This morning the development-team of SMILA recieved the good news right before weekend via Leo Sauermann of german "DFKI" (german research center for artificial intelligence). DFKI just recently joined the Eclipse Foundation to support SMILA. Today's Announcement sounded like this within Leo's email:
Hi SMILA,
As of yesterday, we have changed the license of the Aperture project to BSD.
Ed Merks' remarks can be found over here. This is his takeaway about SMILA:
"The integration of disparate sources of information across the enterprise is key issue to many. The same information can be interpreted in different ways and often separate sources of information need to be related as if they originated from a uniform semantic source. The SMILA approach is focused on this. The idea is to create a shared architecture standard.
As Stephen Arnold blogged already, Georg Schmidt and Igor Novakovic will do a webinar about SMILA. Maybe a good alternative for everyone who cannot attend Eclipse Summit Europe next Week and talk to SMILA developers directly there. The Webinar is on December 17, 2008 at 4:00 pm Etc/GMT-5. You can register over here at Eclipse Live.
I would like to inform you that Richard Seibt and Fritz Rombach have agreed to support the brox team on its mission to establish a sound service offering based on the open source project SMILA and its enterprise class SMILA distribution called eccenca.
Richard Seibt is a long-standing and experienced software manager, also formerly Managing Director and Member of the Board of Management at IBM, United Internet, SUSE and Novell.
His current focus is on using Open Source as a driver in the creation of more agile and economically viable software solutions. He co-founded and chairs the Open Source Business Foundation e.V. as well as Europe's leading Open Source tradeshow. He advocates the creation of industry consortia with the intention to cooperate in the design and implementation of open source software as a way to dramatically reduce TCO to enterprise customers.
Humans are classification machines. We love to categorize and segment our lives into neat little piles. Have you ever sighed in joy after finally getting around to cleaning up that cluttered garage? There are even games where the object is to build order from disorder. We solve Rubik's cubes and prune our shrubs and pick up our socks and put them in the hamper. As the father of two boys, I'm generalizing of course.
People are much better at seeing semantic relationships than any machine. We can tell latte from onion rings. We know how Paris Hilton is related to Larry King. We understand the concept and purpose of underpants. Despite decades of research, and many, many smart person-hours dedicated to cracking that nut, computers still have no clue.
