Two bits
posted Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 11:17 pm MSTRDF Semantic web research isn't working | Zacker.org: "It has been eight years since Tim Berners-Lee threw up his hands and said 'it's all crap, lets do it over' and set off to create the semantic web. We've got very little to show for it so far. I firmly believe the work semantic web technologists are pursuing is important and the concepts will inevitably be realized and I very much want to see this research become viable. But things are not moving fast enough and the tack semantic researchers are taking simply isn't working."
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After spending quite a quile pillaging Altova's set of tools I was tickled to come across Kerika.com ... not just a neat project (JXTA is 5; TurboGeek celebrates) but a really pleasant homepage. In email about it I wrote "so much what I'm moving towards: soft, friendly, warm, practical ... in contradistinction to the rather more hard-edged design used by commercial concerns. Effective, and puhrty too!" It's like having desert after a heavy main course.
Back to the roast beef section of the menu, I found notice of Brad Neuberg's HyperScope presentation at EUOscon ... neat!
"Douglas Engelbart's newest creation is the HyperScope, a thought processor that enables you to navigate, view, and link to documents in sophisticated ways. It brings to the contemporary web new authoring and hyperlink capabilities, including transclusions for grabbing pieces of remote documents in real-time; indirect links, which make it possible to build up unique link databases; powerful granular addressing for targeting remote documents; and more. These capabilities all add up to give end users new forms of collaboration and annotation.Nice to see that not all exchanges are conducted virtually (with respect for the folk at Kerika).
The HyperScope is a fully browser-based application that works with the current web, built using Ajax and DHTML and programmed in JavaScript using the Dojo toolkit. It uses OPML as its base file format, and is open source and available under the GPL."
For the record, Brad's presentation is availiable from his site, in two flavours: good old fashion PDF and OpenOffice ODP. And, for the sake of completeness: HyperScope.
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How many salaries in a EU3B budget?
posted Tuesday, September 19, 2006 at 12:29 pm MSTISTweb | Home Page: "IST is a single, integrated research programme building on the convergence of information processing, communications and media technologies. IST has an indicative budget of 3.6 billion euro and is managed by the Information Society DG of the European Commission."3.6 billion Euro ... for research in IT integration ... *swoon*
A couple of the initiatives headlined in IST Results:
Learning through technology-enhanced collaboration; TENCompetence will lay the foundations for collaborative e-learning networks -
While new technologies have made information more accessible, they have yet to live up to their full potential when it comes to knowledge sharing. Two European projects in the field of collaborative learning are looking to change that.
The IST-funded COOPER and TENCompetence initiatives, which began in December 2005 and will run for two and four years respectively, are creating new tools and techniques for technology-enhanced collaborative learning. Part of the Professional Learning Cluster of IST research projects, the two initiatives are complementary in the way they are applying technology to the realm of collaborative learning, in which groups of teachers and pupils cooperate to share expertise and solve complex problems.
Helping build designs that are 'cool'; EVaN promotes design that is integrated into everyday products -
Cool design creates hot profits, and although really great design is an art rather than a craft, the EVaN project has developed some best-practice design tools to help companies maximise their potential. EVaN aims to usher in a new wave of design that allies form with function."Business is waking up to the enormous potential that compelling design offers," says Alessio Marchesi of Politecnico di Milano, EVaN's coordinator. Great design such as Apple's iconic iPod for example has enabled the company to draw profits from the two opposing revenue generators on the supply-demand curve: margin and volume. Great design can charge a premium and still shift millions of units, because it adds value to a product and protects it from commoditisation.
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/This/ gets $20M funding?
posted Sunday, September 17, 2006 at 11:01 pm MSTNEPOMUK - The Social Semantic Desktop
Proven: yuppies are insane. Full Stop.
post-hoc: I regret the tone of this post. I also regret that it puts NEPOMUK and those who work on it in a bad light.
As exemplars of this teams good works I suggest MyMorey and Gnowsis.
But since this post actually captures the heart essence of my reaction, I must per force let it stand. --BenTrem 0015 18OCT06
