Tag Archives: linked data

Better Recommendations Through (Linked) Data

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Recommendations. Everyone’s talking about them, to paraphrase the old Eastenders slogan. I’m currently working on a pilot project looking at ways to expose the BBC’s archive content, help people find programmes they might be interested in, and clearly show when the programme was made/broadcast. Part of this work includes examining the ways we can improve episode to episode recommendations. I’ve been doing lots of thinking around this, and here’s the latest.

When it comes to recommendations, there seem to be four approaches. Each have their advantages and disadvantages, but I would argue that, until now, only three of the options have been tried in earnest.

Firstly, there’s the traditional method of hand-picked, manual ‘editorial’ recommendations. This means that staff consider each programme they’re responsible for, look around at what else is on offer, and pick out other programmes that could sensibly be recommended. The advantage of this method is that it’s often highly targeted, and good quality, basically because it’s been sense checked. The disadvantage is that it doesn’t scale well. It requires a great deal of human effort, and equally, a potentially vast knowledge of the programming output of a broadcaster in order to reap the maximum benefit. However, until recently, it’s been the safest, if not the only option on the cards.

The next three approaches are more to do with the reasons for recommendation. They’re often the reasons behind the manual recommendations, but as we turn to data-driven systems more and more, these reasons can inform automatic recommendations.

Production-based information – By this, I mean using production data, such as programme structure, categorisation, classification and cast/crew details, to power recommendations. In its simplest form, this can be seen on bbc.co.uk/programmes for almost any episode, where you can see the previous and next episodes in a series. Essentially, this is a recommendation as to what episodes it would make sense to consume before & after the one you’re looking at. Similarly, the genres, format and channel aggregations offer recommendations based on traditional broadcast classification structures. On the plus side, these are (relatively) easily sourced from the existing programme making workflow. They can also provide pretty useful recommendations. However, they tend to be very general. For instance, just because something is on the same channel, or in the same genre, or indeed, has the same actor in, doesn’t automatically make it a relevant recommendation. I would even argue that just showing other episodes in the same series or brand, as is done on things like iPlayer, aren’t really the best recommendations, and probably shouldn’t be sold as such.

Social-based information – Here, I’m talking about probably the most prevalent form of recommendation at the moment – or at least the one that everyone seems to be advocating. Here, we would collect data on a person’s viewing/listening habits, and use this data to provide other programmes that they might want to see, based on a combination of the frequency/range of their consumption, and the already established production-based recommendations. In addition, this can then popularly be combined with social networking information, so that recommendations can be provided based on what other people you are linked to have been consuming. Again, the advantages are that you can build up a fairly accurate picture of the type of audience you have, based on what they’re consuming, and this can then be used to influence both what you provide to them, and what you commission. However, there are major downsides to this, as well. Firstly, speaking personally, although I accept that recommendations from friends can be helpful, I don’t believe it’s the correct primary source for recommendations. Certainly, I’m not really interested in just knowing that other people have watched a particular programme – just because they watched it, doesn’t mean they would recommend it. Indeed, just because they liked it, also doesn’t mean they would recommend it. A recommendation, in this form, at least, has to be pro-active. That is, I’d much rather a friend actively recommended a programme to me, rather than a computer spying on their habits and then telling me. Which brings us to the second problem – the slightly dubious ethical/moral question of whether it’s right for companies to collect detailed information about audience habits. A really thorny question, which I’m not going to delve into now.

Which brings us on to the final form of recommendation, the one I believe gives the greatest benefit. And surprise, surprise, yes, it’s Content-based recommendations. Here, I mean something deeper than ‘this episode is in the same brand’, something more specific than ‘this programme has something to do with the same topic’, and something less, well, creepy than ‘twelve of your friends watched the Inbetweeners, so you must too!’. I’m also not talking about just tagging content. Tagging is probably the simplest and crudest way of doing this – it’s a start, but it really isn’t the end game. I mean that it’s necessary to, as far as possible, represent the actual content of the programme as data, and then link to other programmes which utilise the same data. This provides the most accurate recommendations, because we know that the exact same thing (or at least things with meaningful links between them) are being recommended. The downside, unfortunately, for the time being, is that it would have to be a fairly manual process. In this way, yes, it’s similar to the hand-picked, curated recommendations I mentioned earlier. The difference here, though, is two fold. Firstly, we’re capturing the reasons behind the recommendation as data itself, which leads to automatic re-use rather than constantly having to manually pick things (there would, of course, probably still need to be some form of editorial oversight to at least pick out highlights from the potential mass of auto-generated recommendations). Secondly, it can be folded into the production workflow from the very beginning, by engaging with writers & production staff, so that a seperate team is not required, and the recommendations can be captured and compiled at the very source, rather than after the fact. Commonly, the people who will know the content (and therefore the links) the best, will be the people who made the content in the first place.

This really shouldn’t be news to anyone, and yet it seems that this approach, until now, hasn’t been tried, in the main. I really can’t understand why, although given the problems and reluctance to even provide enough accurate data to power the production-based recommendation perhaps provides a clue. But I don’t think I’m alone in advocating this. In the oft-quoted (but perhaps not often enough!) words of Nicholas Negroponte, in 1995’s Being Digital:

“We need those bits that describe the narrative with key words, data about the content, and forward and backward references….The bits about the bits change broadcasting totally. They give you a handle by which to grab what interests you and provide the network with a means to ship them into any nook or cranny that wants them. The networks will finally learn what networking is about.”

So that’s not just tags, but data to actually represent the content.

With all this in mind, I’ve begun to compile a mixture of production-based and content-based recommendations for traversing through the BBC’s archive. The next post will provide some examples of this, and lead you through the format and choices I’ve made in representing these links in the n3 format of RDF.

Linked Data and ‘Transmedia’ – A Call to Arms

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Last week, I attended the ISKO ‘Linked Data – The Future of Knowledge Organisation on the Web‘ conference at University College London. I’ve been to two similar day-long conferences in the past year or so. They’ve always struck me as important and interesting, but the overall feeling has always been of great worthiness. Now, of course, this isn’t a bad thing. Some of the most important and vital things we could do with data and information set free on the Web would be to use it to improve Government and our lives in general. And yet…it almost feels too important. If I was working in that area, I’d feel immense pressure not only to get the data out there, but to get it right – because it matters, it really does.

Part of the message that the leaders of the Linked Data movement are trying to get out there, quite rightly, is that, whilst this is a  valid concern, it shouldn’t paralyse us into not releasing the data until it’s just right. Get the data out there, publicly admit that it’s not quite perfect, what it’s based on, and what you need help with, and people can and will, work together to improve things for everyone. To be honest, I think that’s the same in lots of cases, including trying to construct ontologies and ways of working with Linked Data. You’re not going to get it right first time – and that’s OK. Admit where you’re not sure, and encourage others to help you. One unanswered barrier in my mind still exists, though. Somewhere I was told that once you make an assertion in RDF, you can’t delete it. That’s good, because we should always have a record of what’s happened – but it’s also kind of scary, because I know mistakes will happen – if I make an assertion about the wrong thing, no matter how careful I’ve been, what then? Am I doomed? I need something that can calm these fears, otherwise I’ll never be truly happy with producing Linked Data – not because I don’t want to, but because I want to do my best with it.

Back on topic – although the work being done with Government data, as I say, is all very important, there still remains an atmosphere of almost stifling academia about the whole area. Again, I don’t want to criticise the tremendous efforts and advances people much cleverer than I have made in this domain, but I do feel that if we really want Linked Data to reach the mainstream, to be taken up by a much wider audience, then we need not only to ‘market’ ourselves better (personally I think this can be misinterpreted to mean bullishly proclaiming a cure for hunger whilst ignoring the hard work), but we need to start applying these techniques we’re learning in wider, more mainstream spheres.

Of course, as you’ve probably guessed by now, I’m talking about areas like drama, entertainment, documentaries and sport. Areas which are beginning to embrace the Web, but all too often don’t go far enough, in my opinion. ‘Transmedia’ is the current popular term for, essentially, telling stories over multiple media. Probably the best example of this would be the Matrix – the films, the animations, the games – you may agree or disagree with the actual quality of the story content, but it cannot be disputed that the way the Wachowski Brothers used the different media at their disposal was spot on – in the audiences’ mind, no matter what the media, there’s a coherent story world, where all parts slot in together to provide a richer experience. Since the early 2000s, of course, the web has been boom-town for social media and marketing experiments, along with other attempts that are often seen as heralding a new media age – and that’s great. But there’s one thing that (in my opinion), they’re all missing. The potential of the Web as a Web. Exactly what the Linked Data community can provide.

So, this blog post is a call to arms. Let the world of Linked Data and Transmedia collide. What can we teach each other? What can we create if we pool our resources? Because I don’t just want to read, listen or watch transmedia stories. I don’t just want to share it with my friends, or upload my own videos. I want to grab on to the characters, the key moments, the places where they’ve been. I want to explore. I want to get vertigo. I want to point-at-things. And then I want to meld them into something new. This isn’t just about video or audio mash-ups. This isn’t about Government data mash-ups – this is about building a ‘digital infrastructure’, an architecture, the lego bricks that will allow us to truly create new things. Rather like the Matrix, I guess….

This is the News

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aka ‘Doing Fewer Things Better, The Problem with Infographics, and The Tyranny of Breaking News’

I’ve been meaning to write something about news for a long, long time. I’m not sure I’ll be saying much that hasn’t been said elsewhere, but hopefully it will act as a useful synthesis of the current debate, with a smidgen of my own thoughts on top.

Firstly, it’s widely said that the news industry is in trouble, or at the very least, going through massive disruption at the moment. And the finger of blame, more often than not, is pointed in the direction of the Web. No-one seems sure what to make of it, or indeed how best to use the Web for news. At times, it seems that in reality, things aren’t much different. Write your articles, and post them on the Internet. just like this blog. Which is where the first ‘battle’ seems to be – between traditional, professional journalists, and those who just write because they want to. Now, it must be said, that I’m absolutely not arguing that plain text writing, as it were, is in any way wrong, dying, or should be outlawed. Indeed, I’ll go on in this post to consider how we can best use the Web to experience news, advocating the importance of the Linked Data approach, just as I have for drama and sport in previous entries, but the fact will remain that this post will be first and foremost a textual essay. And that’s a good thing. But at the same time, it’s not the only thing, and moreover, given the potential of the new Web medium, we should at least be exploring and trying new things out, embracing the complexity and experimenting, rather than just being content with what we know and seems safe and simple. I’m not claiming I have the answers, but the willingness to explore, for me, is the key.

In a very similar vein to the content producers of television and radio, as I’ve explained in the past, journalism, in the main, treats the Web purely as a distribution mechanism, matching McLuhan’s hypothesis of old media confronted with the new. Frustratingly for me, and perhaps others, new platforms, rather than new media, are often lauded as the game changers. For instance, the iPad, and the current vogue for ‘apps’. I’m not disputing that these new forms offer simplicity and opportunities to experiment with presentation and user interaction, but more often than not, they tend to be blind to the massive opportunity for real, genuine, exciting change that the Web offers us. The whole debate around economic models for news on the Web is important, probably, but for me, again, it’s just background noise. It’s like we’ve discovered electricity, and instead of experimenting and investigating its properties, uses and opportunities, we’re sitting around debating how to bill people for their use of it.

More relevant, though, is the seemingly wasted opportunity of simply packaging up existing forms of news content into ‘apps’. As others, including Martin Belam, have pointed out, (here and here) this really is no different from the mid-nineties craze for CD-ROMs. Yes, it’s new, it’s simple, but beyond the immediate experience, does it really change things? Is it really something new? No. At the end of the day, it’s still just textual reports, or video clips, or images – and that’s a real shame. Again, ‘apps’ themselves aren’t inherently a bad thing. Something that packages up content and provides a coherent journey and experience around the Web is useful and should be encouraged – but it shouldn’t be just a surface level thing. The beauty of the Web is in the connections, in the way that it is free-form, the way that it has the potential to be an extension of our minds, freely linking between concepts with no artificial boundaries. If you’re reading something in the Times, you’ll be thinking about the subject of the article not just in the context of that report, or indeed in the boundaries of the Times, but as a general thing, linked in your mind to all sorts of related concepts.

A bit of history and hypothesis, then. News emerged as an industry dependent, really, on the format of the paper, on the medium of text and some images. On rolling TV and radio, of course, news reporting, as exemplified by Charlie Brooker, has not only expanded to fit the medium, but has almost become set in its patterns and ways. More worryingly, though, is the feeling that news currently inspires, across both paper, TV and radio media – dissatisfaction, bewilderment and despair. In the desperation to sell papers, to keep eyes and ears on channels, news outlets are forced to fill time, to fill space with whatever stories they can find (and/or make up!). And the emphasis is always on the breaking story, the immediate, the new, the now. I would argue that again, this isn’t inherently bad – people want to know things as soon as possible, often before others, so that they can then be the first to share it. But this constant barrage of ‘news’ is overwhelming and tends to lower the overall quality of journalism. Ironically, people like Nicholas Carr have been critiquing the Web for ruining attention and making people ‘surface skimmers’, but I’d argue that this is more the result of the pace and quantity of news through traditional means.

Indeed, the Web has the potential to be the exact opposite of this surface world. On the Web, there are no deadlines. There is no material constraint of having to fill the paper with whatever you can. And most importantly, there are no physical barriers to connecting ideas. If everything, potentially, is for the long term (and almost permanent), then there is simply no excuse to be focusing solely on the current, the present. I would argue that it’s completely the wrong model for the Web. Quite frankly, I find it incredible that there is no easy, official way for me to see news stories from any day except for today on the main news websites. Instead, I’m forced into Google searching for content. I’m looking for information about the news, why shouldn’t I be able to find it on the BBC, or on Sky, or any other news outlet. Why are old stories hidden away? There’s no need – and in fact, it’s completely illogical. More often than not, today’s current news is simply building on top of events that have previously happened. Events that will be referenced in the text of the ‘new’ article. And yet, unless a journalist has kindly provided a manually entered link back to a previous story, I’m forced to make the link back implicitly, in my mind. Yes, this made sense in the days of broadcasting, or of papers, where everything was ‘one-shot’ – you couldn’t get the past back, so you had to summarise in your ‘new’ content. But that’s simply not the case now. Perhaps the BBC news outlet shouldn’t try to cover every single story. Instead, perhaps it should pick and choose stories, and cover them in depth, with decent analysis that seeks to help people understand, not just to keep them up to date. Perhaps this is what is meant by doing fewer things, but doing them better. And perhaps it’s important to phrase it like that – not just as ‘doing fewer things better’ – the comma is of prime importance, else it seems we’re advocating doing fewer good things, and lots more bad things.

All this provides an interesting position for news outlets. They’re still trying to work out how best to position themselves on the Web. Yes, there’s the economic question. But paywall or no paywall, it’s really not a question of distribution. It’s a question of form. And whilst images, text and video are not dead, and are still useful, they are not going to solve any problems. My personal opinion here, of course, but if Sky’s position is to be first for the story, to be the arbiter of breaking news, that’s fine. That’s a useful service. But, I contend, it’s one based in the old world of news. It’ll still survive, but there’s an opportunity for others to provide something different, something that can truly revolutionise the news industry, whilst also sating the desire for understanding, the desire that is being so sorely underprovided in the current climate. People are crying out for understanding, for context. And the Web can offer this, not just in terms of lengthy ‘analysis’ articles and the domain of the personal blogger, but by using the building blocks of the Web itself – URIs and links.

Before I go into some examples of what this could turn out to be, I want to take a little time to talk about data visualisation and ‘infographics’. Again, it’s something which is currently in vogue, and very much the subject of debate. I think that infographics can be useful. They can reveal interesting patterns, and of course, look good. They can be, as the regular creators of infographics often acknowledge, misleading and dangerous – a form of propaganda. But again, this whole debate on the merits of infographics often (but, to be fair, not always) misses the point. Data gets collated, the infographic drawn. The graphic is provided as an image, and if you’re lucky, the data in a spreadsheet alongside it. Yes, sometimes it’s in a flash file where you can click on things. But most of the time it’s an image, which can be easily distributed by the Internet. To truly be using the Web, to be creating something new, however, we would need to be creating these graphics from the raw materials of the Web. It’s not going to be easy, at the moment, as the tools are only starting to emerge, and often the beauty of these visualisations are severely compromised. But more effort has to be put into it.

So, finally, a case study. As I write this, today is the hundredth day of the current Coalition government in the UK. There seems to have been plenty of reporting around this in the news. The significance of the hundred days, of course, is a reference back to the tenure of Franklin D Roosevelt in the USA, who used the first hundred days of his presidency to revolutionise American society by introducing economic reform and the New Deal. Not that you’d know from the current reporting. It looks to be just a random milestone chosen because of the niceness of the number.

More importantly, though, we need to consider why the first hundred days of a government is worth reporting on now. It’s precisely the kind of news content that the Web would be perfect at delivering – it’s a retrospective, a review, a summary of events. And what can I find if I turn to the BBC News website? Either a hundred second video (which plays without me asking it to – grr!) with clips of significant moments, or a long textual analysis. The video, especially, is frustrating. It’s offering me a whistlestop tour through time. And yet it’s not allowing me the opportunity to explore, to find out more, to discover. It’s just video. The text article doesn’t even have any real point by point summary of the hundred days. I want to know what the significant events were, why they were significant, and how they were reported at the time. But this isn’t provided. I can read, or I can watch. But I can’t explore. I must consume.

We can also use a related example to illustrate the frustration around infographics. This is a really nice infographic summarising and comparing the first hundred days of presidencies from FDR to Obama. We have nice colourful lines, an easy to use key to ‘types’ of event, and each event is summarised and dated. But it’s just an image. There’s dots, there’s lines, there’s text. Potentially, there could be sound and video. But it’s a flat file. There’s nothing I can click on. I have to consume. All the significance, all the message – it’s all implicit. It can’t be explored, it can’t be journeyed through. And this is where the Web can, and must be used to help.

I’m very much aware that I’ve been quite harsh in this post, and perhaps not providing examples of the solutions. I’m also aware that it’s a difficult time at the moment. In the overwhelming chase for the ‘new’, and with financial constraints, it’s often not regarded as possible to consider anything which doesn’t provide a simple, quick and easy solution. Perfectly understandable. But also perfectly misguided and wrong. Yes, in the current society, we need to make money to survive, and yes, experimentation often means failure and drains on resources. Yes, we should give the public what they want, and if they want more, faster, fresher, we can provide it. But that’s not the be all and end all, and simply can’t be. If we don’t explore, if we don’t try new things, then we’ll never progress. I believe that the lack of comprehension, of attention, of willingness to understand each other, ultimately stems from our preoccupation both with the ‘now’, and with the obsession with single narratives. The Web can allow us to break free from this. It can allow us to create and explore overviews, multi-faceted analyses of situations, which can be consumed in better ways than ploughing through a huge book or long documentary. It’s not the Web which is ruining our attention and/or critical faculties. It’s the lack of consideration, of experimentation, of effort to comprehend and acknowledge the complexities of the world – ones that can only truly be reflected by networks of concepts and ideas, not only in our minds, but on the Web. And it’s up to us to try.

Addendum: Other articles I didn’t get a chance to talk about in this post, but are well worth reading, and I may come back to, include Stijn Debrouwer’s ‘The Basic Unit of Information‘, Megan Garber’s ‘Following up on the need for follow up’, Philip Trippenbach’s ‘News: Rewired‘ and Silver Oliver’s blog.

The Web as a Creative Tool

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Radio Daze, by Ian Hayhurst – creative commons license from Flickr

This year, the World Wide Web celebrates its’ 20 anniversary. I’ve been thinking about what use we’ve made of this technology during this time, and the way in which I like to think about how we could help fulfill the potential of the Semantic Web. As ever, thanks go to several people and bloggers out there whose ideas have inspired me, and the conversations I’ve had with them in general. Again, this may be stating the obvious to some people, but I feel it’s important to try and draw the threads of the patterns I’m seeing together in the hope that it will help others make the leap to looking at the potential of the WWW in a completely new way.

Up until recently, the Web has mainly been used as an enabling technology. By this, I mean that it has allowed us to do things faster, easier, cheaper, wider and for longer than ever before. However, these things that we’ve been doing with the Internet are, in the main, very much things that we were doing before the Web hit the mainstream. If anything, we’ve concentrated mainly on transposing these traditional methods of communication and interaction onto a new platform – and a platform is exactly what we’ve been using the Web for. Essentially doing the same as we’ve been doing before, but “now with added web!” as it were. On the way, we’ve (possibly accidentally) created concepts that didn’t exist before – for instance the whole notion of websites, but overall it’s been a case of doing the traditional things, using the web – and the benefits listed above have come as a kind of side-effect.

The industry in which I attempt to make a living – television and radio – is doing the same thing. The on-demand products from all the major UK broadcasters offer the benefits I’ve mentioned, but when it comes down to it, they are still just replicating traditional platforms – it’s all about using your device as a substitute for your radio or your TV. Yes, we get the extra benefits of stuff being available for longer, and potential personalisation, but we still haven’t fully escaped the mindset of using the Web purely as a platform – as if it was just a new type of box for watching or listening. It can be, but it can also be so much more.

The other way in which we have tended to use the Web has been as a commercial tool. I mean this in two ways. Firstly, again, it’s a case of imitating existing processes on the Internet – hence the success of retailers, such as Amazon and Play. However, I think that the main use has been the way in which the Web has been seen as vital to a commercial strategy – not just in terms of selling goods directly through the Internet, but in a promotional sense as well. If you want to be successful now, you need a promotional presence on the Web. Again, however, what role is the Web playing in this, apart from the side effects? Very little. We’re still promoting and distributing things, it just happens to be a new platform for doing so.

I think it’s especially interesting to note the dichotomy between the way in which we’ve transposed old methods of ‘doing’ onto the Web, whilst creating new ‘things’ which are ‘of’ the Web. But the crux of the matter is that we’ve never really (in a mainstream sense) tried to properly transfer the traditional ‘things’ which make up our world onto the Web, and then set about creating new ways of interacting with these things via the Web.

So that’s what we’ve done up until now. But what of the future?

In the mid-1990s, when CD-ROMs and the Web were beginning to puncture mainstream consciousness, the buzz-word was ‘interactive’. Yet I think this has always been a mis-nomer. The way we’ve used the web so far in terms of the creative arts still conforms to a flat structure. People create things, whether they be songs, pictures, television/radio programmes, even blog posts, post them on the Web, and that’s it. The thing that has been created is effectively fixed, static. Other people can create their own works as a result of these things, but again, it’s almost as if they perform the act of creation ‘offline’, and then only when it comes to ‘publishing’ does the thing go ‘online’.

The Web, as I understand it, is essentially very simple. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, it’s just dots and lines. The dots are the things we identify, and the lines are the links we make between them. So far, we’ve concentrated on using the dots to represent ‘pages’, and the ‘lines’ have been (mostly) simple navigational links, with little meaning invested within them. These dots and lines, though, could be used as a model for almost anything – they are, after all, the essence of communication, the construction of a narrative. What we should be doing, is using the Web in the same way we would write a book, or make a TV/radio programme.

By this, I mean that just as you pull together ideas, resources, things in the construction of a work, we would use the Web to do the same thing – except we’d be able to retain the links back to where the individual parts of the work came from, with less need for someone to do the hard work of analysis for us. For instance, knowing that a line in a TV show is a reference to a famous film from the 50s, knowing that an author is alluding to a Norse legend, knowing that a piece of music is sampling others, even knowing that a work of art was painted using oils or watercolours, or uses symbols which have distinct meanings – all this would be explicit and available to anyone, via the links – encouraging learning, truly ‘reading between the lines’, as it were. Indeed, then we could claim to use the word ‘interactive’ properly – because a work that is published by someone would no longer be a flat, finished structure – audiences would be able to explore it from all angles, trace links to other things, and, importantly, then create their own works by linking things together in a brand new way.

Of course, one of the main objections to the trend of making things available online is that we lose the context of things, the author loses the power. I think that I disagree here – that’s not a failing of the Web itself, it’s a failing of our limited use of it. If we were to use the Web in the way I’ve talked about, then authorship would be another valid link to make – and one that should always be traversable – credit would actually be easier to give, and would also hopefully, importantly begin to encourage a true breaking down of the walls between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ – we would, and should be, enabling the audience to create entirely new things, using our things – that’s still a valid thing to do, as long as the credit is given, and the links between what one person has originally made, and someone else has remixed, are made.

As I mentioned towards the beginning of this post, it’s almost as if so far, we’ve done things the wrong way round – we’ve been so busy creating the new platforms and enablers that we’ve failed to see the true potential of them – and that can only really be achieved once we start migrating not the processes and devices (e.g. the process of shopping, the ability to watch TV etc.) but the things we create for those processes, onto the Web. Dots can be more than webpages, lines can be more than navigational links. Create the things (from which we may create exciting new things we haven’t even thought of yet…), then refine the processes that help us find, share and experience them.