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OSAF receives $98,000 grant

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Some good news form the OSAF Website: “We are pleased to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has agreed to provide a $98,000 grant to fund a planning project to extend OSAF’s Chandler software application to meet the information technology needs of higher education. The Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) originally planned for its new Personal Information Manager application to target individual and small-to-medium business users that need a better tool to manage and share their email, contacts, calendars and notes. Based on expressions of significant interest from the higher education community, OSAF, with support of the Mellon Foundation, is undertaking a study of how to address administration, scalability, and security issues of that segment.” [1]

[1] http://www.osafoundation.org/MellonAnnouncement_Mar-31-2003.htm

Communications Rights in the Information Society (CRIS)

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Communications Rights in the Information Society (CRIS)[1] is a campaign to ensure that communication rights are central to the information society and to the upcoming World Summit to the Information Society (WSIS). The campaign is sponsored and supported by the Platform for Communication Rights, a group of NGOs involved in media and communication projects around the word.

[1] http://www.crisinfo.org

Is .NET Smart?

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Joachim Breitsprecher from our partner company d-serv told me about this interesting article[1]:

[quote]
Does an organization have anything to gain from .Net?

Despite a vaguely defined purpose, no track record and several known risks, organizations are starting to implement projects based in .Net. Carmine Mangione delves into the .Net enigma and explains why jumping on the .Net bandwagon – like blindly adopting any technology without first weighing the pros and cons – could potentially sink your organization.
[/quote]

We fully agree with the author that despite the hype concerning SOAP, WSDL & Co., these technologies are currently too imature to be used in reliable software infrastructures on a broad scale. Furthermore, we are very concerned with the latest decisions of IBM and Microsoft to leave the W3C standardization gremium for Web Services. It seems like the good old HTTP/URL mechanisms are still the best way to go, because the level of abstraction offered by the REST model[2], is much more convenient and manageable than Web Services.

[1] http://www.linuxworld.com/go.cgi?id=742092
[2] http://www.ebuilt.com/fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm

Session at OSCOM 3 Conference, May 29

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

“Managing the Semantic Web” is the title of the session[1] Sandro Zic will hold at the OSCOM 3 conference[2]. The conference will take place at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA from May 28-30. In his session, Sandro will discuss the question: How can we ensure efficient user-computer-interaction based on distributed content and knowledge management to make the Semantic Web manageable and useful?

[1] http://oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/Proposals/zic_managing_semantic_web.html
[2] http://oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/