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.
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.
