THE REST OF THE NEWS
Standards and Government
One billion [RFID public transport] smart cards are expected to be eventually deployed within this sector [August 8, 2005] |
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Zhang Qi, director-general of the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry ...Full Story |
As our focus in this issue is on the interplay between standard setting and the implementation of government policy, we begin this month’s selection of news items and commentary with a range of stories that illustrate the various ways in which Europe and countries in Asia are making an impact in the standards arena, in large part as a result of the greater degree of coordination between their standards sector and the government.
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Asia: The stories below run the gamut of showing the importance of Asian countries as markets and testbeds, the fencing that is going on as they assert their influence, ongoing intellectual property clashes, and specific standards-based technologies (RFID). |
Korea plays essential role in wireless broadband
The Korea Herald, July 27, 2005 -- Korea will be the world's staging ground for wireless broadband service, says the marketing vice president of an international communications group. "Korea plays an essential role in the world's wireless broadband market. It is expected to become the first practical staging ground for WiMax-based service in early next year," said Dr. Mohammad Shakouri, vice president of marketing and board member of the WiMax Forum, a non-profit corporation formed to promote and certify compatibility and interoperability of broadband wireless products. ...Full Story
The China Card
AIM Global, July 26, 2005 -- The scheduled meeting earlier this month between representatives of Chinese ministries involved with RFID and representatives of the U.S. government and various RFID groups, organized by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), was cancelled by the Chinese due to "visa problems." Some insiders believe the meeting was cancelled because the Chinese feel that U.S. interests are too closely tied to those of EPCglobal. Others feel it's just politics as usual. Whatever the reason, it's a clear indication that the Chinese want a strong voice in deciding how RFID will be used in global trade. And, if Wal*Mart can be viewed as a 5,000 lb. gorilla (that's used to getting what it wants), China may well be a 10,000 lb. gorilla. ...Full Story
Push for protection
By: ZI MU
The China Daily, August 9, 2005 -- Never underestimate China's ambition to shed its status as a technological backwater. This country is on the rise. But the drive to internationalize China's technology sector has been overshadowed in recent years by a barrage of lawsuits against Chinese firms over intellectual property rights (IPR) infringements. ...Full Story
RFID and China
By: Harold Clampitt
RFID Journal, August 8, 2005 -- China is the manufacturing capital of the world and the largest market for technology. Currently, the country is home to 95 million Internet users. With usage growing faster then 20 percent a year, China will have more Internet users than any other country by 2006. ...Full Story
Edward Zeng’s RFID Strategy
Red Herring, August 8, 2005 -- Controversy clings to Edward Zeng like white on rice. To his admirers, the 43-year-old founder and CEO of Beijing-based Sparkice is a visionary and a survivor. At 26, he went from a promising young cadre in the State Planning bureaucracy to an accidental Tiananmen Square refugee. Finding himself in Japan on that fateful day in June 1989, he took the opportunity to enroll in a Canadian graduate school, where he sold T-shirts door-to-door to pay the bills. ...Full Story
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Europe: Much of the action in Europe recently has focused on supporting the open source licensing model, as well as avoiding the patent entanglements that would complicate software generally, and open source in particular. |
European Union Public Licence Version 01
IDABC, August 3, 2005 -- EU's IDABC Programme has just released the 'EU public licence' (EUPL), a draft open source software license designed to provide legal certainty for software owners and users in the European context. The aim of the EUPL is to encourage public administrations throughout Europe to publish the software applications they develop and that could be used by others. According to the statement of scope of the rights granted by the Licence: The Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sub-licensable licence to do the following, for the duration of copyright vested in the Original Work: ...Full Story
Norwegian Minister says that all public sectors need to make a plan for the use of Open Source by 2005
Open Source News July 22, 2005 The Norwegian government is taking large steps in their software policy: everybody in the public sector has to develop a plan for use of open source solutions within 2006. The Norwegian Minister of Modernization, Morton A. Meyer, presented new plan for information technology in Norway called “eNorge – the digital leap", where one of the points concerned open standards and open source. The details are not yet finalized, but the plan stipulate these objectives for standardization and open source: ...Full Story
Europe Votes for Innovation, Not Patent Laws
By: Jim Rapoza
eWeek, July 18, 2005 -- The fight to keep software patents out of Europe could change the patent landscape in the United States, too. The last few months have been mainly filled with bad news for those who support innovation in technology and fight against bad laws and policies that mainly serve to prevent innovation. Things were looking pretty bleak, and the fight to keep software patents out of Europe looked like it was going to go down for the count as well. But then finally it happened: good news! The members of the European Parliament stood their ground, showed up in force and soundly defeated the software patents proposal (648-14, with 18 abstentions). ...Full Story
Legislation and Advocacy
It was a mess. Better no directive than a bad directive [July 6, 2005] |
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Tony Robinson, spokesman for the Socialists, after the decisive (and final) defeat of a bill to permit software patents in the EU ...Full Story |
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On the other hand…We have only a few items to note regarding the intersection between government and standards in the United States. The first is a happy example, showing how private sector standards and legislation can be combined in order to solve important problems in contemporary society. But the second shows how the legislative side of the equation is struggling (thus far unsuccessfully) to provide the type of patent laws that will allow important standards-based technologies to be deployed most effectively, and to permit the United States to be competitive in the global marketplace. Whether or not you think that the final item is a demonstration of public/private success in projecting the United States intellectual property regime abroad in support of domestic industry or a step backwards will depend on what you think about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. |
Standards Play Role in U.S. Energy Bill
ANSI News and Publications, New York, NY, August 2, 2005 -- After several years of development and dispute, the complex and controversial Energy Policy Act of 2005 (H.R. 6), or more simply known as the U.S. Energy Bill, was passed on July 28 in the House of Representatives. Expected to be signed into law by President Bush this week, this first comprehensive energy bill in thirteen years includes several elements in which standards play a significant role. The U.S. Energy Bill mandates the adoption of reliability standards for the electricity transmission grid, provides incentives for grid improvement and reform of transmission authorization rules, and includes language that would create an electric reliability organization (ERO). ...Full Story
Fixing the Patent System: Patent System's Problems Defy Easy Solutions
Michael Kanellos
CNETNews.com August 6, 2005 -- Lawyers, companies, inventors and politicians all agree that the nation's patent system is in desperate need of reform. They cite concerns about proliferating litigation, questionable licenses and a potential decline in American competitiveness. The question is how to reform: For all the complaints, little consensus has emerged on how to fix the system. In the worst-case scenarios, misguided reform efforts could unleash unintended consequences.... The issue is coming to a head in Washington, where committees in the House and Senate are planning hearings on a host of proposals to change the nation's patent law and how the Patent and Trademark Office operates. The ideas being proposed run a wide gamut, from forcing patent holders to license their inventions to others, to the elimination of software patents altogether. ...Full Story
Copyright lobbyists strike again
B y: Declan McCullagh
CNETNews.com, August 1, 2005 -- You wouldn't know it from a political debate veering between labor standards in Nicaragua and the evils of protectionism, but one major section of CAFTA will export some of the more controversial sections of U.S. copyright law. Once it takes effect, CAFTA will require Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua to mirror the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's broad prohibition on bypassing copy-protection technology. This prohibition, of course, has been problematic in the United States. Courts have interpreted it as barring news organizations from linking to DVD-descrambling utilities, and lawyers have invoked it to stifle discussion of security vulnerabilities and even prevent conference presentations from taking place. ...Full Story
Intellectual Property Issues
You can create it. You can sell it. You can license it or you can sit on it. It is not the job of the patent examiner to delve into the psyche of the inventor [August 6, 2005] |
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Former U.S. Patent Office Director James E. Rogan, on suggestions that patents should only be issued to those that would implement their inventions ...Full Story |
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Meanwhile, out in the trenches: While Congress is struggling with how to reform the patent laws and the Patent and Trademark Office, the action continues unabated in the marketplace and in the courts, with well-financed private companies utilizing the existing system to maximum effect, and the courts struggling to do what they can to clarify the way that the existing system is intended to operate. |
Why Bill Gates Wants 3,000 New Patents
By: Randall Stross
NYTimes.com July 31, 2005 -- "EXCITING," "uninteresting" and "not exciting" don't seem like technical terms. But they show up a lot in United States patent application No. 20,050,160,457, titled "Annotating Programs for Automatic Summary Generation." It seems to be about baseball. The inventors have apparently come up with software that can detect the portions of a baseball broadcast that contain what they call "excited speech," as well as hits (what I call "excited ball") and automatically compile those portions into a highlights reel. If the patent is granted, after a review process that is likely to take three years, it will be assigned to the inventors' employer, Microsoft. [free site registration required] ...Full Story
Amazon files for Web services patent
By: Dawn Kawamoto
CNETNews.com, July 28, 2005 -- Amazon.com has received a public airing of its patent application for an online marketplace where consumers search and pay for Web services. The patent application, filed last year and published Thursday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, marks the online retailing giant's latest attempt to make inroads into consumers' wallets. Amazon, in its latest filing, is seeking to patent its idea for creating a marketplace where third-party Web services providers can link up with consumers. In its role as an intermediary for the marketplace, Amazon would collect a fee from companies providing the service. In its filing, Amazon notes that after receiving a customer's payment for a third-party Web service, it will provide 'at least some of the obtained payment for the subscriptions to the third-party Web services provider that registered the... service'. ...Full Story
Federal Circuit Case Addresses Patent Interpretation
Gesmer Updegrove July 20, 2005 -- On July 12, 2005, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in a case that has had patent attorneys holding their collective breath. In Phillips v. AWH Corp., the Federal Circuit attempted to clear up years of confusion and inconsistent rulings, explaining how the operative language in patents is to be interpreted. The Court also spoke to the standard to be used on appeal, when deciding whether trial courts have interpreted “patent claim” language correctly. While the topic seems to be one only an inventor or his lawyer could love, viewed in context, the Phillips decision represents an important milestone in a ten year journey that has transformed patent jurisprudence. The journey started in 1995, with the Federal Circuit Court‘s decision in Markman v. Westview Instruments, Inc. The Federal Circuit concluded in that case that the scope of a patent should not depend on facts and circumstances particular to the inventor, but rather, it should be divined exclusively from the official patent documents themselves and from objective references, such as treatises and dictionaries. Divorcing patent claim interpretation from traditional factual inquiry meant two things. First, it meant that judges, not juries, were responsible for deciding what the terminology used in a patent claim actually meant. Second, it meant that a court hearing an appeal of that determination (i.e., the Federal Circuit) need not give any deference to the trial court’s conclusions. The appeals court was to reach its own conclusions de novo – a Latin term essentially meaning “from scratch.” ...Full Story
New Initiatives
A Parmesan standard could have a damaging effect on the intellectual property rights of producers and traders inside the EU.... What will be next?” [July 11, 2005] |
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EU Commission Position Statement on parmesan cheese ...Full Story |
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Every day a new dawn: Although new initiatives usually gain less airplay than completed efforts because they have yet to prove their importance, they are the broad end of the funnel that eventually creates important news, and no more can come out the narrow end than enters the broad one. Here is a selection of the many new initiatives announced in the last month in a variety of areas. |
Mozilla Foundation forms for-profit corporation
NewsForge, Mountain View, CA, August 3, 2005 -- The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit public benefit software development organization, today announced it has formed a wholly owned subsidiary company to be known as the Mozilla Corporation. The Mozilla Corporation is a taxable subsidiary that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent, the Mozilla Foundation, and the vast Mozilla community. It will continue to leverage resources from diverse sources to create and distribute great open and free-of-charge end-user products -- such as the popular Mozilla Firefox Web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird email client -- that promote choice and innovation on the Web. ...Full Story
Openstream(R) Contributes Speech Components to IBM-Apache Open Source Framework
Yahoo Finance, New York, NY, August 1, 2005 -- Openstream announced today that it has contributed speech components for stock market applications to the Apache Foundation. Companies wanting to develop stock or trading applications for the North American Stock Exchanges can use these Reusable Dialog Components within the IBM-Apache RDC framework. The RDC initiative, led by IBM and its partners, drives the speech and voice application business from its proprietary, vertical roots into the horizontal world of standards-based development. ...Full Story
Smart Active Label Consortium Drives Extension to ISO RFID Standards; Work Will Add Battery Assist and Sensor Functionality to ISO 18000 Series
BusinessWire, Wakefield, MA, August 1, 2005 -- The Smart Active Label Consortium (SAL-C), a non-profit group that promotes the benefits and uses of Smart Active Label technology, today announced that the global standards body ISO (International Organization for Standardization) has authorized a new work program based on SAL-C's contributions. ISO's IEC JTC1 SC31 committee, the body responsible for the creation of the RFID air interface and data structure standards used in supply chain and asset management, approved a work program that will add battery assist and sensor functionality to the existing ISO 18000 series of RFID standards. The new initiative is a direct result of SAL-C's input to SC31 describing the benefits of this functionality to the RFID community, together with a Technical White Paper outlining how the extension could be achieved. ...Full Story
New security standards seek to establish trust
By: Colleen Frye
SearchWebServices.com, August 4, 2005 -- Industry cooperation around security in a Web services world has taken several steps forward recently with the announcement that three more specifications in the IBM/Microsoft Web Services (WS-*) Security Roadmap are being submitted to OASIS in September, and a successful interoperability demo involving multiple federated identity protocols. Both took place at the Burton Group's Catalyst Conference last month. WS-Trust, WS-SecurityPolicy and WS-SecureConversation build on WS-Security, which was ratified by OASIS in 2004. WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation were co-authored with vendors such as Actional Corp., BEA Systems Inc., Computer Associates International Inc., Oracle Corp., RSA Security Inc., VeriSign Inc. and others. ...Full Story
Open Source
Last year, there was a lot of smoke but no fire when it came to Linux on the desktop," he said. "It is not the sexy story that it used to be." [August 9, 2005] |
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Jeremy White, Desktop Linux Consortium head and CEO of CodeWeavers ...Full Story |
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Where to begin? As always, there was plenty of action in the open source world in the past month. Major trends and events included: continuing action by strong supporters of open source, such as IBM and Novell, with the first acting to support the attractiveness of the open source FireFox browser, and the latter agreeing to open source its flagship Linux distribution; organized counterattacks on the patent front, with RedHat agreeing to fund patents relevant to open source projects in order to prevent others doing so, and the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) creating a “Patent Commons” that would be the reverse of a patent pool: instead of pooling and licensing patents out, it would pool non-assertion pledges by those that owned patents; and news that a new consortium would be formed to support Debian, the second most popular Linux version. And finally, we note that the open source battle is not only global, but local. Our last note under this heading notes the country-by-country effort (in this case, Egypt) of major vendors like IBM to press the open source attack in every market. |
IBM Contributes Open Source Code to Make FireFox Browser More Accessible
IBM Press Release
Marketwire.com August 17, 2005 -- IBM today announced that it is contributing software to the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox Web browser to make it easier for more users -- including those with visual and motor impairments -- to access and navigate the Web. In addition to contributing code that will make it possible for Web pages to be automatically narrated or magnified, and to be better navigated with keystrokes rather than mouse clicks, IBM is contributing Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language (DHTML) accessibility technology to the upcoming Firefox Version 1.5. This will allow software developers to build accessible and navigable "Rich Internet Applications" (RIAs) -- a new class of applications that are particularly visual and interactive. DHTML will also allow users to efficiently navigate content more easily using keystrokes rather than a mouse. ...Full Story
Novell to open source Suse
By: China Martens
InfoWorld, August 3, 2005 -- Novell is planning to open up a version of its Suse Linux (Overview, Articles, Company) operating system to users and developers, unveiling its OpenSuse project at the LinuxWorld show next week in San Francisco, a company executive confirmed Wednesday. "We're making OpenSuse available for anyone anywhere," said Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, director of marketing for Linux and open source at Novell (Profile, Products, Articles). "We've learned from customers that it's still very, very hard to get Linux unless you're a technical user." Novell will rename its Suse Linux Professional flavor of Linux, Suse Linux, and will open source the operating system, hosting those efforts at a new Web site http://opensuse.org/, according to Mancusi-Ungaro. ...Full Story
Open-source allies go on patent offensive
By: Stephen Shankland
CNETNews.com, August 11, 2005 -- Two Linux allies are taking a leaf out of their opponents' book as they try to prevent software patents from putting a crimp in open source. Red Hat will finance outside programmers' efforts to obtain patents that may be used freely by open-source developers, the top Linux seller said Tuesday at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo here. At the same time, the Open Source Developer Labs launched a patent commons project, which will provide a central list of patents that have been donated to the collaborative programming community. ...Full Story
Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) Announces Patent Commons Project.
The Cover Pages, August 10, 2005 -- On the second day of the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, Open Source Development Labs CEO Stuart Cohen announced a new OSDL Patent Commons Project "designed to provide a central location where software patents and patent pledges will be housed for the benefit of the open source development community and industry." Several leading companies (e.g., Computer Associates, IBM, Nokia, Novell, RedHat, Sun Microsystems) have already contributed patents and pledged patented technology to the "open source community," attempting to create a framework for patent-free software development. To date, no formal legal entity has been designated to coordinate the patent pledges, contributions, and legal declarations that would provide the structure for a patent pool. ...Full Story
Linux vendors cosy up to Debian to push into enterprise
By: Matthew Broersma
TechWorld, July 27, 2005 -- Several Linux vendors have confirmed they are participating in a project to turn Debian into a serious force in the enterprise. The appearance of the Debian initiative, called the Debian Core Consortium (DCC) is a blow to the Linux Core Consortium (LCC), announced last summer and backed by Progeny, MandrakeSoft and Turbolinux. However, the LCC says it is forging ahead with its own plans. The DCC, is to be formally announced in August at the LinuxWorld conference, according to Progeny Linux. Progeny, whose chairman Ian Murdock also founded Debian, is spearheading the DCC, with other members including Credativ, Knoppix, LinEx, Linspire, Mepis, Skolelinux, Sun Wah Linux, UserLinux, VA Linux and Xandros. A number of other companies are considering joining the project, according to Murdock. ...Full Story
Taking Aim
By: Waleed El-Shobakky
Business Today, July 24, 2005 -- IBM Egypt heavily promoted Linux software at its annual forum in Cairo in September, announcing that the software will be playing a central role in a number of IBM's products and services. The move should come as no surprise considering that IBM Egypt's mother company is the heaviest investor inan open-source consortium that includes Dell, Hewlett Packard and Oracle. ...But it may be much tougher to crack the market in Egypt, where Microsoft seems to hold a special place in the IT world. ...Full Story
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But not all were smiling in Happy Valley: Of course, the march of open source, as with any other business trend, is not without its potholes and rainy days. A few examples appear below. |
Linux on the desktop--almost there again?
By: Michael Singer
ZDNet.com, San Francisco, CA, August 9, 2005 -- Despite their best attempts, Linux software companies say they are still having a hard time luring average consumers away from the Windows environment--but that may not necessarily be a bad thing. Windows still dominates the PC world. About 90 percent of all desktops, laptops and even PDAs are powered by Microsoft, according to reports by Gartner and IDC. Even with all the hoopla last year about Linux progress, the buzz over breaking the Windows stronghold has died down considerably. ...Full Story
HP exec decries proliferation of open source license types
By: Paul Krill
InfoWorld, San Francisco, CA, August 9, 2005 -- Decrying the proliferation of open source license varieties, a Hewlett-Packard executive on Tuesday urged IBM (Profile, Products, Articles) and Sun Microsystems (Profile, Products, Articles) to abandon their own licenses and back the GNU GPL (General Public License). The existence of too many types of open source licenses could cause interoperability problems, said Martin Fink (Overview, Articles, Company), the vice president and general manager of HP NonStop Enterprise Division, Open Source and Linux (Overview, Articles, Company) Organization. Fink made his remarks during a presentation at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. ...Full Story
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Roots: We include this item for both historical and sentimental reasons. In the early 90’s I helped spin the X Consortium out of MIT, and represented it until the project downsized and was merged into The Open Group. The X Consortium was crucial to the evolution of both Unix and open source, and its license agreement (now popularly referred to as “the MIT license”) is still one of the most popular licenses in the world that meets open source requirements. The organization was led by Bob Scheifler, one of the great leaders in the open source/open standards movement, whose role in the X Consortium in many ways prefigured that of Linus Torvalds in the Linux community. |
LinuxWorld Profile: X.org
InfoWorld, August 8, 2005 -- Leon Shiman, Secretary, X.org is on hand for a number of LinuxWorld programs including the Linux and Open Source and Government Day (the third in the LinuxWorld series) as well as representing X.org in the .org Pavilion. X.org is unique among the major open source projects both because of the history of it’s use and the underlying technology that underlies all of the Linux desktops. It’s a layer that’s necessary to have a windowed desktop. The X.org organization is really the precursor to the community. The people that founded the project still contribute today (nearly 20 years) later,and X is neutral--vendor, platform, and OS independent. It runs on everything and is network transparent. ...Full Story
Open Source/Open Standards
The answer lies in the "O3 zone:" open source, open standards and open systems [July 22, 2005] |
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Guy Cross, Oracle director, Business Development, Oracle Asia Pacific Linux Business Unit, on what vendors are rallying behind ...Full Story |
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Culture Shock: For some time, we have been reporting on the not always happy intersection of open source licensing needs and traditional open standards licensing norms (see What Does “Open” Mean? ). One such collision occurred recently when the Apache Software Foundation wished to include WS-Security, a security standard supported by OASIS, an open standards group. Unfortunately, the feature was available under a license arrangement that included term that did not meet open source requirements. For more background on Apache and WS-Security (and links to a lively debate on the contentious convergence of open source and open standards), see the multiple entries at our news Blog on July 15 and before. |
Web Services Specs Meet Open Source
By: Darryl K. Taft
eWeek.com July 22, 2005 -- As the Apache Software Foundation, Microsoft Corp. and IBM sort out licensing issues around making the WS-Security specification open-source-friendly, the issue becomes something of a precedent for how Web services specifications will evolve in the open-source world. Meanwhile, IBM and Microsoft have announced plans to submit three additional Web services specifications to a standards body, and Hewlett-Packard Co. has announced that three Web services specifications it turned over to Apache have now left the incubator stage. ...Full Story
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Pushing the envelope: Meanwhile, the applicability of open source continued to be explored in diverse areas, bringing new opportunities for friction over the interface between open standards and open source. Here are two examples. |
Does an open virtualisation standard mean open source?
By: Manek Dubash
TechWorld, August 11, 2005 -- These guys have been talking to each other. Over the last two weeks, there has been a rash of announcements from a number of leading vendors pledging support for new open virtualisation standards. The plans pointedly do not involve Microsoft and could be seen as encircling the Redmond giant in the booming virtualisation market, which most observers see as becoming of growing importance over the next few years. ...Full Story
Doors 'open' to hardware
By: Richard Goering
Electronic Engineering Times, July 28, 2005 -- Is "open" hardware a disruptive technology that will foster the kind of collaboration that Linux brought to the software world? Despite the recent demise of one prominent open-source programmable-logic effort, advocates think so. Given the increasingly prohibitive costs of developing hardware from scratch, open hardware is an attractive possibility. But the road is not easy, and new business models will be needed to support it. ...Full Story
Semantic and NextGen Web
This is too important to be left in the hands of diplomats [August 1, 2005] |
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Part of the response of Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN, to the question, "Is it a possibility that Internet governance could come under the umbrella of the United Nations?" ...Full Story |
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We said it and we meant it: When Tim Berners-Lee announced his commitment to create the standards necessary to enable the Semantic Web, it was hot news for a while. Predictably, press coverage fell off as the long process of standards development (now largely completed), and then market uptake (just beginning), ground on. In our June issue of this year, The Future of the Web , we committed to provide continuing coverage of the uptake of Semantic Web standards to help create the next generation of the Web. So, as promised, here are this month’s examples of the wide range of little-noticed efforts and developments that are underway in this arena. |
From Web page to Web platform
By: Martin LaMonica
News.com August 19, 2005 -- What do you get if you cross Google Maps with an online gas-price tracker? A shift in the way the Web works. The advent of the Web 10 years ago opened up vast banks of information to anyone with an Internet connection. Now, clever programming tricks that use data from public Web sites are letting developers mix up that information to suit consumers' particular needs. They also portend big changes for site owners--at least, for those who want to take part in the next stage of the Web, called Web 2.0 by some. ...Full Story
IBM Open-Sources New Search Technology
By: John Pallatto
eWeek, August 8, 2005 -- IBM plans to release as open-source a sophisticated new search and text analysis technology that is able to find relationships, trends and facts buried in a wide range of unstructured data, including e-mails, Web pages, text documents, images, audio and video. Called the UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture), the technology is able is able to go beyond the keyword analysis typically used by most search engines to discern the semantic meanings within text and other unstructured data, said Nelson Mattos, vice president of information integration with IBM in San Jose, Calif. IBM implemented UIMA in its WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition as part of its enterprise search platform, which Mattos said was the first commercially available application for this technology. ...Full Story
Topic Maps and RDF, having long ago agreed to agree, finally find themselves on the same page
The Cover Pages, August 2, 2005 -- Extreme Markup Languages 2005 opened with a bang Tuesday, August 2. The conference, which five years ago famously witnessed an RDF/Topic Maps shootout turned treaty-signing, showcased two dazzling efforts to make the alternative relationship technologies interoperable. Not surprisingly, given the preferences each camp has in its own approach, one presentation gave RDF/OWL the dominant role, the other Topic Maps. On first examination, both seem viable routes to this long desired goal. ...Full Story
Smart software tutors students
BetterHumans, July 27, 2005 -- Ever get bored sitting in a classroom full of students? Or perhaps you were one of those struggling to grasp new concepts being explored while the instructor raced on to new, additional material. A new training system developed through an EU project will soon change all of this and bring the instruction down (or up) to suit individual students' needs. The Diogene system uses advanced semantic Web technologies, such as metadata and ontologies, to manage the training information. This allows it to intelligently infer when a student is showing signs of struggling and automatically recommend remedial coursework to get a student back on track or to fill in gaps that may have occurred in the student's normal coursework progression. ...Full Story
Computers graduate in education
Information Society Technologies, July 25, 2005 -- Computers will increasingly behave like real teachers thanks to a recently completed EU project that developed an information and communication technology (ICT) training system that chooses course materials appropriate to the topic and the student....The system uses advanced technologies, like metadata and ontologies, for information management. Metadata is 'information about information', a means of archiving Web languages, while ontologies are the formal specifications of a system. Combining the two allows a computer to match up course materials with a topic....Diogene includes innovative features like dynamic learning strategies and semantic Web openness. The first means that teaching adapts to the student's progress, while the semantic Web gives data a label that can be understood by machines. ...Full Story
ASK-IT: a large project in its early steps
ClickPress, July 24, 2005 -- ASK-IT (Ambient Intelligence System of Agents for Knowledge-based and Integrated Services for Mobility Impaired users) Integrated Project (IST-2003-511298) aims to establish Ambient Intelligence (Ami) in semantic web enabled services, to support and promote the mobility of the Mobility Impaired (MI) people, enabling the provision of personalised, self-configurable, intuitive and context-related applications and services and facilitating knowledge and content organisation and processing. ASK-IT will during a 4 years period develop an environment that will advance mobile devices as personal guides in leisure, sport, education, work, socialisation and tourism and will allow effortless movement of the Elderly and Disabled people across Europe. ...Full Story
In support of PubChem: towards open chemical information
EurekAlert, July 17, 2005 -- An XML-based approach to the communication of chemical information in the biomedical literature would prevent the loss of crucial information and facilitate the re-use of data and would be easily achievable using existing open tools and resources. A commentary article published today in the Open Access journal BMC Bioinformatics argues that it is time chemistry followed in the footsteps of bioinformatics and structural biology and moved towards the creation of an open semantic web facilitating access to chemical information. ...Full Story
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Come again???? The following surely must be the most bizarre and surreal interview to which Tim Berners-Lee has ever been subjected. Rather like asking the inventor of penicillin if he ever loses sleep because someone might inject it using a dirty needle. Berners-Lee fields the questions with his usual quick wit, but we would have liked to see the look on his face as the questions were asked. |
Berners-Lee on the read/write web
By: Mark Lawson
BBC Online, August 9, 2005 -- In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first Web site. Fourteen years on, he tells BBC how blogging is closer to his original idea about a read/write Web. Berners-Lee: "[The Web is] a new medium -- it's a universal medium and it's not itself a medium which inherently makes people do good things, or bad things. It allows people to do what they want to do more efficiently. It allows people to exist in an information ...Full Story
Story Updates
The conversion of 'I think it's unique' to 'I will buy it' is much higher for HD-DVD [August 19, 2005] |
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Steve Nickerson, Warner Home Video Sr. VP of Market Management, on the results of a Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD consumer preferences study ...Full Story |
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Bury the hatchet or fight on? There were new developments in the last month in two ongoing sagas involving high-stakes standards competitions. In the first, the two opposing camps in the IEEE WLAN 802.11n competition decided to combine forces, as reported below. Of course, as soon as this problem was solved, news broke that a rival proposal for mesh networking had also been presented in the 802.11 Working Group. And in the long and bitter struggle over the next generation DVD standard, the HD-DVD and the Blu-ray camps, as always, fought on, although they did happen to both pick a common security feature for inclusion in their respective offerings. Who will eventually prevail? A recent marketing study indicates that the HD-DVD forces are winning (at least) the Air Wars, for now. |
Broad approach for high-speed WLAN standard
By: Matt Hamblen
TechWorld, August 1, 2005 -- Warring factions of vendors have finally reached an agreement to co-operate on development of the next high-speed wireless LAN standard. IEEE standards officials this week said that the planned joint proposal could be ready for an initial vote in November. The three factions said at an 802.11n task-force meeting held this month in San Francisco that they are "working together to create a single merged proposal," according to a short statement from the task force issued by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The proposed standard is expected to be available at an 802.11n meeting in California, during the week of Sept. 18 and should be ready for review and a possible vote by the entire 802.11 working group in November, said Nancy Vogtli, the working group's publicity chairman. ...Full Story
ASK-IT: a large project in its early steps
See Mesh? SEEMesh Proposed
By: Eric Griffith
EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet, July 21, 2005 -- The IEEE 802.11 Working Group meeting in San Francisco continues this week, and news comes that in addition to the proposal to the Task Group S (TGs) for mesh networking from the recently formed Wi-Mesh Alliance, competition has come in the form of another consortium of companies. This one is backed by a series of big names including Intel, Nokia, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, and Texas Instruments. Dubbed SEEMesh—short for Simple, Efficient and Extensible Mesh—the group is not talking about details of the proposal: requests from Intel and TI went unanswered today. ...Full Story
DVD camps agree anti-piracy standard
By: Ken Young
VNUnet.com, August 10, 2005 -- The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has announced that it has selected the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) as its protection scheme for next generation DVD media. The anti-piracy measures include a watermarking and digital rights management update scheme to secure discs against copying. By choosing AACS, the BDA matches the rival HD-DVD (backed by the DVD Forum), which has chosen the same system. ...Full Story
HD-DVD Claims the Brand Advantage
By: Melissa J. Perenson
PC World August 19, 2005 -- Never underestimate the power of a name. That's the single greatest takeaway I found in a recent study offered up in support of HD-DVD, one of two competing formats in the race for a next-generation disc format with the capacity required for high-definition content. And according to this study, HD-DVD's familiar sound is going to serve it well in the coming format war--which is not a surprising conclusion, considering the study was commissioned by HD-DVD's backers.In July I looked at research released by the Blu-ray Disc Association, the group pushing HD-DVD's rival format. Unlike the more abstractly focused Blu-ray Disc study, which for the most part asked consumers to express general preferences regarding next-generation optical technology without getting into specific formats, the Warner study specifically pitted HD-DVD against Blu-ray Disc. ...Full Story
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It hasn’t been from want of trying: The Sender ID saga has been one that has mirrored many other trends in the industry, such as the clash between traditional licensing terms and open source requirements, and much blood has been spilled in blogs and elsewhere over how that conflict arose and ultimately resolved. But if it isn’t adopted, then it will have been for naught. |
Sender ID's fading message
By: Joris Evers
CNETNews.com, August 9, 2005 -- At the start of last year, Bill Gates told the world's elite at an annual conference in Davos, Switzerland, that the problem of spam would be solved in two years. But if the Microsoft chairman was betting on Sender ID to play a major role in achieving that goal, it looks like a losing bet. The Microsoft-backed protocol to identify e-mail senders aims to stem spam and phishing by making it harder for senders to forge their addresses and by improving filtering. ...Full Story
Standards are Serious (right?)
Consumers may have mistakenly purchased a blow dart gun thinking it was a decorative walking stick, posing the risk of injury if someone used the gun for its intended purpose [July 28, 2005] |
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Consumer Product Safety Commission recall notice for a 51" African blow dart gun and darts, because the product might be used for its intended purpose ...Full Story |
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All work and no play…Just because standards have serious implementations doesn’t mean that they can’t be used for recreation as well. In some ways, the mark of a successful standard is it’s percolating into all types of products and uses throughout society, such as that described in this story. |
OGC Standards Enable Armchair Captains to Track Rolex Fastnet Races
Open Geospatial Consortium August 12, 2005 -- There's a bit of invisible magic enabling the mapping website that shows the current positions of the sailing vessels in this year's Rolex Fastnet race from the Isle of Wight to Plymouth. Visitors to http://www.netandsea.com/fastnetrace/ see colorful maps from Netency with regularly updated data on 10 of the 250 yachts. But what pulls all the data together underneath? Elegant open geospatial standards. Netency has covered a series of races on its website since January of this year. The Rolex Fasnet Race is the fifth. How does the company "custom build" a website for each race? It takes advantage of Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) standards that make calling one map as easy as calling another, no matter what software in the background. Netency can call different background maps for different races from different servers across the world. The real time data on boat locations and winds are automatically overlain to create the real time maps. "OGC specifications were really an important part of the architecture from its conception, in particular the OGC Web Map Service (WMS). The standard provides such flexibility to the website architecture. We can change the rendering of map by just referencing another WMS server!" noted Didier Caillon, the technical lead at Netency. ...Full Story