events: October 2008 Archives

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.

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.