An amazing video on the Information Age in 2014 is available here!

Its an approx. 8 min video which explains the evolution and spread of the Google religion. The clash of the Titans – Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

With the blogger, friendster, amazon, google grid we are moving to a highly personalized news – views – reviews global information system.

Can we have a brainstorming session in one of our meeting on what each one of us thinks about the information age of 2014?

When we named our semantic web search engine Swoogle, we registered Swoogle.org but none of the other Swoogle top level domains. A .org address seemed appropriate since we had no plans to commercialize Swoogle and also wanted to mostly use http://swoogle.umbc.edu/ as the canonical URL for branding reasons. Well, we should have spent the extra $10 to secure swoogle.com. A Google Alert just informed me of a new web site at swoogle.com devoted to “Adult clothing galleries for women’s erotic day & evening clothes, sexy bikinis & swimwear, erotic lingerie fashions, and sexy shoes & boots”.

Why Swoogle? Well their official name seems to be “Sexy Women’s Online Galleries for Lingere Etc”.

We live in a fallen world.

Anybody know a good trademark lawyer?

ACM published a study on the globalization and offshoring of software with several findings:

• Globalization and offshoring of the software industry are deeply connected and both will continue to grow.
• Offshoring can, as a whole, benefit both, but competition is intensifying.
• Offshoring will increase but determining the specifics is difficult. Skepticism is warranted regarding claims about the number of jobs to be offshored and the projected growth of software industries in developing nations.
• Standardized jobs are more easily moved to developing countries than are higher-skill jobs. While these standardized jobs were the initial focus of offshoring, global competition in higher-end skills, such as research is increasing today.
• Offshoring magnifies existing risks and creates new and poorly understood threats to national security, business property and processes, and individuals’ privacy.
• To stay competitive in a global IT environment and industry, countries must adopt policies that foster innovation.

The study concluded that predictions of job losses were greatly exaggerated and that 2-3% of the US IT jobs will go offshore annually over the next decade. But more jobs will be created than are lost in the future as long as US industry moves up the economic ladder to do higher-value work — typically, applying IT to other fields, like biology and business. Employment in the IT industry is higher today than it was at the peak of the dot-com bubble, despite the growth of offshore outsourcing in the last few years.

(spotted on the CRA policy blog)

This presentation describes the SPIRE project, a distributed, interdisciplinary research project that is exploring how the Semantic Web can be used in Ecoinformatics. Several tools are described including the Swoogle Semantic Web search engine and ELVIS (the Ecosystem Location Visualization and Information System), a suite of tools for constructing food webs for a given location. The presentation shows how the SPIRE tools are used to answer queries against multiple Semantic Web documents in the course of building a food web model.

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“Everyone needs this Ontology”. The subject flashed itself in my mail client. No sooner had it arrived than it was gone. “Everyone needs this Ontology”? What could it be and where did it go? Could the spam filter have eaten it? I looked in my spam bucket and there it was.

Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 06:15:21 +0500Message-Id: < CFE0.9A2.3081698B8C@ mopalinux.com >From: “Jennifer Mansfield”To: ontology@cs.umbc.eduSubject:  Everyone Need This OntologyHuge selection of meds availableat attractive prices.Highest quality assured.Try us out today..http : //au.geocities.com/mitzi96503bertine1617/vKHTCC

An Upper Ontology Summit will be held in Gaithersburg MD on 15 March 2006 to work toward developing a common core ontology to support knowledge interoperability.

There are a number of open, large, general purpose ontologies in existence today, including SUMO, OpenCyc Upper Ontology, DOLCE, PSL, OntoSem, WordNet and others developed in the Semantic Web community and application areas such as biomedical research. Such ontologies, often called upper ontologies or foundation ontologies, describe general concepts and entities that do not belong to a specific problem domain. General concepts to describe time, space and social roles, for example, are common in upper ontologies. Vocabulary to describe VLSI layouts are not. Having widely used and sharable upper ontologies are thought my many to be critical for knowledge sharing and interoperability. The current thinking is not so much that all domain ontologies must share the same upper ontology (although that would be very convenient) but that upper ontologies can be used as common references for ontology mapping and alignment among them.

The Upper Ontology Summit will be held at NIST on 15 March 2006 sposored by the Ontolog Forum, NIST, and SICoP. Its goal is to get the “custodians” of the leading existing upper ontologies to agree to a subset, an intersection of these ontologies, that could serve as a core to support interoperability among the future explosively growing population of ontologies. Representatives and stewards of many well known large, general purpose ontologies will be there, cinluding Cyc, SUMO, DOLCE, BFO and PSL. The one-day workshop and panel discussion event will be held at on the NIST campus in Gaithersburg MD on 15 March 2006. The workshop is free, but pre-registration by 6 March is required to enter their facilities.

Semantic Web research at UMBC began in 2000 when we (UMBC, JHU/APL and MIT/Sloan) were awarded a research contract under the DARPA DAML program. One theme of our award was to investigate the integration of software agents and DAML. That winter we began developing a research testbed application which was a portal with information about information technology talks. The result was the ITTALKS system, which you can see in this demo done in June 2001. We recently found it gathering dust on one of our servers and uploaded to Google Video, partly for posterity and partly to give Google Video a try.

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