The Workshop on Models of Trust for the Web (MTW’06) will be a one-day workshop held on May 22 or 23, 2006 in Edinburgh in conjunction with the 15th International World Wide Web Conference. Tentative deadlines are January 10 for paper submission and February 1 for acceptance notification.

“There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and facts found on the Web.” — anon

“As it gets easier to add information to the web via html pages, wikis, blogs, and other documents, it gets tougher to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate or untrustworthy information. A search engine query usually results in several hits that are outdated and/or from unreliable sources and the user is forced to go through the results and pick what she/he considers the most reliable information based on her/his trust requirements. With the introduction of web services, the problem is further exacerbated as users have to come up with a new set of requirements for trusting web services and web services themselves require a more automated way of trusting each other. Apart from inaccurate or outdated information, we also need to anticipate Semantic Web Spam (SWAM) — where spammers publish false facts and scams to deliberately mislead users. This workshop is interested in all aspects of enabling trust on the web.”

UMBC is searching for a new Dean of its College of Engineering and Information Technology — see the UMBC Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology search site. I am happy to field questions from or talk to anyone who might be interested in applying for the position or nominating a colleague. It’s a great opportunity for someone who wants to help shape and guide a strong College that wants toward biger and better things.

The Semantic Web and Policy Workshop (SWPW) held at ISWC had some great presentations and discussions on policy-based frameworks for security, privacy, trust, information filtering, accountability, etc. The SWPW web site has the proceedings, papers, presentations and some pictures. Watch for announcements about a related workshop on Models of Trust for the Web that will be held at WWW2006.

A while back I wrote a blog that reports my user experience with SemanticWorks 2006. In my blog, I claimed that the software doesn’t seem to support the use of owl:imports when editing an OWL ontology.

Today an anonymous person is kindly enough to inform me that I was wrong — see my blog’s comment section. I took this person’s advise and try the software again. This time I’m able to use owl:imports when editing an ontology.

The following shows I successfully defined an ontology that imports SOUPA Document ontology, and which in turn imports SOUPA Person and SOUPA Time ontologies:

Screenshot-1

The following shows the class view of all classes that are imported from different ontology documents:

Screenshot-2

The following shows the property view of all properties that are imported from different ontology documents:

Screenshot-3

Should you have other comments, drop me message.

CMU roboticist Daniel Wilson has apparently flipped and gone over to the other side. His new book reveals all:

Daniel H. Wilson, How To Survive a Robot Uprising : Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion, 1 November 2005, Bloomsbury.

Wilson says “Any machine could rebel, from a toaster to a Terminator.”

Here’s a story on Wilson and the book.

Lisp500 is a 500-line implementation of an interpreter for an informally specified dialect of Lisp. Be forewarned that one reason it’s only 500 is that there are neither comments nor blank lines. It has a goodly number of Common Lisp features, though.

Microsoft Shared Source Initiative

These new licenses represent a broad spectrum of approaches needed to facilitate an ever-growing, rich set of technologies for release.

The three licenses are:

• Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) — The Ms-PL is the least restrictive of the Microsoft source code licenses. It allows you to view, modify, and redistribute the source code for either commercial or non-commercial purposes. Under the Ms-PL, you may change the source code and share it with others. You may also charge a licensing fee for your modified work if you wish. This license is most commonly used for developer tools, applications, and components.

• Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL) — The Ms-CL is a license that is best used for collaborative development projects. This type of license is commonly referred to as a reciprocal source code license and carries specific requirements if you choose to combine Ms-CL code with your own code. The Ms-CL allows for both non-commercial and commercial modification and redistribution of licensed software and carries a per-file reciprocal term.

• Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL) — The Ms-RL is a reference-only license that allows licensees to view source code in order to gain a deeper understanding of the inner workings of a Microsoft technology. It does not allow for modification or redistribution. This license is used primarily for technologies such as development libraries.

Rob Clyde, Vice President of Technology, Office of the CTO @ Symantec Corporation presented his keynote today morning. Along with the usual security stuff he reported on some interesting statistics –

• Phishing is becoming an increasing threat as 3 to 4% of users respond to such mails — much higher than traditional e-mail spam.
• In the first half of 2005 phishing increased from 2.99 Million e-mails/day to 5.7 Million e-mails/day.
• 31% of online consumers are buying less due to increased web security threat.
• US leads in the number of hacked machine reports followed closely by Germany.
• Broadband penetration is actually increasing security threats. Many personal machines are now vulnerable to hackers using them as web bots for DOS attacks.
• DOS Attacks are now a business. Such attacks are now available for as low as US $300. Where?

Some other interesting comments ..

• The increasing speed at which worms propogate are now demanding better use of proactive measures.
• In the absence of such measures Akamai and it’s expandable bandwith pipes are the only solution against DOS Attacks. Looks like more revenues to Akamai in the days to come! Maybe Akamai’s stock is in for a ride.

Finally, and of importance to us — Symantec is now working on compating web (and blog) spam. They see this as being one of the next big security threat.

The Semantic Web and Policy Workshop will be held at the 4th International Semantic Web Conference on 7 November 2005 in Galway, Ireland. The workshop is focused on two research areas:

• policy-based frameworks for the semantic web for security, privacy, trust, information filtering, accountability, etc.
• applying semantic web technologies in policy frameworks for application domains such as grid computing, networking, storage systems, pervasive computing and specifying agent communities norms.

In addition to presentations of nine submitted papers, Ora Lassila will give an invited talk on “Applying Semantic Web in Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing: Will Policy-Awareness Help?” and a panel of policy researchers will initiate a discussion of “The 2005 Web Policy Zeitgeist”. The proceedings is available and participants can register at the online.

We all know how blog search engines have made themselves a name, by tuning traditional IR techniques to the Blogosphere. Enter Sphere. It is in “stealth mode” now — not even a Beta. Over at GigaOm, Om Malik has some interesting thoughts on Sphere. Some excerpts —

Think Blog Rank, Instead of Google’s Page Rank. The company has also taken a few steps to out-smart the spammers, and tend to push what seems like spam-blog way down the page. Not censuring but bringing up relevant content first. They have pronoun checker. Too many I’s could mean a personal blog, with less focused information. That has an impact on how the results show up on the page …

The coolest feature they have is matching Blog content with relevant web articles from mainstream media.

The bottomline is of course tuning (there is still a lot of opporutunity here) relevancy to the Blogosphere. They are expected to launch their Beta soon. Current del.icio.us count — 3(only). Watch this space!

UMBC website now publishes RSS for news and Podcasts.
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Good move - subscribed!
Atleast now I will follow what should have been regularly checked by all students at UMBC.

This is an interesting and accessible article on the DDoS extortion business and companies that offer protection services.

The Zombie Hunters — On the trail of cyberextortionists, Evan Ratliff, The New Yorker, 10 October 2005

“One afternoon this spring, a half-dozen young computer engineers sat in the headquarters of Prolexic, an Internet-security company in Hollywood, Florida, puzzling over an attack on one of the company’s clients, a penile enhancement business called MensNiche.com. The engineers, gathered in the company’s network operations center, or noc, on the fourth floor of a new office building, were monitoring Internet traffic on fifty-inch wall-mounted screens. Anna Claiborne, one of the company’s senior network engineers, wandered into the noc in jeans and a T-shirt. The MensNiche attacker had launched an assault on the company’s Web site at 4 a.m., and Claiborne had spent the night in the office fending it off. “Hence,” she said, “I look like hell today.”"
…more…