Recently in announcements Category

We have just release Version 1.1 of eccenca. It contains a lot of bugfixes because it is based on a new SMILA revision.

Please try it eccenca 1.1 and give us feedback:
http://download.eccenca.com/

See the Release Notes

We are proud to introduce the all new desktop search client from eccenca.

At a first glance eccenca Discoverer is just another desktop search. So why should the eDiscoverer boost your productivity in comparison to existing systems?

The eDiscoverer features a superior fault-tolerant search and indexing technology. Besides it enables users to quickly find and review documents from remote severs. Companies usually don't allow desktop search engines to index fileshares over the network as the resulting increase in traffic has been linked to network break down. But how are we supposed to quickly find important documents on remote servers without being able to index network drives?
eDiscoverer has the ability to seamlessly connect to eccenca server engines. These are directly placed on central file- or groupware-servers to avoid network traffic during indexing. Lightning fast document preview functions assure instant gratification and improved "findability" with eccenca - no matter if documents are stored locally or on a remote server.

Click here to get your free trial version!

We are proud to announce the launch of the new eccenca marketplace! This version replaces the preliminary system that was actually not more than a component info system. Many missing features are now aboard.

Of course there is all necessary e-commerce functionality. Besides, the marketplace is designed to serve as a comprehensive information source for information logistic news, trends aswell as existing software. We plan to extend this mission a lot in the future.

In the meantime further providers of great free and commercial components have joined.  Please welcome the imaging technology specialist accusoft pegasus as a representative.

Today we have launched our long awaited eccenca.com website and the first BETA version of the soon to come commercial eccenca product.
The circumstances of this launch are peculiar in many ways. The most disappointing being that some of those who have helped us in defining the vision of eccenca are no longer part of our team. When celebrating the site and product launch today, we want to thank those who have given us support or have directly contributed during the long implementation cycle.

What is the right time to come out with a product? How feature rich and functionally complete must it be to get the desired response in the market?
If you have been involved with the development of any piece of software you must know, that at this point we have more ideas of what to do next than ever before.

Click here to read the full coverage at heise (german).

Attensity and living-e - Two Powerful Partners Join SMILA

The Open Source Initiative, SMILA "SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture", was mutually launched at the end of 2007 by brox IT Solutions GmbH, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and empolis to create a standardized infrastructure for information management. The "eclipse Foundation" was chosen as a platform for the initiative. The eclipse community consists of more than 180 companies and research institutions, as well as countless private users worldwide, which all have the common objective of developing open and standardized platforms. Since June 2008, SMILA attained the status of an official eclipse project http://www.eclipse.org/smila/ and is co-funded through the THESEUS project by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi).

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.

 

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.

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.