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."

Ultrawideband can be one important stepstone to enable the right price tag and usable wireless grids. I will publish some thoughts on this later. But if you want a brief summary see Dr Fontanas articles at Multispectral

Virtual Markets and Wireless Grids (NSF #0227879) is a good springboard for the initiatives that builds up to the wireless grid. It was made by James Howison. The basic idea is to enable economically viable and usable ad-hoc networking and sharing of resources.

Mozilla Firefox - The Browser, Reloaded: "Firefox empowers you to accomplish your online activities faster, more safely and efficiently than any other browser, period. Built with Tab browsing, popup blocking ..."

I always used NS before until 1999 and I must say that returning to Firefox is a pleasant surprise concerning rendering speed, openness and stability. Kudos to all you Mozilla developers around the world! This is posted with blogthis! a mozilla XUL extension, which
makes web front-end a breeze to develop.

E-science is touting the juxtaposition of grid technology and the semantic web to form the
semantic grid which will serve as the basis for future collaborative scientific explorations . See the book Grid "Computing: Making The Global Infrastructure a Reality" by Fran Berman, Anthony J.G. Hey and Geoffrey Fox. Tony Hey worked with Feynman at Caltech and is also the editor of Feynmans excellent books on computation

Grid toolkits like the Globus toolkit has been around for some time. Condor is often used with BeoWulf Linux clusters to provide the foundation for the matrix infrastructure.

W3C announced the RDF and OWL recommendations in January 2004 and together with web services this will be the basis for the Semantic Web. There is a lot of tool making happening and especially around the enaction of the logic. Tim Berner Lee did some early experiments with a Python implementation of CWM and now there are tools implemented in higher-level functional langages like Swish which is written in Haskell.