Pragmatic Knowledge Sharing - Piggy Bank

As a user of Mozilla FireFox you are always privvy to getting and
testing new software dueto the completely open architecture of
FireFox. One example of this is the extensions architecture and
there is a whole bunch of useful extensions like Sage for RSS,
GreaseMonkey for user scripting and BlogIt for posting directly to
your Blogger blog.

I downloaded Piggy Bank two days ago and even though it is a hefty
4 Mb download for a Firefox extension it is well worth the wait,
because this is a serious attempt to have a crack at the
chicken-and-egg problem which the semantic web is faced with.
It has a very pleasing AJAX user interface which is faceted. This is
achieved by using their semantic browser Longwell.

So what you get here is a complete application server that is
overlayed on Firefox and allows you to "tag and scrape" metadata
as you go about surfing the web. So the "knowledge" collection
phase is well integrated with the web user behaviour, which is
completely incidentally from the design team at Simile.

I'd say that the Simile team has a good chance of achieving
for the semantic web, what NSCA Mosaic did for the syntactic
web by being so pragmatic. The sharing of knowledge is done through
semantic banks, which can be set up anywhere on the web or in
any organisation. Information that is not in semantic format
(e.g. RDF) can be converted by using e.g. XSLT or Javascript
screen scrapers, which themselves are sharable through Piggy
Bank of course.

And best of all is that this is Open Soure Software (OSS) itself
and based on OSS from mainly Apache. Stay tuned for a more
in-depth review!

Grids and Semantic Web Waltzing

There's a new 20-page report available on semanticgrid.org

It discusses discusses ´feasible Semantic Grid services and opportunities for enterprises to participate and collaboration between disciplines. It also look at some important issues:

"...The biggest challenge to be overcome appears to be of a non-technical nature: having people
from different fields talk, work and evolve together. Another challenge is that overcoming
reluctance of industry and business to fully engage Semantic Grid technologies given many in
industry and business remain somewhat unsure of the Semantic Web and the benefits of the
Grid (other than ‘cluster computing’). Nonetheless commercial interest alone will probably
not drive the Semantic Grid to become a success."

According to Ken Birman at Cornell CS Department, they have more problems than this because grid technology sofar has not adressed reliabilty and security and that it is still unclear that the need for massive cumputing will be pervasive and not only CERN and a few others

RFID Journal - Hospital Gets Ultra-Wideband RFID: "Aug. 19, 2004 Parco Wireless, a developer of an ultra-wideband RFID system for healthcare facilities, has sold its first commercial installation. In October, Parco will oversee the deployment of more than 20 readers and around 100 tags for patients and staff as well as tags for equipment throughout the emergency department of the Washington Hospital. Parco's real-time location system uses tags and readers licensed from Multispectral Solutions, an ultra-wideband (UWB) specialist combined with Parco's own asset management software. The system allows hospitals and clinics to track the status and exact location of patients, staff and essential equipment. " (excerpt from RFID journal).

This is a very good example of the high feasability for UWB in wireless gridlike applications. Suddenly we can track the whereabouts of stuff with high precision and with non-intrusive and
low power radio technology. The US has a lead in this area due to the rapid acting FCC a couple of years ago, which allowed for market players to "experiment with UWB applications, while stipulating that the power cord is always plugged into the inhouse wall outlet". Intel is betting on UWB as part of it's heterogenous wireless future and will soon release WiMax and Bluetooth replacements. First out for UWB here where the patents war, which has been documented. Now we have the standards war, lobbying activites and the first wave of acquisitions in the US.

Europe have fairly decent research projects in the area through the Framework Programme R&D and some of the ICT companies has participated and invested in UWB startups in the US. But the slow part in Europe right now is regulatory bodies both on the European and national levels.

SWED: "The Semantic Web Environmental Directory (SWED) is a prototype of a new kind of directory of environmental organisations and projects. Our goal is to develop a sustainable (realistically maintainable) and easy to use directory about environmental organisations and projects throughout the UK.

How is SWED different? - Rather than centralising the storage, management and ownership of the information, in SWED the organisations and projects themselves hold and maintain their own information. The information is published on their web sites. SWED simply 'harvests' that information and uses it to create the directory." (from the SWED home page)

This is the RDF based portal that is a result from the european part of the w3c. It is made available as open source software and uses Jena for RDF and OWL management.

The semantic blog mentioned in Steve Cayzer's paper in the last posting is available for demo and download.

Another good GForge source for open source software for the semantic web is semwebcentral

Semantic Blogging: Spreading the Semantic Web Meme: "Semantic blogging builds upon the success and clear network value of blogging by adding additional semantic structure to items shared over the blog channels. In this way we add significant value allowing view, navigation and query along semantic rather than simply chronological or serendipitous connections. Our vision is to use semantic web tools and ideas to help move blogging beyond communal diary browsing to rich information sharing " The W3C SWAD-E activities are gearing up to marrying promising ideas and this seems to be a good area to start. There is an Open Source prototype available for semblogging

Ian Horrocks: publications: "Ian Horrocks and Peter F. Patel-Schneider. A proposal for an OWL rules language" This is going to be presented at WWW13 . It is called ORL and gives you Horn clauses in an XML-based syntax

SSRN-Wireless Grids: Approaches, Architectures and Technical Challenges by Ashish Agarwal, Douglas Norman, Amar Gupta is a fairly recent paper from MIT Sloan. The abstract says:

"Grid computing are attracting a growing amount of attention. Originating as a concept for sharing computing resources among wired participants, the grid concept is gradually been extended into the wireless world. A Wireless Grid is an augmentation of a wired grid that facilitates the exchange of information and the interaction between heterogeneous
wireless devices. While similar to the wired grid in terms of its distributed nature, the requirement for standards and
protocols, and the need for adequate Quality of Service; a Wireless Grid has to deal with the added complexities of
the limited power of the mobile devices, the limited bandwidth, and the increased dynamic nature of the interactions
involved. Depending on the nature of the interactions among the constituencies served by the wireless grid, various layouts can be envisaged. The ability of these models to address needs at the enterprise, partner, and service levels is contingent upon the efficient resolution of multiple technical challenges of the grid."