The Good Relations Annotator

I was just notified today about the release of the GoodRelations annotator tool. Now, without philosophing too much about what it is and what it can be used for, I just attached the email by Martin (Univ-Prof Dr. Martin Hepp is professor at the Bundeswehr University in Munich). I really think such pragmatic projects are the way to bring semantic web into every dayy use, at least in the corporate sector. This tool is just one of the many semantic web initiatives undertaken by martin and the researchers in his group and his network.



----------------------------------------------

We are proud to announce the release of the GoodRelations Annotator, a form-based tool that will help any business in the world to create a description of its offerings suitable for the Web of Data, and that in less than 5 minutes.

The tool is available at

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/

It creates a straightforward yet complete description of the key aspects of a typical business using the GoodRelations vocabulary and current Semantic Web standards.

The resulting RDF/XML file can be either directly published on the company's Web site or used as a skeleton for developing a more fine-grained description with price information etc.

The work on the tool has been funded by the Oesterreichische Forschungsfoerderungsgesellschaft GmbH (FFG) and the Austrian Bundesministerium fuer Verkehr, Innovation und Technologie (BMVIT) under the myOntology project in the FIT-IT "Semantic Systems" program (contract number 812515).

Martin Hepp:
http://www.heppnetz.de
http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/

Tool:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/

GoodRelations Project:
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/

Webcast (15 Minutes)
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/

----------------------------------------------

Marwane El Kharbili, this time on behalf of Martin Hepp

You wanna talk to ramona?

If you want to test how well robots (or artificial intelligence agents if you think about a human robot when hearing the word robot) can have a normal discussion, then you can test it here. Ramona is a virtual person, and here, you can chat with her. I tested her ability to follow a normal conversation with and I have to say she does quite well.

Accoring to KuzweilAI.net (the hosts of Ramona), Ramona is the first live virtual performing and recording artist. You can learn more about her here.

I noticed that the discussion flows a lot better if you just answer her questions at the start till she has enough information about you. It's astonishing to see how much progress artificial intelligence has made. when are we going to have a pet imitation which is not dirty and to which you can talk (I am ironic of course)? Imagine virtual medical assistants which could talk to old people so that they do not feel alone! I can't wait for the future!

Marwane El Kharbili

Microsoft and the future of quantum computing

...Is the 1st April joke by Microsoft folks on Channel 9. And when you have a look at the reactions and the comments, many people have fallen down for this :D I must say, hadn't it been the comments, I would have believed that a team of genius software architects and astrophysicists have gotten together under the umbrella of the "Quantum Unreality Computation Group" and developed the revolutionary Quark product. This product is the ultimate quantum computing machine, the solution everybody dreamed of to revolutionize parallel computing. Don't look for this one on Microsoft's catalogs, you won't find it. the only thing that betrays the prank is that at the end of the 30 minute video where Dr. Beckman very handily explains the quantum theory behind the discovery, both the reporter and him eventually finish laughing their heart out, lol. If you want to get a not so serious idea about how quantum jokes made by Microsoft look like, get the video!

Marwane El Kharbili.

Business Rules and the semantic Web

So when will the wedding take place? This seems to be the question everybody is asking about Business Rule Management (BRM) and the Semantic Web (SW). At least the buys from the European Business Rules Conference did (http://www.semantic-web-days.net/EBRC_start.htm). Last year they organized the Semantic Web Days at the EBRC 2007. It took the form of a tutorial by Gerd Wagner (University of Cottbus and REWERSE Project) and colleagues and an exhibition by innovative companies and research institutes to present the latest innovations. In the tutorial, Gerd Wagner talked about Rule Modeling and Rule Interchange between different representation formalisms. He also talked about the latter in the context of the approaches of the REWERSE European research project and the W3C RIF (Rule Interchange Format) working group of the W3C. Another project dealing with the question is the MUSING project, under coordination of our neighbors here in Saarbrücken, the DFKI, represented by the person of Thierry Declerck.

This is only one of many events tackling the question of bringing specialists of the two domains together, since they are working mainly on inherently adjacent issues. One of the characteristics of research on business rules is the variety of works from very different people with different backgrounds. Due to lack of communication and exchange, we undergo the risk of having to reinvent the wheel at each time. One will inevitably notice this if one works in the Business Rules domain and tries to get an overview and an incept of what is really going on in research about business rules.

There is no need to be an oracle to see how semantic web technologies can help business rule propagation, interchange and enforcement in systems all over the web (actually there is no reason why the same approaches could be used for most type of distributed environments and systems), but also what level of artificial intelligence awareness the use of business rules in the semantic web architecture and applications would bring. I only hope that after the REWERSE project is over, many researchers will get to know the results, take profit from the dissemination efforts of REWERSE and build on them, and that through the variety of backgrounds, positions and ideas, that we will bring Business Rule Management to the next level, being really productive in a semantic distributed environment.

Marwane El Kharbili