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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).

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.

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.

This morning I have been part of a web conference that demonstrated the way that I believe more and more user centric applications will be built.

The goal of this new approach is to reduce the cost of IT, by standardizing the code while being able to flexibly adjust and reuse its components according to business needs.

The idea is to separate processing components (instruments, services) from the knowledge and rules that are to be applied in the business process. This is a bit like taking object oriented programming one step further by going beyond the code and taking this concept to the level of how we map our understanding of the business in respect to the code.

The benefit of this approach to the IT department is, that software and hard coded functions will increasingly get standardized thus increasing their rate of reuse, or old code may be reused using a web service wrapper.

The benefit to the business department is a dramatic increase in flexibility to adapt the processes and applicable rules to the dynamics of the business world.

The web meeting this morning has convinced me that next generation of systems architecture will not only make use of Web-Services (SOA), but will integrate dynamic business process management (workflow) but also functions to model business knowledge and rules that effectively control the entire application but do not require coding.

To continue to give you the background on the SMILA project, also known as the SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture project, I will turn your attention to the breakthrough of June 2008 where the Eclipse Foundation really began its incubation of 12 developers, primarily from brox and Empolis, as well mentioning SMILA in internal and external presentations, setting up a Wiki, and creating a project web presence. Funding for SMILA comes from the German government, affiliations with other European government projects, and growing European industry support.

To summarize from the Eclipse site: SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture) is an extensible framework for building search solutions to access unstructured information in the enterprise. Besides providing essential infrastructure components and services, SMILA also delivers ready-to-use add-on components, like connectors to most relevant data sources.

Goals:

• Define and implement an extensible framework based on SOA principles and standards (e.g. BPEL, SCA), which is dedicated to the access and integration of (unstructured) information.
• Provide ready-to-use framework components (data source connectors and service implementations) that help to demonstrate and leverage its capabilities.
• Deliver interfaces for management, operation and monitoring of the framework and its components.

Eclipse projects store all of their source code in public revision control systems. The project hosts its revision control repository -- ”http://dev.eclipse.org/svnroot/rt/org.eclipse.smila/

There is a mailing list for SMILA developers and interested parties: https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/smila-dev

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.