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