek
 pragmatist
 publisher

3. +
Who am I?
 High school – 1981
 College – 1985
 Chelsea House Publishers – 1985-1986
 Wiley – 1986-1988
 Springer – 1988-2000
 Nature Publishing Group – 2000 – present

4. +
Question Time
1. How many people in this
room are carrying a phone?
2. How many people in this room
are using a laptop?
3. How many people in this
room are using a tablet (iPad, etc.)
4. How many people are using a cloud
app?

5. + “I think there is a
TJ Watson world market for
about five
computers.”
Thomas J. Watson, CEO, IBM, 1914-1956

6. +
1946 ENIAC: Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer

7. +
Centralized
 Computers and information centralized
 Only in specific locations
 Only obtainable locally

8. +
1970s

9. + “A computer on
Bill Gates in
every desktop
every home.”
Bill Gates, CEO, Microsoft, 1975-2000

10. +
mid 1980s – My College PCs

11. +
1980s
Personal Computing Era
Decentralized

12. +
Late 80s - Portable PCs

13. +
1990s  2000s

14. +
We are more
computer savvy.
Mobile but
tethered.
Not very social.

15. +
Rise of search engines of all kinds.

16. +
Audio, Podcasts, MP3, Video

17. Rise of Social Media

18. +
Blogs found a place

19. +
Social Networks took off!

20. +
User behavior
changed.
We are now
social.

21. +
Wireless is in!

22. +

23. +
Connectivity gets faster and cheaper

24. + New tech extends battery life
7-10+ hours!

25. +
We and our
devices are
untethered.

26. “What we want to do is
make a leapfrog product
Steve Jobs that is way smarter than
any mobile device has
ever been, and super-easy
to use. This is what iPhone
is. OK? So, we're going to
reinvent the phone.”
Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple, 1971-1985,1996-2011

27. + Apple taught us how to be mobile

28. +
Mobility spreads like wildfire

29. +
We own many
devices
Computing
travels with us

30. Cloud
Users just expect their information to be available
anytime they want it, anywhere they are and in what ever
format they need it

31. +
Evernote

32. DropBox

33. Pandora

34. +
Computing
is becoming
ubiquitous.

35. “Ubiquitous computing names
the third wave in computing, just now
beginning.
First were mainframes, each shared by lots
of people.
Now we are in the personal computing era,
person and machine staring uneasily at
each other across the desktop.
Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the
age of calm technology, when technology
recedes into the background of our lives.”
-- Mark Weiser, Xerox Parc (1990s)

36. +
Ubiquitous Computing
 The purpose of a computer is to
help you do something else
 The best computer is a quiet, invisible
servant
 The more you can do by intuition the smarter
you are; the computer should extend your
unconscious
 Technology should create calm
-- Weiser’s principles (source Wikipedia)

37. +
Pervasive Computing
 Decentralization
 Local or mobile devices
 Information is “networked”
 Diversification
 Specialized tasks
(e.g., Internet access on (laptop, mobile phone, games
console, Palm PDA)
 Connectivity
 Data exchanged between devices
 Wireless connection / internet
 Simplicity
 Seamless, interfaces, intuitive, calm
Credit: Andy Hunt, Pervasive Computing

38. +
PC + Tech Companies are seeing it
Old OS are merging with the
New!
Hardware? Irrelevant!

39. +
Mobile Internet Revolution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUljrP6ILN0&feature=related
Credit: Crowdsauce.com, Uploaded April 30, 2011

40. +
What Should
the Publishing
Community Do?

41. +
Article Particles
• Break articles down into major sections (e.g.
scientific methods, data, results)
• Semantically mark-up entities and terms
• Surface concepts with annotations
• Use people, place, thing identifiers
• Build particle connections to other datasets
• APIs allow the building of bolt-on tools and
allow us to leverage community efforts
Dicing and slicing breaks apart journal silos and
allows users to search across the corpus of
knowledge.
We can offer compelling services on a
publisher-neutral destination for researchers.

42. + Linked Open Data?

43. +
Research Objects?
Credit: S. Bechhofer et al., “Research Objects: Towards Exchange and Reuse of Digital Knowledge,” 2010

44. +
Developer Platforms & APIs

45. +
Divide it up!
Mark it up!
Share and shake
it up!

46. +
References
 Sean Bechhofer et al., “Research Objects: Towards Exchange and
Reuse of Digital Knowledge,” Submitted to: The Future of the Web for
Collaborative Science (FWCS 2010), April 2010, Raleigh, NC, USA.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18555/
 Mark Cuban, “You Don’t Live in the World You Were Born Into” (31 December
2011, Blog Maverick: The Mark Cuban Weblog)
http://blogmaverick.com/2011/12/31/you-dont-live-in-the-world-you-were-
born-into-4/
 Andy Hunt, “Pervasive Computing: History and Key Topics” (University of York
course)
http://tinyurl.com/8432mk7
 Anna Faherty, “The future for publishers is content creation, with a dash
of Martini” (7 December 2011, Kingston Publishing: inspiring future publishers)
http://tinyurl.com/79ymwo3
 Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the 21st Century” (Scientific American, 265,
September 1991),
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0991-94

47. +
Thank you!
Howard Ratner
CTO & EVP, Nature Publishing Group
h.ratner@us.nature.com
@hratner