http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger EBB is the ebiquity research group\\\'s blog at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). We focus on technologies that facilitate the design, implementation and control of distributed, intelligent information systems -- mobile and pervasive computing, ad hoc networking, multiagent systems, knowledge representation and reasoning, and the semantic web. As the tides of technology ebb and flow, we hope the good ideas wash up on our beach and the bad ones drift back out to sea. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:50:39 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Twitter turned on its API for geotagging tweets yesterday, as announce in in a post on their blog, Think Globally, Tweet Locally. Currently, geographic information will only be associated with your tweets if you use an application that adds it and will only be used to display your ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/20/twitter-api-enables-geotagging/ http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/18/xkcd-on-the-difference-between-academia-and-business/ Wikipedia has an interesting RFC on approaches to achieve and maintain better coherence in its infobox templates. This is significant because Wikipedia is becoming the new CYC -- a broad, practical KB filled with general purpose background knowledge. The RFC was kicked off by discussions on dbpedia template ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/15/wikipedia-infobox-template-coherence/ This ought to be fun. According to an article in the WSJ, Europe Approves New Cookie Law, "the Council of the European Union has approved new legislation that would require Web users to consent to Internet cookies.." The law could have broad repercussions for online ads. “Almost every site that carries ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/13/eu-approves-law-requiring-user-consent-for-web-cookies/ Around here we prefer range voting to approval voting or IRV. http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/12/xkcd-on-elections-and-voting/ Mark Chu-Carroll is a Google software engineer who's written a long, detailed and informed review of Google's new programming language Go. It's worth a read if you are interested in understanding what it's like as a programming language. Here's a few points that I took note of. "The guys who ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/12/a-review-of-googles-go-programming-language/ Yong Yu and Rudi Studer are editing a special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on semantic search that will appear in the summer 2010. The special issue will cover interdisciplinary topics between Semantic Web and search. See the call for papers for a list of relevant topics ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/11/cfp-jws-special-issue-on-semantic-search/ PCWorld has a story, Google VP Mayer Describes the Perfect Search Engine, with some interesting comments on semantic search from Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of Search Products & User Experience. "IDGNS: What's the status of semantic search at Google? You have said in the past that through "brute force" -- ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/11/google-vp-on-semantic-search-and-the-semantic-web/ The Economist has been running a series of online Oxford Union style debates on topical issues -- CEO pay, healthcare, climate change, etc. The latest one is on the cloud computing: This house believes that the cloud can't be entirely trusted. In his opening remarks, moderator Ludwig Siegele says "The participants in ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/10/can-cloud-computing-be-entirely-trusted/ The Journal of Web Semantics now has a facebook page and a Twitter account to augment its blog. All three will be used for news and announcements of call for papers, special issues, availability of new papers, etc. As you might expect, the tweets will be terse items, the ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/09/follow-the-journal-of-web-semantics-on-facebook-and-twitter/