brox-Artikel Chefbüro 08-09.pdf
We are glad to see that SMILA also gains momentum in german press: I just received my copy of the Feb. Issue of Eclipse Magazine which features SMILA together with other Eclipse frameworks like Swordfish, Riena, Ingres CAFÉ ...
I espacially love the German Interview-headline citing Chris with this: "The World needs an Open Standard for Information Logistics".
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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).
I have been discussing progress in semantic knowledge structures with Entrepreneur and Researcher Sam Chapman of K-Now who has recently left the University of Sheffield, Department of Computer Science, in the United Kingdom to go full-time into the delivery of semantic technologies in the enterprise. His attendance at the ISWC 2008 has created some momentum to engage new corporations in a discussion on a recently presented paper on "Creating and Using Organisational Semantic Webs in Large Networked Organisations" by Ravish Bhagdev, Ajay Chakravarthy, Sam Chapman, Fabio Ciravegna and Vita Lanfranchi. Knowledge management has shifted as evidenced in his paper. He contends with others that a more localized approach based on a particular perspective of the world in which one operates is far more useful than a centralized company view. All-encompassing ontologies are not the answer, according to Chapman. In the paper, his team indicates:
A challenge for the Semantic Web is to support the change in knowledge management mentioned above, by defining tools and techniques supporting: 1) definition of community-specific views of the world; 2) capture and acquisition of knowledge according to them; 3) integration of captured knowledge with the rest of the organisation's knowledge; 4) sharing of knowledge across communities.
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.
