Steve Karam, Data and Content Technologist with John Wiley & Sons, was invited by John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, for a very inspiring talk about... books. The interview took place during our live coverage of Oracle OpenWorld this week. In a world where books are being digitized, content is now being used to explore new data types. Aware of his pioneering status, Karam was more than willing to share his vision on this particular use of data in order to drive new users and authors. "With big data come new business models and new innovations, and it's all about access and discovering content, information and people," said Furrier. Steve karam picked up on this thread and explained: "Big data is all built around sensors and around bringing in as much data as you can from as many sources as you can. The idea is that: if an author writes a book, that author has a million other ideas in his head. He has come up with so many different concepts as he was writing his book, and we want to know those things. "If we could capture all his concepts, not only do we get great written work, but we also get data that can build communities and even more content. It can give them more tools to write more good content for us, it can link to other things. You can bring in sentiment analysis and semantic searching and we can build a whole package of content and data." Data, Big Data & Databases : Technology under the hood At a higher level we're now experiencing a confluence of human (knowledge) and machines. There is an unprecedented access to ideas and thoughts, and the notion of machines bringing levels of scale to the table is credible, despite machines' inability to substitute the human touch entirely. "You start deploying some of these scalable learning machines, machine learning, AI like functionality on top -- you can bring a whole new level of data to take the burden off the author and allowing him to do more," said Karam. The way Karam sees it, today the author has his notebook, pen and maybe Wikipedia, performing searches and trying to find information out about what he's writing. "If he can have tools that are built on the things he's writing, and every work that is typed can bring a whole new world of new knowledge -- all based on what a machine thinks you should be writing about, or based on what other authors of your kind have written about, we can bring these things to the author and we can do so in real-time, getting better content. That content builds a world of its own, moves on and writes its own stories." If we include things like enterprise-level searching and large databases that hold the metadata that surrounds all these things, we can truly have stories written by these machines, stories written by the system, based on what the authors have done with them. It's what they call "smart content." Outstanding value "Once you have that kind of information, you can use it to enter new fields, new areas of thought, enrich your existing content, find gaps in your content, find out places where you should be going," said Karam. Moving away for a bit from the books, Steve Karam discussed Oracle and the company's latest news. In Karam's opinion Oracle 12C represents the biggest architecture change in a long time: Multitenancy. To recap, it offers: - multitenancy cloud - hadoop plugin - security Karam boasted a staggering number of articles aggregated in only a blink of an eye: "Some 387 articles, written by over 130 different authors around the world, aggregated in the short span of 3 months since the release." As Karam put it, "the response has been phenomenal." Multitenancy at the database layer vs. the application layer "What's the most beneficial for the customer?" asked Vellante. "At the database layer the main benefit is transparency to the application -- that is a good benefit as far as not having to change the most time and money consuming part of your development cycle," replied Karam. "If we put multitenancy in the database, the database is the most cumbersome part of our application world. If we can put that in a cloud environment with multitenancy built-in and we can give applications their own pluggable databases and make it very easy to move around/backup/clone, we can facilitate newer methods of development," he explained. Upcoming features (currently in beta) Self-provisioning of these pluggable databases and the ability for the development group to get their own provisioned, contained system. That is true cloud ability and perfectly exemplifies Software-as-a-Service. Steve Karam, John Wiley & Sons, at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 with John Furrier and Dave Vellante @thecube #oow13