Innovation That Matters, easy to say, not so easy to define… What matters in life is deeply subjective and context dependent. How about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the list below as a starting point?
27th September some friends and I planted 104 vines, the genesis of my vineyard in Brittany, France. The vines were 50% Bronner and 50% Johanniter, two disease resistant white wine varieties from Germany. I’m hoping they will like the cooler, wetter Breton climate.




The next couple of years will be about studying, pruning and training, with the first harvest in 2028/2029. Assuming this planting does well, I will plant some more vines over the coming years, experimenting with different varieties.
My last day at Docusign is fast approaching, and what an experience it has been!
Let me take you back to January 2021: the UK is still reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic, Christmas has just been “cancelled” for many, and pubs are closed. It doesn’t get much more serious than that!
Continue reading “What is that over there?”In this article I dig into the question of whether you should use a traditional RDBMS (Postgres, MySQL etc.) or a graph database (Neo4J, AWS Neptune, OrientDB etc.) as you embark on your next data management and knowledge representation project, especially in this era of Knowledge Graphs and LLMs.
Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each will help you pick the right tool for the job.
Image from: https://www.biconnector.com/blog/knowledge-graph-vs-relational-database-differences/
Continue reading “Knowledge Representation: Graphs or Tables?”- Ski and camp on frozen lakes ✅
- Haul your gear for a week on a sled ✅
- Try to spot seven musk ox in a mountainous national park ✅
Sounds like a perfect winter holiday!
Continue reading “Quest for the Musk Ox”There’s been a Cambrian explosion in the number of companies working on orchestration of large language model (LLM) tools, agent-based systems, and exposing enterprise data to LLMs, via retrieval augments generation (RAG), or via graph-based approaches (GraphRAG) or Knowledge Graphs.
In this article I explore LLM agent-based systems, particularly as they will be applied to enterprise systems of record.
Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Agents and Enterprise Systems of Record”My photo library turns me into an intrepid explorer, spelunking through time and place. All those pictures of conferences and whiteboards become a treasure-trove of past lives, ideas and dreams. In this post I will take a look back over the past five years or so, from our “Smart Clause” mission as Clause.io, to the latest Intelligent Agreement Management developments at Docusign.
Disclaimer: I don’t make any promises about products, timelines or roadmap; that is not my role, and the past shows that progress is not a straight line, but is a meandering river — so don’t use any of this article to make purchasing decisions!
So, in the words of Eric Zenz, hop in my Deloren and let’s accelerate to 80 miles per hour!
Continue reading “Looking backwards to predict the future”Confused by people throwing words like ontology, taxonomy and data model around? In this post I explain the differences and give some practical advice for which to adopt.
Continue reading “Ontology vs Taxonomy vs Data Model”The nights are drawing in, and it’s damp, grey and cold in England. What little summer we had, is a fast fading memory. I was fortunate enough to escape for three weeks to South Korea with the family.
Continue reading “South Korea”