October 2008 Archives

This morning I have been part of a web conference that demonstrated the way that I believe more and more user centric applications will be built.

The goal of this new approach is to reduce the cost of IT, by standardizing the code while being able to flexibly adjust and reuse its components according to business needs.

The idea is to separate processing components (instruments, services) from the knowledge and rules that are to be applied in the business process. This is a bit like taking object oriented programming one step further by going beyond the code and taking this concept to the level of how we map our understanding of the business in respect to the code.

The benefit of this approach to the IT department is, that software and hard coded functions will increasingly get standardized thus increasing their rate of reuse, or old code may be reused using a web service wrapper.

The benefit to the business department is a dramatic increase in flexibility to adapt the processes and applicable rules to the dynamics of the business world.

The web meeting this morning has convinced me that next generation of systems architecture will not only make use of Web-Services (SOA), but will integrate dynamic business process management (workflow) but also functions to model business knowledge and rules that effectively control the entire application but do not require coding.

In July 2008, a number of large corporations in information technology spaces, began to take an interest in the SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture) project, including SAP. A successful presentation was made to SAP on SMILA, for SAP support and involvement. This was achieved. Let's remember that the primary purpose of SMILA is to provide a development framework that is accessible by all developers and reduces the investment risk for all companies in this. With an open source solution worldwide, there is a basis to build momentum for this initiative to be a standard. This constructs the inroads for semantic applications in every industry. The first mission under SMILA is to create sample implementations of a workable information logistics framework. Next generation semantic information systems must count on a framework being available to really ground themselves in industry excellence, stability, and scalability.

SMILA Architecture Overview

Georg Schmidt (brox) and Igor Novacovic (empolis) will give a demo on the 7th international Semantic Web Conference in Karlsruhe (CongressCenter), Germany.

ISWC 2008 will hold a combined poster and demonstration session on Tuesday, October 28 at 6:30 pm. The Poster/Demo Session is an opportunity for presenting late-breaking results, ongoing research projects, and speculative or innovative work in progress. Posters and demos are intended to provide authors and participants with the ability to connect with each other and to engage in discussions about the work.

The paper can already be downloaded at the ISWC Website.

Abstract: An important requirement to the enterprise IT is the ability to manage information with high flexibility. Semantic web research and resulting technologies are therefore getting more and more vital within business processes. One question is how to get the research work - done at universities or within corporations - into the enterprise easily. One possible answer to this question is the availability of an open source information processing framework, which meets the requirements of an enterprise. This framework should be mature and flexible enough to design any application. To move towards such a flexible architecture, which is able to process vast amounts of information in an enterprise, a joint development by brox and Empolis, has been started on Eclipse.

To continue to give you the background on the SMILA project, also known as the SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture project, I will turn your attention to the breakthrough of June 2008 where the Eclipse Foundation really began its incubation of 12 developers, primarily from brox and Empolis, as well mentioning SMILA in internal and external presentations, setting up a Wiki, and creating a project web presence. Funding for SMILA comes from the German government, affiliations with other European government projects, and growing European industry support.

To summarize from the Eclipse site: SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture) is an extensible framework for building search solutions to access unstructured information in the enterprise. Besides providing essential infrastructure components and services, SMILA also delivers ready-to-use add-on components, like connectors to most relevant data sources.

Goals:

• Define and implement an extensible framework based on SOA principles and standards (e.g. BPEL, SCA), which is dedicated to the access and integration of (unstructured) information.
• Provide ready-to-use framework components (data source connectors and service implementations) that help to demonstrate and leverage its capabilities.
• Deliver interfaces for management, operation and monitoring of the framework and its components.

Eclipse projects store all of their source code in public revision control systems. The project hosts its revision control repository -- ”http://dev.eclipse.org/svnroot/rt/org.eclipse.smila/

There is a mailing list for SMILA developers and interested parties: https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/smila-dev

Yesterday I visited the Systems Fair in Munich. It used to be the second most important IT trade show in Germany and one of the most important ones in Europe.
I myself have been questioning the benefit of having two trade shows (Cebit and Systems) in a small country like Germany and so have been many of the visitors of whom there have been less and less over the past few years. First the number of visitors dropped, a little later the number of exhibitors dropped also. A downward spiral began that seemingly would only find its end in the cancellation of the entire event. Just on the one day, when I changed my mind about the concept and importance of the event the news came out that this is going to be the last SYSTEMS fair.

I find this information sad. As a matter of fact I am convinced that everyone who visited and exhibited at this years SYSTEMS fair will wonder if or why this should be the end. The atmosphere in the fairground, the crowds of visitors at pretty much every booth, the confidence in the market, the value of available solutions and the interest of the attending audience were in extreme contrast to the goings on in the financial markets.

Overall the atmosphere reminded me of the good old days of CEBITs that I used to regularly attend in the 80s and 90s. Exhibitors with full order books and exciting solutions and customers who seemed to feel that they were part of a rebirth of an industry. It really made my mind spin. With SYSTEMS taking place in only 4-5 halls each being the size of a soccer field, it provided a cozy atmosphere to the visitor long lost in CEBITs overwhelming size.

Especially in my field of interest (document management, storage management, workflow and BPM) the attending vendor booths were well received by the visitors and those vendors I had a chance to speak with were more than satisfied with the attendance and lead generation.

Welcome to a discourse on how an international standard of information logistics is possible through an open source solution. This blog is dedicated to deriving a semantic, intelligent information management standard, in conjunction with utilizing the open source umbrella of Eclipse. At brox IT-Solutions GmbH, a global corporation based in Germany dedicated to information excellence in the enterprise, I see there is a commitment to making all enterprise-level data, structured and unstructured, understandable and accessible for day-to-day decision-making. The unsolved issue of managing unstructured data is a future concern for all enterprises. This means the conversation about information logistics has to be expanded to new levels, so that all departments and constituents of any organization have actionable knowledge NOW. This is not just a conversation about just having key departments in the enterprise run proprietary software for data output that other departments cannot see or find or, if they can find it, no one can interpret it for any real knowledge. The lack of semantic meta data is a real concern in today's workplaces. And, those interested in a semantic standard are not just pushing out what is already known—that countless hours of expensive, consultative integration for all departments is possible, but has no end in sight. Information logistics of value comes from capabilities that include a strong emphasis managing unstructured data, data quality, data analysis, and enterprise search solutions. An international standard for information logistics will come from putting a priority on the open source framework for this to happen. I contend that the revolution began in the month of January 2008.

This is when brox partnered with Empolis, to create the SMILA project under the Eclipse Foundation, which is the premier universal toolset for development, mostly provided in Java. While little known in certain parts of the globe, the fact remains that Eclipse is at the heart of more than 70 percent of the world's code running information technology solutions. You need a Java runtime environment (JRE) to use Eclipse (Java 5 JRE recommended). I'm told that the first SMILA Version .5 code for academic researchers, IT consultants, and enterprise-level IT developers involved in text analytics, data mining, semantic technologies, and case-based reasoning will be available in late October. At brox, the company is building commercial-grade architecture and applications for the enterprise under the eccenca Foundation, based on the SMILA codebase. eccenca products will reflect internal expertise of existing customer requests, including those of startups in Theseus, Volkswagen, and others.

So what is SMILA? SMILA stands for SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture and it was unveiled as an Eclipse project in January 2008. Its mission has been to provide the best condition for seeding an emerging international standard for information logistics. The SMILA project through brox gained notoriety at the Open Source Meets Business event on Jan. 22, 2008 hosted by Heise, in Nuremberg, Germany where brox received a European Open Source Business Award. Get involved! If you are a developer in the enterprise, contact info@brox.de to explore ready-to-go business applications under brox's eccenca product line with roots in the SMILA open source research. Corporate and OEM users of software, no matter how it is being created, require indemnification, warranties, maintenance, support, certification, training and a full stack of professional services. brox is offering a select number of these services of SMILA software under eccenca, a commercial grade software platform approach.