Planet Semantico

Since 2005 Google have been in negotiations over US lawsuits brought by a group of authors and publishers, along with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers (AAP) around copyright issues.

Today Google have announced an agreement with AAP that brings the lawsuits to a close and will result in the establishment of the Book Rights Registry.  To quote their New chapter for Google Book Search blog post:

Google is also funding the establishment of a Book Rights Registry, managed by authors and publishers, that will work to locate and represent copyright holders. We think the Registry will help address the "orphan" works problem for books in the U.S., making it easier for people who want to use older books. Since the Book Rights Registry will also be responsible for distributing the money Google collects to authors and publishers, there will be a strong incentive for rightsholders to come forward and claim their works.

The money collection they refer to, is from a new feature they will introduce, as explained:

…in addition to being able to find and preview books more easily, users will also be able to read them. And when people read them, authors and publishers of in-copyright works will be compensated. If a reader in the U.S. finds an in-copyright book through Google Book Search, he or she will be able to pay to see the entire book online. Also, academic, library, corporate and government organizations will be able to purchase institutional subscriptions to make these books available to their members. For out-of-print books that in most cases do not have a commercial market, this opens a new revenue opportunity that didn’t exist before.

Google in this announcement, also recognise the value of books to libraries, and obviously the value the Book Search service has gained from partnering with some of them:

In addition to expanding the commercial market for these books, Google, the authors and the publishers have worked hard with our library partners at Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of California and the University of Wisconsin-Madison to ensure this agreement advances libraries’ efforts to preserve, maintain and provide access to books for students, researchers and readers. The agreement gives public and university libraries across the U.S. free, full-text viewing of books at a designated computer in each of their facilities. That means local libraries across the U.S. will be able to offer their patrons access to the incredible collections of our library partners — a huge benefit to the public.

So what does this mean to the public – if you are not in the US very little at the moment.  Although they hint at intentions to spread this to ‘other countries’.

In libraries inside US boarders, there will be a computer [I wonder how many users will be allowed to logon to it at once] providing access to a massive collection which was not available before. 

For the US public inside and outside the library walls, they will able to find and preview books more easily, and then be able to read them.

If a reader in the U.S. finds an in-copyright book through Google Book Search, he or she will be able to pay to see the entire book online. Also, academic, library, corporate and government organizations will be able to purchase institutional subscriptions to make these books available to their members. For out-of-print books that in most cases do not have a commercial market, this opens a new revenue opportunity that didn’t exist before.

As this comes out of a legal settlement with authors and publishers, the can be forgiven for the emphasis on new revenue opportunities. 

For me the big story behind this is that Google have started to complete the links in the search-for-it-discover-it-get-it chain for books in the same way that we are accustomed to for web pages.  It is all about getting to the information, and previous century’s legal frameworks have been getting in the way of what has been technically possible for ages.  Google’s weight is starting to sweep away some of those restrictions.

The publishers are probably very pleased with their agreement [see AAP’s FAQs], but this could easily be one of the early significant steps in disintermediating their role in getting author’s works to their readers.  Eventually, as Google becomes the de facto route to find and read, who needs publishers? We are already starting to see music being distributed with very different models that often don’t include the traditional music publishers.

I must stop hypothesising too much as the agreement behind this has yet to be finalised, and then we need to see how the details are fleshed out.  Nevertheless I think the word ‘significant’ can most definitely be associated with this announcement.

English AAP, Association of American Publishers, Authors Guild, California, Google, Michigan, search-for-it-discover-it-get-it chain, Stanford, the University of Michigan, United States, University of California, University of Wisconsin, USD, Wisconsin

Project10X has published the first comprehensive industry study of the next stage of internet evolution — Web 3.0. This landmark 720-page, highly illustrated report is written for executives, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, investors, and others who want to better understand semantic technologies, the business and market opportunities they present, and the ways Web 3.0 will change how we use and experience the internet. In the coming decade, semantic technologies will drive trillion dollar global economic expansions, transforming industries as well as our experience of the internet. This is business intelligence you can’t afford to be without. Thrive in the new business landscape

delicious Business Intelligence, internet evolution, semantic technologies, USD, ways Web

I hereby return from my long blogging hiatus!

The cheers, they shake my heart.

Instead of finishing my old SWRL series, I’m going to start a brand, spanking new series on policy management.

I do recommend you go back and read the older posts on policy management, especially Kendall’s musings and Markus’s report.

Policies In General

A policy is a kind of rule which governs behavior. If you adhere to the requirements of a policy, then you conform with or adhere to the policy. A policy can present positive requirements (i.e., obligations; things you must do) or negative requirments (i.e., forbiddens; things you must not do) or possibilities (i.e., things you may or may not do, according to your own judgments and needs). Policies are not “active” rules, that is, they don’t generate behavior. Instead they are a check on behavior…a constraint on the possible space of behaviors.

(We can also have, in the realm of the permitted, target goals, e.g., “keep discretionary spending under $1000/person-year”. Conformance, in this case, becomes an potentially complex optimization problem.)

So, it may be corporate policy that no one can spend more that $5000 without the sign off of at least one other person at a comparable level (for a sanity check) plus 2 week notification of accounting (so they can manage the cash flow appropriately).

Notice that there are different levels here. We have some high level goals (to spend money wisely or not to bounce checks but also not to have money sitting idle in the checking account) but we also have what might be termed implementation details (e.g., getting a sanity check from a peer). The implementation details may vary widely while the goals remain fixed. It is, of course, possible for the goals to vary as the implementation stays fixed! (Since the same implementation may meet many goals.)

Whether some rule is an implementation or a goal often depends on the context. For example, the overall goal is probably to be fiscally responsible. When we evaluate the success or correctness of a policy, we do so in light of higher goals.

RBAC

The kind of behavior we’re concerned with modeling can be reduced to various sorts of access (thus, our policies aim to control access). Essentially, we need to determine what actors have “performative” access to which objects (aka, resources). If we have a blueberry pie, for example, we want to ensure that only the right sorts of people (i.e., those whose first name begins with “B” and can be forced into rhyming with “Dijon”) have access to the pie. If we are willing to grant access to the appearance of the pie (but not to the taste) we might put it into a cage. If we also want to restrict smell access, we’d put it in a tupperware container. If we want to grant people like me eat access, we’d give me a key to the cage.

If the cage is too weak, or the lock easily picked, or the bars of the cage wide enough to let the tupperwared pies slip through, then the wrong sorts of people (e.g., those whose first name begins with “K” and rhymes with “End-all”) will be able to get at—and eat—my pie.

There are many sorts of general models of access control, but the sort we’re concerned with is role based access control (RBAC), as that is the basic model behind XACML and is pretty popular anyway. In RBAC we do not associate access permissions with actors directly, but with different roles an actor might have.

Deployment vs. Development (and Auditing)

As I’ve written before, it is important to distinguish deployment time and development time, especially when dealing with analysis services that do a lot of work and, thus, are computationally uncertain. This is especially true for policy management. In XACML, there has been a lot of attention on runtime behavior (e.g., Policy Decision Points (PDPs) and Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs)). It is tempting to think that we should add intelligence to PDPs which are, after all, decision points. There are two problems with this strategy, 1) PDPs tend to be time critical and high volume and 2) complexity in a PDP is a vulnerability. Even if one did wish the PDP to be smart, one would still need tools to build up confidence that the PDP wasn’t too smart for its own (and your organization’s) good. Thus, we are going to focus on development time services, i.e., how can we better support the engineering, maintenance, and auditing of complex sets of RBAC policies.

What are we trying to improve?

Fundamentally, people—- developers, testers, and policy setters—- need to understand their policy regime and to understand it in a way that gives them clear control over their behavior. If you don’t understand your set of policies, including whether the policies meet your goals, then in addition to suffering from a fair bit of anxiety, you may open yourself up for serious legal sanction. The quotidian can be considerable as well: every chance requires extensive testing. Change, even to improve matters, is a hostile force.

Given the high stakes involved with access control, it is surprising how little attention is paid to producing tools and services that support more effective development and auditing of policy regimes. Policy languages, such as XACML, have already moved toward the more declarative, so there’s at least some hope for reasoning sensible about XACML based policies. However, XACML is, itself, rather complex and opaque. It’s pretty clear that people are going to have a terrible time analyzing even small XACML policy sets.

This is exactly where our experience with OWL kicks in. We already know, to a fair degree, how to build support services to help people work with and understand large, complex information structures (we just call them “ontologies”).

The key is to have the computer do the tedious aspects of reasoning and make the results of its analysis salient to a human decision maker. Interestingly, it’s generally not enough to provide a useful service—- or even an amazingly useful service, but you need to provide a usable service as well. This means that you must take into account existing (or related) practices. Which we do!

HIPAA, our running example

In order to make all this concrete, Markus and I have been working on a realistic example of a set of patient information access policies for a doctor’s office/hospital. Health care information is something which is intrinsically the kind of thing you want to keep private (“Whoa, your prostate is HOW big?! And, btw, we didn’t need to hack the hospital computers to know you have hair plugs. Dude. Everybody knows…”) but you also want the right people (insurance agents, the sane doctor, etc.) to know it at the right time. Plus, your information can be of high societal value by contributing to medical research. In the US, there’s a very big and complex law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) which, effectively, mandates that health care providers have pretty strong mechanisms to ensure only the appropriate access to your health data. If you blow that, you are in for some serious fines.

In my next post, I’ll delve a little deeper into the example.

English development time services, insurance agents, United States, USD

In a recent study the authors Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor of Carnegie Mellon University found out that the time allocated for reading online privacy policies on the websites you regularly visit would produce a total loss in productivity and time equalling $365 billion a year.

These findings are based on empirical data estimating that an average internet user invests approximatly USD 3000.- per year getting to grips with the various privacy policies of their service providers.

But - bluntly speaking - as “noo ne” reads privacy statements anyway, this is not a real economic loss. But still it raises the interesting question what it would cost if you as an inter end-user wanted to make use of your civil rights and gain some souvereignty towards your service providers.

So here the question arises how semantic web technologies, especially the Policy Aware Web, can be a viable solution to this economic problem. But the answer to the question is a political one, which means it will be up to the politicians to recognise this problem and support a (technological?) solution … which from my point means that there are interesting times ahead for a Policy Aware Web.

Read a more detailed coverage of the study at out-law.com.

Author: Tassilo Pellegrini

English Aleecia McDonald, average internet user, Carnegie Mellon University, how semantic web technologies, Lorrie Faith Cranor, online privacy policies, Semantic Web technologies, USD

In a recent study the authors Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor of Carnegie Mellon University found out that the time allocated for reading online privacy policies on the websites you regularly visit would produce a total loss in productivity and time equalling $365 billion a year.

These findings are based on empirical data estimating that an average internet user invests approximatly USD 3000.- per year getting to grips with the various privacy policies of their service providers.

But - bluntly speaking - as “noo ne” reads privacy statements anyway, this is not a real economic loss. But still it raises the interesting question what it would cost if you as an inter end-user wanted to make use of your civil rights and gain some souvereignty towards your service providers.

So here the question arises how semantic web technologies, especially the Policy Aware Web, can be a viable solution to this economic problem. But the answer to the question is a political one, which means it will be up to the politicians to recognise this problem and support a (technological?) solution … which from my point means that there are interesting times ahead for a Policy Aware Web.

Read a more detailed coverage of the study at out-law.com.

Author: Tassilo Pellegrini

English Aleecia McDonald, average internet user, Carnegie Mellon University, how semantic web technologies, Lorrie Faith Cranor, online privacy policies, Semantic Web technologies, USD

This offer just showed up in a Google alert triggered by its mention of Swoogle. Some poor Australian student (poor in ethics and ability, not money) is willing to pay $100 to have someone do his project for a Semantic Web course.

homeworkanytimehelp4 is behind on several assignments and in a bit of a fix. He needs his ontology assignment done by 12 October, just two days after he posted his offer.

Is this cheating? Well, the studentOfFortune.com site has thought deeply about this, and it turns out that it’s not.

Q: It still seems like cheating
A: We’ve thought long and hard about this. We believe that users who write solutions which not only help provide answers but also help teach how the answers were achieved will be the solutions that are purchased more often than not. And for that reason, we believe that Student of Fortune is a teaching and research tool, not a tool for cheating. But it’s up to you how you use it. We’re not going to judge you. We’re just here to help.

Times are hard right now. If you are tempted to help homeworkanytimehelp4, you owe it to yourself to find out if the dollars are USD or AUD.

English Google, USD, Web course

Powerset is excited to be participating in Web 3.0, held in Santa Clara from October 16-17, 2008. 

Scott Prevost, Powerset’s general manager, will be keynoting in the morning on Friday, where he’ll describe The Road to Semantic Search.  Also, Mark Johnson, a Powerset Program Manager, will be hosting a roundtable discussion on Thursday afternoon called Semantic Startup 101 – Successes, challenges, and strategic decisions, featuring Alitora, Cerebra, Metaweb, and Evri.

If you’re interested in attending, you can get a full conference pass or just come to the Expo Hall and keynotes for only $50.  We hope to see you there!

English Expo Hall, Mark Johnson, Santa Clara, Scott Prevost, USD

The National Research Council released a report on the effectiveness of collecting and mining personal data, such as such as phone, medical, and travel records or Web sites visited, as a tool for combating terrorism. The report, titled Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Program Assessment, was produced by a multi-year study was carried out at the request of DHS and NSF.

The NRC’s press release on the study notes that routine datamining can help in “expanding and speeding traditional investigative work”, it questions the effectiveness of automated datamining and behavioral surveillance.

“Far more problematic are automated data-mining techniques that search databases for unusual patterns of activity not already known to be associated with terrorists, the report says. Although these methods have been useful in the private sector for spotting consumer fraud, they are less helpful for counterterrorism precisely because so little is known about what patterns indicate terrorist activity; as a result, they are likely to generate huge numbers of false leads. Such techniques might, however, have some value as secondary components of a counterterrorism system to assist human analysts. Actions such as arrest, search, or denial of rights should never be taken solely on the basis of an automated data-mining result, the report adds.
    The committee also examined behavioral surveillance techniques, which try to identify terrorists by observing behavior or measuring physiological states. There is no scientific consensus on whether these techniques are ready for use at all in counterterrorism, the report says; at most they should be used for preliminary screening, to identify those who merit follow-up investigation. Further, they have enormous potential for privacy violations because they will inevitably force targeted individuals to explain and justify their mental and emotional states.”

The report suggested criteria and questions addressing both the technical effectiveness as well as impact on privacy to help agencies and policymakers evaluate data-based counterterrorism programs. It also calls for oversight and both technical and policy safeguards to protect privacy and prevent “mission creep”. Declan McCullagh has a good summary of the key recommendations.

The 352 page report can be downloaded from the National Accademies Press site for $37.00.

English automated data-mining result, data-mining techniques, Declan McCullagh, DHS, National Accademies Press, National Research Council, National Science Foundation, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, travel records, USD

On Sunday October 12, six computer chatterbots will sit down with six human judges at the University of Reading and try to convince them that they are not machines, but humans. The winner might take away the grand Loebner Prize worth $100,000. The Loebner Prize competition is a modified and simplified Turing test intended as a measure of machine intelligence. Here’s how Wikipedia describes it.

“The Loebner Prize is an annual competition that awards prizes to the Chatterbot considered by the judges to be the most humanlike of those entered. The format of the competition is that of a standard Turing test. In the Loebner Prize, as in a Turing test, a human judge is faced with two computer screens. One is under the control of a computer, the other is under the control of a human. The judge poses questions to the two screens and receives answers. Based upon the answers, the judge must decide which screen is controlled by the human and which is controlled by the computer program.”

This year, the competition is taking place ar Reading under the direction of Professor Kevin Warwick. The thirteen initial entries which have been reduced to six finalists.

The competition was started in 1990 by Hugh Loebner, who put up a set of cash prizes, including one worth $100,000 for the “first chatterbot that judges cannot distinguish from a real human in a Turing test that includes deciphering and understanding text, visual, and auditory input.” A fact of local interest is that Hugh Loebner worked at UMBC as the assistant director of computing in the 1980s. He left UMBC to run his family’s business, which at the time was doing well manufacturing roll-up disco dance floors for parties.

Over the years the Loebner prize competitions has come under considerable criticism from the AI research community. A common option among AI researchers is that the competition is more about publicity than science and encourages people to try to do well by exploiting tricks and competition-specific strategies rather than work on the fundamental problems underlying the development of intelligent machines. This article in Salon, Artificial stupidity, summarizes the positions.

Here are some stories on the 2008 Loebner Prize competition in the press: ‘Intelligent’ computers put to the test’, Invasion of ‘human’ robots and Artificial Conversational Entities: Can A Machine Act Human and Be Given ‘Rights’?.

English artificial intelligence, computing, Elizabeth Perreau, Eugene Goostman, Fred Roberts, Hugh Loebner, Jeremy Gardiner, Jerome, John Li, Kevin Warwick, Mohan Embar, Peter Cole, Richard Wallace, Robert Medeksza, Robert Scott Mitchell, Simon Edwards, University of Reading, USD, Vladimir Veselov

There has been much comment following the launching of legal action by Thomson Reuters against George Mason University, and their latest release of the Zotero browser plugin which includes the ability to import EndNote styles.

There has been an interesting thread of conversation on my earlier post on the subject - Thomson Reuters Sends Zotero a $10 Million EndNote.  I am especially intrigued as to the real identity/loyalty of the person who only identifies him/herself as ‘Anon’.

Because the main users of Zotero are to be found in academic institutions, this topic is of great interest to those addressing the issue of applying Internet, Web, Social Networking, Semantic Web and other emerging technologies to the world and practice of education and learning.

It is hardly surprising therefore that our sister blog Project Xiphos, has also covered this topic in a post The $10 million question…, which has received a thoughtful comment from Richard Karnesky.

While you are over on the Project Xiphos blog, I recommend a scroll through some of the other posts.  It is starting to evolve in to a really good heads up on thinking and initiatives in the education, learning and research space.   It reminds me of the early days of Panlibus when we were exploring the influences and thoughts that led towards Library 2.0.

I would particularly recommend some of the Xiphos featured Talking with Talis podcasts, and Sarah Bartlett’s post about the book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.

English George Mason University, Richard Karnesky, Sarah Bartlett, Thomson Reuters, USD

My Thomson Reuters Sends Zotero a $10 Million EndNote post yesterday, attracted several comments and ping-backs.

The thoughts seem to drop in to a couple of themes.  Firstly there is the legal position – Have Thompson Reuters got a case, was it presented correctly, which bit of EndNote licensing does it depend upon, of what relevance is the GMU license to use EndNote, etc., etc.  My colleague Rob Styles, who has a far better understanding of these things, has published an excellent post over on our sister connecting  knowledge blog,  Xiphos, reviewing some of the legal issues.

At first glance it seems the case would be specious. Reverse engineering file formats in order to allow interoperability has been settled on several occasions.

In this case, however, GMU have a site license for EndNote. In Bower vs Baystate the courts upheld an anti reverse-engineering clause in the case where it had been knowingly and voluntarily entered into.

Rob also references James Grimmelmann’s post - Thomson Reuters: The Gang That Couldn’t Sue Straight - in which he questions the quality of the case that Thomson Reuters has presented.

The other theme that has emerged from the comments and other posts, is the corporate approach to things like this. As Bruce D’Arcus commented:

If there’s a problem here with corporate academia, it’s the fact that they mindlessly support companies like Thomson with expensive site licenses with ridiculous terms who are prone to litigate when things don’t go their way.

The flippant answer to Bruce’s point is that “they’ve always done it that way, so it’s hardly surprising”.  The corporate approach to the licensing, distribution, and protection of software intellectual property, has evolved over the last forty years or so.  It is only in the last few years that broad open source distribution of functionality, such as is at issue here, has even been possible.   It is therefore unsurprising that corporate monoliths, and especially their legal departments, appear to be way behind the curve of the Open Source and Open data movements.

As I said in my previous post - I predict that this will only one skirmish in a series of battles that will ensue as the information and knowledge publishing and distribution industry morphs into something new.  I stand by this.  We didn’t get from buying CDs in our local store to the current online, pay-as-you-go, take-it-wherever-you-go, iTunes world, without a few battles like this one.

English Bruce D'Arcus, James Grimmelmann, Rob Styles, software intellectual property, Sue Straight, Thomson Reuters, USD

USA Today has a story, Sprint takes wireless service to the max in Baltimore, on Sprint’s new WiMax system for the Baltimore area.

“Monday, Sprint will launch wireless WiMax services in Baltimore, marking the beginning of what could become a new era in mobile broadband. The mobile data network — which will be marketed under the Xohm brand name — is designed to cater to the needs of laptop and home broadband users, not cellphone users.

Prices will start at $10 for a day pass, good for 24 hours of unlimited usage. Monthly service starts at $35. There are no contracts. To use the service, Baltimore customers will have to buy a special WiMax “aircard” or modem, which cost about $45 apiece. There are also special launch discounts, including a $50-a-month plan that offers subscribers unlimited data usage for life.”

Xohm is pronounced “zome”, by the way.

The xohm site has pricing details, which seem to be $35/month for home, $45/month for mobile, and $50/month for both. For home use, they do have a modem that you can hook up to a home router. The $50 fee is good for as long as you are a member, which could be a great deal. I know someone who only pays $5/month for Sprint’s basic all-you-can-eat EDVO service because he was an early adopter.

Speed? They claim that it will be “Comparable to basic DSL and Cable internet service” with a footnote stating “Comparison based on basic DSL and cable plans offering download speeds of 786 kbps (DSL) and 1.5 Mbps (cable) as of September 2008.”

The site says that DC and Chicago are next in line for the service and Dallas, Fort Worth, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia are in the works.

Of course, there are lots of details to check into (e.g., if I buy service in Baltimore, can I use it when in Chicago), but this looks very interesting. Maybe Sprint can make WiMax work.

English Baltimore, Boston, broadband, Chicago, Dallas, DSL, Fort Worth, home router, internet service, mobile data network, Philadelphia, Providence, USA Today, USD, wireless service, xohm site

George Mason University is being sued by Thomson Reuters to prevent the distribution of the excellent Firefox plugin, Zotero.  As reported via the Courthouse News Service:

Thomson Reuters demands $10 million and an injunction to stop George Mason University from distributing its new Web browser application, Zotero software, an open-source format that allows users to convert Reuters’ EndNote Software. Reuters claims George Mason is violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base.

Subject of a Talking with Talis podcast last year with Trevor Owens, Zotero is an impressive free open source tool for capturing, organising and citing research resources, that has been building a successful community of users around it.

Thomson Reuters is complaining about the 1.5 preview release of  Zotero, announced on July 8th, which introduces several new features including:

Support for thousands of existing Endnote® export styles.

Following that link to Endnote export styles you end up on a page containing the following words:

EndNote output styles are provided solely for use by licensed owners of EndNote and with the EndNote product.

That seems to be the bit that is behind the legal action taken.  The question is can they, or should they, enforce such a restriction – not being a legal expert I’ll stop ruminating further in that direction.

The folks in the Center for History and New Media at George Mason, must be wondering what has hit them, but you can’t go rattling the current business model of a someone the size, history and market position of Thomson Reuters without expecting some form of backlash.

I can imagine the cries of outrage that will emanate from the Open Source and Open Data communities because of this.  They will no doubt be matched by indignation and litigious thoughts from the commercial sector as other publishers check to see how Zotero is helping to distribute their output but not necessarily in a way they would like.

It’s ironic then that somewhere else in the Thompson  Reuters organisation there is a site/service with the following ambition:

We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais.

Calais (Powered by Thomson Reuters) is a semantic web technology based project which in simple terms provides an API to information about people, organisations, geographies, books, authors, events, facts about them, and links between them.  It is a free API service can be used openly, for commercial and non-commercial use, to enrich applications.  (For an insight in to Calais and how it fits with Reuters’ business, I can recommend the podcast Paul Miller recorded with Barak Pridor of ClearForest, the technology with which Calais has been built).

The action being taken against Zotero is symptomatic of the classic growing pains as technology and distribution mechanisms move on.  Just like the scribes complaining  about movable type in the 1400’s, or  the music industry complaining about the mp3 download culture that emerged some 600 years later.

I predict that this will only one skirmish in a series of battles that will ensue as the information and knowledge publishing and distribution industry morphs into something new.  Will actions like this prevent it happening? - of course not.  Will it slow it down? – possibly.   If I was part of the Zotero project would I be worried? – yes, I might be;  some of the early vanguards of the music download revolution were forced out of the race by such legal challenges.  Nevertheless, be it the opening of access to newly created knowledge or providing useful open access to traditionally controlled data, things are a changing.  We will look back on actions like the one against Zotero, viewing them as inevitable battles to try to preserve rapidly outdating business models – anybody read the Innovator’s Dilemma recently!

I hope  that the Zotero folks survive to reap the rewards of their pioneering efforts.

English API, Barak Pridor, Center for History and New Media, ClearForest, Courthouse News Service, free open source tool, George Mason University, MP3, Paul Miller, Reuters EndNote Software, Semantic Web Technology, Thompson Reuters, Thomson Reuters, Trevor Owens, USD, Web browser application

Virtually all information technology programs in the US and Europe saw their enrollments drop significantly after the dot com bubble deflated in 2001. Students decided to pursue other majors, even though the IT job market remained strong — it just wasn’t insanely strong.

At UMBC, the number of our Computer Science majors fell by almost 50%, even though the number of BS degrees we produced declined only slightly. Our Information Systems Department suffered an even greater decrease in their undergraduate programs.

One of the popular alternatives students moved toward was business, especially finance, banking and trading, where young people with good analytic skills who were willing to work hard could do very well.

Computer World has an article, Wall Street’s collapse may be computer science’s gain, that speculates the flow will reverse.

“The collapse of Wall Street may help make computer science and IT careers attractive to students who abandoned these fields in droves after the pop of the last big bubble, the dot-com bust of 2001.
    William Dally, chairman of the computer science department at Stanford University, said that for the last several years, he has watched some students interested in technology go into banking and finance because those fields could be more lucrative.
    ”Many thought they could make more money in hedge funds,” Dally said. He said students are returning to computer science because they like the field and not because it can necessarily make them rich.”
…

My only regret is that the IT industry (including the academic sector) didn’t get a multi-hundred-billion dollar federal bailout back in 2000.

(h/t to Marie desJardins)

English banking, Europe, Information Technology, information technology programs, Marie desJardins, Stanford University, United States, USD, Wall Street, William Dally

• Daft invests in boards.ie (the official press release)
• Áine Coffey in the Sunday Times says (regarding the investment) that “talk is not very cheap” (well, there was also that $580 million purchase of MySpace by News Corporation, the ultimate owner of the Sunday Times…)
• The Minister for Communications, Eamon Ryan, makes his first post on boards.ie (spotted via IRC and Damien)
• The latest AMAS “State of the Net” bulletin reports on the growth of boards.ie (via the Sunday Business Post)
• boards.ie is shortlisted for “Best Discussion Forum” in the Moviestar.ie Irish Web Awards 2008 (yay, thanks to everyone who nominated us!)
• Over 50 competitors have signed up for the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition (and there’s still a month to go…)

English News Corporation, Sunday Times, USD, Web Awards

Here is a quick update on Calais developer events as well as new discounts on conferences where the Calais team will be presenting in the weeks ahead.  We hope to see you there, so let us know if you can make it! 

NOTE: The MIT EmTech '08 conference is next week, so act now to get your discounted OpenCalais community rate.

1. MIT's EmTech '08 - September 23 - 25, Cambridge, MA (with Calais developer luncheon on 9/25)
2. The European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC2008) - September 24-26, Vienna, Austria
3. The Web 3.0 Conference - October 16-17, Santa Clara, CA
4. 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008) - October 26-30, Karlsruhe, Germany
5. The Defrag Conference - November 5-6, Denver, CO
6. Mashup Camp - November 17-19, Mountain View, CA

DETAILS AND DISCOUNTS:

MIT's EmTech '08 - September 23 - 25, Cambridge, MA

The Calais team will be out in force at the Emerging Technologies Conference @ MIT, with a booth, a developer luncheon and discounted pricing for members of the OpenCalais community.

The luncheon takes place Thursday, September 25th from 12:30 - 1:50 p.m. ET.  Tom will share "Five Easy Ways to Add Value with Calais" to provide developers with helpful tips and ideas to kick-start their efforts.

Visit the OpenCalais community discounts page from MIT to register.  Discounted options include attending the entire conference, coming for one day, or coming for just the Calais developer luncheon. 

The European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC2008) - September 24-26, Vienna, Austria

Barak Pridor, CEO, ClearForest, a Thomson Reuters company and creator of the Calais Web service, speaks at EXTC2008 in Vienna on Thursday, September 25th.

Barak co-presents the keynote address that day, Extraction and resolution capabilities for entities, events and facts, along with Peter Jackson, Chief Scientist for the Thomson Reuters Professional division.

The Web 3.0 Conference - October 16-17, Santa Clara, CA

Calais lead Tom Tague will be speaking on the Semantic Startup 101 - Successes, challenges and strategic decisions panel along with Powerset's Mark Johnson and others.

The Web 3.0 conference organizers has offered a $100 discount to Calais fans and OpenCalais community members, which you can secure by using the code SPKGF08 when you register.

7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008) - October 26-30, Karlsruhe, Germany

Michal Findkelstein-Landau, Calais' Director of Content Strategy, will provide an overview of the Calais Web service, including technical elements, current applications and insight on how to add value with Calais today.

The Defrag Conference - November 5-6, Denver, CO

Calais is a Defrag silver sponsor and Tom Tague is also speaking alongside Yahoo! Search's Amit Kumar and Siderean's Bradley Allen in the Next Level Discovery panel on Tuesday the 4th.

Mashup Camp - November 17-19, Mountain View, CA 

Calais is a sponsor of Mashup Camp and will be hosting a speed geeking table.  We will be competing in the 'Best Solution Provider Tool' competition, and are working on a Calais mashup developer contest of our own (stay tuned for details).

Registration for Mashup Camp is free if you don't mind sharing your email with sponsors, or you can pay a nominal fee to avoid doing so.  Either way, save your space in advance.

English Amit Kumar, Austria, Barak Pridor, Bradley Allen, Calais, Cambridge, ClearForest, Denver, Emerging Technologies, European Semantic Technology, Germany, Karlsruhe, Mark Johnson, Mashup Camp, Massachusetts, Michal Findkelstein-Landau, MIT, Mountain View, Peter Jackson, Santa Clara, Thomson Reuters, Tom Tague, USD, Vienna, Web Conference, web service, Yahoo

The NYT has an interesting article, Stuck in Google’s Doghouse, on the importance of search engines to many businesses. Or maybe it’s about ad arbitrage and the ways that some Web business models are based on gaming search engines and Web advertising. In any case, it’s especially relevant in the light of the recently announced Google-Yahoo advertising deal.

One of the most interesting aspects to the story, at least to me, is who gets the credit or blame for significant decisions and events on the Web — people or machines.

“When Mr. Savage asked Google executives what the problem was, he was told that Sourcetool’s “landing page quality” was low. Google had recently changed the algorithm for choosing advertisements for prominent positions on Google search pages, and Mr. Savage’s site had been identified as one that didn’t meet the algorithm’s new standards. (As Google defines it, landing page quality includes a series of attributes — loading speed, user friendliness, relevancy, originality and dozens of other characteristics — that it deems appropriately “googly.”)” source

A more dramatic example of our brave new world was the $1B problem United Airlines stock had last week, as outlined in A Stock-Killer Fueled by Algorithm After Algorithm.

“What made a six-year-old article about a bankruptcy filing by United Airlines reappear on Wall Street traders’ screens on Monday as if it were fresh news, prompting a sell-off that erased $1 billion in the company’s market value in a matter of minutes? The path the article followed from forgotten archive entry to present-day stock-killer has begun to emerge, and it raises some interesting questions about how news rockets around the Web. Both human error and far-from-foolproof technology seem to have played a role in the episode, which involved a 2002 Chicago Tribune report; the web site of the Sun Sentinel, a Florida newspaper owned by the same company; the Bloomberg News financial wire service; and Google, all apparently unwittingly.” source

The automation is inevitable, IMHO, and probably a good thing. Of course, I reserve the right to revise and extend my remarks if my own ox is gored.

Uncategorized advertising deal, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, far-from-foolproof technology, Florida, Google, Savage, search engines, search pages, Sun Sentinel, United Airlines, USD, Wall Street, Web people, Web advertising, Web business models, Yahoo

The US congress is asking the four major mobile phone providers why their charges for text messages have gone up by 100% over the past few years. As Chris Gaylord notes in his blog on the Christian Science Monitor, “text messages cost about $1,310 per megabyte. That seems a tad high.”

“With text-messaging rates doubling over the past three years, Sen. Herb Kohl has started asking questions. The Wisconsin Democrat and head of the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee sent a letter to the four major cellular companies on Tuesday with some interesting points.

In 2005, the industry charged about 10 cents per text. Now it’s 20 cents. All four carriers upped their rates at about the same time. The number of nationwide competitors slipped from six to four. And the remaining big-timers are gobbling up regional carriers.”

US Senator Herb Kohl’s press release includes the letter to the telecos.

“Today, US Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI), chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, asked the presidents and chief executive officers of the four largest wireless telephone companies to justify sharply rising rates for its customers to send and receive text messages. In a letter, Senator Kohl requested an explanation from Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, which collectively serve more than 90 percent of the nation’s cellular phone users. The text of Senator Kohl’s letter follows below.”

Uncategorized AT&T, cellular telephone, cents, Chris Gaylord, Christian Science Monitor, Congress, Herb Kohl, Senate, Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, United States, United States Congress, USD, Verizon Wireless, wireless telephone, Wisconsin

We hope to meet as many members of the OpenCalais community as possible.  Toward that end, here is a list of the September events where we are presenting and/or holding workshops. 

We would love to see you there, so let us know if you can make it!

1. SDFORUM - Wednesday, September 3rd - 6:30 p.m. PT - Palo Alto, CA
2. PAWS MEETUP - Thursday, September 4th - 6 p.m. PT - San Francisco, CA
3. MESH SUMMER SCHOOL ON MULTIMEDIA SEMANTICS - September 1 - 5, Crete
4. ONLINE NEWS ASSOCIATION (ONA) - September 11 - 13, Washington, DC
5. MIT's EMTECH '08 - September 23 - 25, Cambridge, MA

Please find details (and some special Calais discounts) below. 

SDFORUM - Wednesday, September 3rd - 6:30 p.m. PT - Palo Alto, CA 

We're holding an interactive session on the Calais Web service at the SDForum Semantic Web SIG in a session titled "Emerging Semantic Ad Platforms". 

Tom will focus on how Calais can be used to produce computable semantics from any text and feed them into any new search service, Semantic Web application or semantic ad platform. 

All are welcome, and the fee for non-SDForum members is $15 at the door.  There is no charge for members, and no pre-registration is required.

PAWS MEETUP - Thursday, September 4th - 6 p.m. PT - San Francisco, CA 

Tom will provide a look at Calais' underlying technology, and offer insight into the Calais roadmap going forward, in a special 'field trip' Meetup of the Palo Alto Semantic Web (PAWS) group.

The Calais team is hosting the event at Thomson Reuters downtown San Francisco office at 425 Market Street.  There are only 12 spots left for this free Meetup, so sign up today.

MESH SUMMER SCHOOL ON MULTIMEDIA SEMANTICS - September 1 - 5, Crete

On Thursday, September 4th, Barak Pridor, ClearForest CEO, will offer an overview of the Calais initiative and discuss the value it brings to publishers and journalists. 

ONLINE NEWS ASSOCIATION (ONA) - September 11 - 13, Washington, DC 

On Friday, September 12th, Tom will participate in the "Hello! Semantic Web!" panel alongside Tristan Harris, CEO of Apture, and Tiffany Shackelford, Semantic Marketer and consultant.

MIT's EMTECH '08 - September 23 - 25, Cambridge, MA 

The Calais team will be out in force at the Emerging Technologies Conference @ MIT, with a booth, a developer luncheon, and discounted conference pricing for members of the OpenCalais community. 

The luncheon takes place Thursday, September 25th, from 12:30 - 1:50 p.m. ET.  Tom will share "Five Easy Ways to Add Value with Calais" to provide developers with helpful tips and ideas to kick-start their efforts.

Click on the OpenCalais community discounts page from MIT to register.  The options are as follows:

1.  $49 if you want to enter the conference solely to attend the Calais developer luncheon on Thursday.
2. 15% off on a one-day pass if you want to come for a full day of conference sessions on either Wednesday or Thursday.
3. 15% off on the full conference pass.

We hope to see you there!

 

English Apture, Barak Pridor, Cambridge, ClearForest, DC, Emerging Technologies, MESH SUMMER SCHOOL ON MULTIMEDIA SEMANTICS, MIT, Online News Association, Palo Alto, San Francisco, search service, Thomson Reuters, Tristan Harris, underlying technology, USD, Washington, web application, web service, Web SIG

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