OSCOM

Authena: RDF Rights Descriptions and Syndicated Distribution "Whereas RSS is generally used for syndicating newsfeeds, Authena uses RSS to syndicate rights information and links to digital media in different formats, including thumbnailed, watermarked, and high-quality originals in secure directories, so as to facilitate the indexing, harvesting, and selling of content on the semantic web in accordance with rights defined by the creator." Also at OSCOM will be SIMILIE (mentioned previously), An Ontology for Content Management Systems and many others.

HTML to RDF/RSS

JMdRdf "This software is the tool which creates RDF/RSS. RDF/RSS creation library is also contained. You can generate rss for your homepage rss, only configuring XML .Information is automatically extracted from a title, description, etc. in HTML, and RDF/RSS is created." JMdRdf's sourceforge project.

iTunes Extravaganza

Apple Launches the iTunes Music Store "iTunes(R) Music Store, a revolutionary online music store that lets customers quickly find, purchase and download the music they want for just 99 cents per song, without subscription fees. The iTunes Music Store offers groundbreaking personal use rights, including burning songs onto an unlimited number of CDs for personal use, listening to songs on an unlimited number of iPods, playing songs on up to three Macintosh(R) computers, and using songs in any application on the Mac(R), including iPhoto(TM), iMovie(TM) and iDVD(TM)."

It's only available in the US. Weird. It's still fairly fun to use. There's no caching on the movies you download, I can see this being a real bandwidth buster.

Apple Introduces New iPods "iPods, which hold up to 7,500 songs in a stunning enclosure that is lighter and thinner than two CDs. The new ultra-portable iPods feature completely solid-state "no moving parts" navigation wheel and buttons; an elegant new dock with audio out for fast and easy connection to your computer or stereo; an "On-The-Go" playlist so users can build a playlist right on their iPod(TM); a customizable main menu so users can promote the features they use most often to their top level menu; and Apple's unique, patent pending Auto-Sync for automatically syncing your computer's music library with iPod. The new ultra-portable iPods are available in three models: a 10GB model for just $299 (US), a 15GB model for $399 (US) and a 30GB model for $499 (US)."

Now does everyone re-encode their CDs to AAC? Which I was looking at anyway.

Fortune has an article about it "Each song is encrypted with a digital key so that it can be played only on three authorized computers, and that prevents songs from being transferred online. Even if you burn the AAC songs onto a CD that a conventional CD player can read and then re-rip them back into standard MP3 files, the sound quality is awful."

"In fact, Warner's Roger Ames is trying to broker a deal in which AOL would adopt iTunes as its music-manage-ment software. "Steve was resistant at first," Ames says. "But now I understand that he's decided to go that way.""

JBoss Remoting

JBoss Remoting "The JBoss Remoting (JBR) framework is a core JBoss component that provides a light-weight building block API for constructing network aware services."

"The JBR framework provides no particular remoting service alone; however, it does provide a set of interfaces and classes for easily building network aware services. For example, the JMX component uses JBR to provide JMX Remoting services, making MBeans accessible and transportable within a JBoss networked environment."

Metawebsites

Building a Metadata-Based Website "The online world has been flooded in recent years with talk of metadata, structured authoring, cascading style sheets (CSS). These ideas have at their core the idea of standardizing document creation by separating content from display. Additionally, the idea of a semantic web, consisting of ontologies and controlled vocabularies is gaining momentum. These ideas are about representing knowledge so that machine agents can understand them. At the confluence of these two broad categories of activity, new models of websites are emerging that can be as easily navigable by humans as maintained by rigorous processes."

The four steps of the process are:
1. Centralize the core concepts in a taxonomy.
2. Develop core relationship types between the core concepts.
3. Associate content to the concepts.
4. Make the website use the Ontology's concepts and relationships for navigation.

This is fairly impressive stuff. They even present Delphi as a collaborative way to create a taxonomy.

Emerging RDF

Emerging Technologies Presentations: Gonzo Collaborative Mapping on the Semantic Web and Peer-to-Peer Semantic Search Engines: Building a Memex.

spacenamespace "this is a kind of collaborative mapping project. it consists of geographical models which are represented as RDF graphs. you can wander round them, like a MUD or MOO, with a bot interface which you can use to create and connect new places...it is a semantic web project; it provides a scheme for semantic web identification of places via unique uris. the interaction with people aspect uses FOAF, in the hope that friend-of-a-friend networks can benefit from collaborative filtering as well as collaborative mapping." Includes an example of an annotated, RDF based "walk-through" of London Mudlondon. It uses Perl and mySQL. Interestingly the UK government own the copyright to the shape and controls maps of the UK.

Contextual Network Graphs is a graph-based alternative to LSI available in Perl via CVS. See also PMI-IR, uses Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) and Information Retrieval (IR).

What Linus Really Think About DRM

Re: Flame Linus to a crisp! "But such a "make the machines be something the _users_ can trust" is 100% indistinguishable from a technical standpoint from something where you "make the machine something that Disney Corp can trust". There is _zero_ technical difference. It's only a matter of intent - and even the intent will be a matter of interpretation.

This is why I refuse to disallow even the "bad" kinds of uses - because not allowing them would automatically also mean that "good" uses aren't allowed."

Re: Flame Linus to a crisp! "PC's are _designed_ ot be flexible - that's what makes the PC's. DRM on a PC is a totally braindead idea, and I _hope_ Microsoft goes down that path because it will kill them in the end."

Macromedia Using RDF?

ETech Report: Finishing on pure adrenalin. "Macromedia's Central ("a brand new way to develop, sell, and deploy applications using Macromedia Flash MX. More precisely, it is a different and exciting response to the need for “occasionally-connected” desktop and mobile applications")...[h]as the notion/ability to send information (even broadcast it) between applications using XML or RDF that where even if separately developed." Screenshot here.

Exercising EXIF

JpegRDF "reads and manipulates RDF metadata stored in the comment section of JPEG images. It can extract, query, and augment the data. Manipulating JPEG images with jpegrdf does not modify the actual image data or any other sections of the file." It basically converts the EXIF format (f-stop, camera, flash used, etc.) to RDF. Uses Jena. I'd like to see an ontology based on cameras and the EXIF (or metdata) that they produce.

Semantically Blogging

Announcement about the semantic blog. "Right at the moment, neither blog is terribly 'semantic' (although you can view the metadata behind each entry) but I wanted to get the baseline public asap."

FOAF for all

Battle of the blog builders "SixApart, the company behind the Movable Type weblogging system, is to lanch a new "hosted" service called TypePad later this year."

"The standout feature is the template maker...and automatic creation of Friend of a Friend data - instantly taking an experimental standard and
taking it to the mainstream."

An example of FOAF use:
http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/home-smart

An idea of FOAF and event discovery:
http://esw.w3.org/topic/EventDiscovery

Things that go Bump in the Night

Make Your Own Rules "Using the patent system as a private regulatory vehicle circumvents the checks and balances to which government-made law is subjected. Constitutional guarantees of individual rights can be invoked only against the government, not against a plaintiff suing for patent infringement. Thomas gives the example of patents that have been granted that regulate the content of speech, including ones for making sales pitches or delivering advertising over networks. Government control of expression is strictly circumscribed. " Yet all indications from the courts are that privately held patents offer their owners the ability to suppress or punish speech without reference to these limitations," Thomas wrote last year in the Houston Law Review."

Interview: Cory Doctorow "But some time in the last five or ten years, all of the action has migrated to intellectual property, primarily copyright. Copyright has become this stupendous weapon for abridging privacy and for abridging freedom -- and those freedoms include things like the freedom to speak."

Removal of Free Press

The press and freedom: some disturbing trends "Once the news conference got underway, the President did not recognize reporters who raised their hands. Instead, he called their names from a list prepared by news secretary Ari Fleischer, the man who told reporters after Sept. 11 that they should watch what they say. When CNN’s John King attempted to ask a question, the President told him to wait because, the President said, ‘‘This is scripted.’’ Then he called the next name on his list: John King." The list of questions to ask W is pretty cool.

Removal of a Legend

Edgar Codd, database theorist, dies at 79 Still waiting...I'm glad more press is covering his death.

RDF and Ontologies

The Web's Next Leap "But for corporations, the immediate value of the Semantic Web may not rest in using it for new services, but rather as a means of integrating data in heterogeneous environments. And the concepts and standards are sufficiently developed to allow that now...Indeed, developing the Semantic Web will take years, says Jas Dhillon, president and CEO of Celcorp Inc., a start-up company in Santa Monica, Calif., that has used RDF and ontologies to integrate applications." Celcorp's product page "Software that thinks - so you don't have to".

Ask Jeeves and Google Agree

Ask Jeeves: What is the best search engine?

The answer is, of course, Google. It must be true because Google says so too.

Features to Remove Functionality

Slashdot claims there's nothing new in Windows 2003. Well that's just plain wrong. MS has 10 reasons to upgrade my favourite is number 7:
"Windows SharePoint Services is a platform for creating large numbers of smart Web communities focused on information sharing and team productivity. It can scale to thousands of sites within an organization. It fully supports load-balanced Web farm and clustered database deployments. Site and server managers can enforce storage quotas using a sites per-server and users per-site criterion. Site usage can be monitored to detect and retire inactive sites. Security is granular, yet easily managed. Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) is a security feature of Windows that works with applications to help safeguard confidential and sensitive enterprise information—no matter where it goes."

Now what were the web people thinking about leaving out DRM in HTML:
"Authors can restrict permission to Web-based information as they create it, and then save the content as a rights-managed HTML file (with the file name extension .rmh). If the readers have installed the Rights Management Add-on, they can open the file and use the contents, based on the permission that the author has given them."

A discussion on the DRM technology is available at Technet. Macs will be left out, everyone has to upgrade to the 2003 version of Office, etc. The best quote: "the organization owns the content, not the user"

It's Cold Outside...

An RDF crawler "I wrote an RDF crawler (aka scutter) using Java and the Jena RDF toolkit that spiders the web gathering up semantic web data and storing it in any of Jena's backend stores (in-memory, Berkeley DB, mysql, etc). Download it here....Plans for the future include tying FOAF-related processing into the aggregation such as smushing and mbox_sha1sum normalising, and making a publish/subscribe-based system so that people who can't run their own aggregators can subscribe to the RDF that's gathered."

Extra points for the Red Dwarf reference:
"We call RDFWeb/FOAF indexers 'scutters' in tribute to the robots from the UK TV series Red Dwarf. They are also called this because, metaphorically, they *scutter* around the Web looking for stuff."

Expressing using OWL

Using OWL to Avoid Syntactic Rigor Mortis "Below is outlined a strategy for realizing the full flexibility of XML through the use of OWL ontologies." A short, simple tutorial on using OWL to produce different "physical expressions" of the same thing.

Business Processes and App Servers

Could application servers be overkill? "I asked O'Toole if he expected Cape Clear's customers to proceed blindly with developing Web services that are devoid of any notion of orchestration or transactional state. O'Toole claimed that complicated protocols like the Business Process Execution Language for Web services (BPEL4WS) or the Web services Choreography Interface (WSCI) are extra baggage and that any functionality that those specifications are designed to handle is easily covered by something found in virtually every system: JavaScript (also known as ECMAScript)."

The most recent column is a little more troubling as far as the W3C is concerned:
"...when the idea of IBM and Microsoft working together was ludicrous, the W3C was offered some measure of protection that if either company attempted a power play, the other would provide the necessary countermeasures to thwart it. But now, with the two working together, the W3C is about to get steamrolled (at least when it comes to Web services). Unless, of course, it decides to defend itself."

EWeek Review Intelligdimension

Intellidimension App Shows Power of RDF "A Windows-based query tool allowed us to access the database and create and test server-side scripts. Server-side scripts are written in RDF Query Language, which, being based on ECMAScript, was easy to use.

The sample applications that Intellidimension provides on its site were a great help in developing for RDF Gateway."

The use of scripting is nice but I'd really like to be able to generate RDF from Java and vice-versa. Combining with using something like Discovery you could get, at runtime, existing services working with new RDF or new services working on existing RDF. They were most impressed by the portal. They also mentioned that it would be good to have standard interface to RDF datasources so that other application servers and web servers could use it. I'd especially like a J2EE connector for example.

Grubby Looksmart

Grub "LookSmart is confident that the number of Grub volunteers will continue to grow, and is hopeful that in time -- perhaps several months -- the system's "distributed crawl" will be capable of indexing all of the Web's estimated 10 billion pages -- every day.

"It will be the first comprehensive index (of the Net)," said Kord Campbell, the programmer behind the Grub software. "We can conceivably crawl every Web page, every day."

By contrast, today's fastest search engines, such as Google or Inktomi, crawl about 150 million pages a day. Google indexes about a third of the Web, and refreshes its index every 30 days, according to LookSmart.

Campbell quietly worked on the software for more than three years in Oklahoma before LookSmart acquired his company and three-person staff in January. Grub was -- and continues to be -- largely an open-source project. "

"If the Grub project attracts enough volunteers, it may be capable of performing the holy grail of Web searches: a real-time "semantic parse" of the Web. Stechert said."

Will Looksmart beat everyone in implementing and deploying the Semantic Web?

URLs and Trademarks

Sixth Circuit finds no trademark violation in post-domain paths "...the Sixth Circuit has ruled that the use of a registered trademark in the post-domain path of a URL does not violate trademark law because it is unlikely to create customer confusion regarding the origins of the goods offered at the website.

The post-domain path of a URL is everything after the domain name, e.g. anything after "nytimes.com" or "lawmeme.org.""

Another Reason for the SW

Recent changes in reporting rules and regulations are going to kill us! "New technologies may change that, however. A reporter from The Economist recently asked Tim Berners-Lee if he could give an example of how companies could make or save money using concepts embodied in the Semantic Web initiative. Berners-Lee at the time did not have a ready answer. But in my mind, the reporting and analysis of financial statements is one area that will benefit greatly from semantics-based technologies." ClearForest is the obvious example of a company doing this.

Blogging with Semantics

The Semantic Blog "As we consume more of our information by way of RSS feeds, the inability to store, index, and precisely search those feeds becomes more painful. I'd like to be able to work with my RSS data locally, even while offline, in much more powerful ways. One emerging option is the XML layer being added to Sleepycat's Berkeley DB, the database that's embedded in the Mozilla mail/news client, in Movable Type, and in a slew of other programs."

ROI of the SW

What is the Business Value of the Semantic Web? "The greatest ROI won’t come from the removal of software applications that you currently employ, but rather the new services that these software applications will be able to provide." I found this all rather unconvincing.

Another Attempt at a Java Office Suite

IBM Plans Sneak Attack On Microsoft Office "IBM Software and its Lotus Software Group have built J2EE-based spreadsheet, document and presentation graphics "applications" that will be bundled for free with the company's WebSphere portal, sources said."

"CIOs, for whom buying portals has become a top priority, will be able to get for free what IBM says will be 80 percent of the Office functionality most people use, said one channel source familiar with the plan. "IBM can now say, 'Look, you can pay for half the portal with what you'll save in Office,' " the source said."

XP Sucks

Refactoring XP Interview "Source code is too complex to be a clear statement of intent. We need something simpler than code and unit tests to define our design – a Word document, or a class model, for example."

"I’ve worked on, trained people and provided tools to people on ballistic missile defense projects, the Space Station, the Hubble telescope, avionics systems, helicopter projects, military flight planning systems, command and control systems, etc. I was talking to a client of mine from a very large jet fighter project yesterday and I suggested they let the architecture of the fly-by-wire system evolve incrementally. We got a good laugh out of it. I think if people on these kinds of projects can manage to develop architectures and then design within the architecture, people doing business or e-commerce systems can, too."

"I’ve also worked with some incredibly talented programmers who would have been awful to pair with...I’d resist any process that wouldn’t allow me, as a manager, to make use of his skills. So I would never mandate pair programming. And of course, my big issue with XP’s approach is that pair programming is used as an excuse for not doing upfront design. That’s completely bogus, in my opinion."

Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP.

At Least the Oil is Safe

Americans defend two untouchable ministries from the hordes of looters "US troops have sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Irrigation, the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Information. They did nothing to prevent looters from destroying priceless treasures of Iraq's history in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum and in the museum in the northern city of Mosul, or from looting three hospitals.

The Americans have, though, put hundreds of troops inside two Iraqi ministries that remain untouched – and untouchable – because tanks and armoured personnel carriers and Humvees have been placed inside and outside both institutions. And which ministries proved to be so important for the Americans? Why, the Ministry of Interior, of course – with its vast wealth of intelligence information on Iraq – and the Ministry of Oil."

I think this should make everyone angry. How is history going to judge whether it was worth the oil for relics from ancient civilisations or for any of this? Another article Iraq Liberated Of Culture, History.

'Data Comes Alive' "This was the theme of Esther Dyson's recent industry conference, and aptly summarizes a panoply of emerging new technologies that hold the promise of dramatically increasing what software can do. Among them: web services, which allow applications to seamlessly communicate with each other; the so-called "semantic web," a richer version of the web we use today that allows software to communicate more efficiently without human intervention; and a variety of new enterprise applications that will bring the benefits of automation to many intractably uncomputerized business processes."

k42 is a Java based store for Topic Maps with some interesting storage abilities (it has its own generic store). They have quite a number of interesting product demos. It was announced last March. According to their latest newsletter they have customers such as Bosch.

WebDAV and RDF "Original charter of WEBDAV was to facilitate WEB publishing (vs. WEB browsing). We believe that WebDAV (in combination with RDF) has much greater the potential: to form the protocol of the Semantic Web ."

From Site Search to the Semantic Web "We’ll further explore how Siderean’s faceted metadata resource discovery capabilities will bolster the viability of commerce that involves non-textual digital assets, including software components in the realm of Web Services. Next, we’ll examine how Siderean’s underlying technology, based as it is on RDF semantic encoding, makes Siderean Software's infrastructure a firm foundation for tackling problem number four, inference (or reasoning from data) in the decentralized world of the Web. Happily, cracking problem 4 upon an infrastructure of 1 through 3 is exactly what’s required to capitalize on the full potential of the Semantic Web." They are using Java 1.4.1 and any JDBC compliant database. They have some online demos.

Booch positive on the Semantic Web "Also on the horizon for developers is the semantic Web, said Booch.

"What the semantic Web brings to bear is the notion of bringing more self-knowledge to things on the Web," creating opportunities for new applications that tie together semantically rich and knowledgeable data, he said.

But Booch cautioned, "I must remind you again that software development remains a very, very hard thing. There's no silver bullet here.""

Jena 2 Preview 2 Released the changes since preview 1 include:

* RDQL: support for datatyped literals and standard namespace prefixes
* N3: support for datatyped literals
* I/O: bugfixes and reflecting latest WG decisions
* Reification: new WG-compatible API, I/O round-tripping
* Ontology API: preliminary release of generic API for OWL and DAML+OIL; with improved ontology document management. Inferencing limited to class/property hierarchy closure.

The preview can be downloaded from: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/jena/Jena-2p2.zip?download. The Jena Roadmap was also recently made available.

Calories still count in weight-loss game, studies find "In the most comprehensive review of published science on the subject to date, researchers reviewed data from more than 100 diet studies, which included a total of 3,268 people. They found that weight loss among people on low-carbohydrate diets results primarily from restricting calories, not from some magic nutritional combination." The American Medical Association did the study.

W3C Work On Semantic Web Draws Criticism""If I can make sure that all of my trading partners and all of my systems in my divisions are speaking the same language, that that will solve 90 percent of my problems," Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for ZapThink LLC, said. "People are not at the point where they need to talk to arbitrary systems that they don't know the semantics for."... But W3C spokeswoman Janet Daly said RDF technologies are in use today by AOL Time Warner Inc., Hearst Corp. and LexisNexis. The W3C work is enabling companies to build applications with more sophisticated search capabilities. The group's Web services and Semantic Web technologies are complementary, Daly said. "They actually work hand-in-hand.""

W3C advances Semantic Web drafts ""We're trying to make the Semantic Web as easy as it is now to join relational database tables," said Eric Miller, activity lead for the W3C's Semantic Web Activity and a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The Semantic Web technologies are designed to enable data from different places to be seamlessly integrated..."We haven't done a good enough job as we would like explaining what we're trying to do with the Semantic Web," said Miller of the technology's current reputation. "It's not rocket science, but a set of simple enabling technologies for data integration on the Web."" Seems to have caught onto what Shelley said.

"SWAP combines two highly successful technologies, viz. Semantic Web and Peer-to-peer computing. SWAP will develop the technology that is necessary to allow users their individual views on knowledge AND let them share knowledge effectively. In order to allow for individual views, every user’s PC is treated as a peer and every user may ask queries to the network of peers."

If you look carefully you can see Iraq's chemical and biological weapons. Sorry, wrong planet. NASA has released new pictures of Mars.

Some comments on Microsoft's use of RSS, in that, the RSS 1.0 spec is just not friendly. IBM is using RSS 1.0 (RDF) and Microsoft is using RSS 2.0. The Microsoft employee that originally broke the news has some words on the RDF tax.

Duh Blog on PC Forum 2003 points to TBL's PC-Forum presentation with some points on Sun's use of RDF. Some interesting quotes: "Tim trashes meta-data" and the real answer to how the Semantic Web can save or make money was something more like "what was the business model for the web 10 years ago". Which is less disappointing. Oh and there are other words with "rdf" in them. This is also a good example of someone using SnipSnap.

Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed... in 42 days ""Contrary to earlier utopian theories of the Internet, it takes very little effort for governments to cause certain information simply to vanish for a huge number of people."

Rub out the word 'government', and replace it with 'weblog A-list'. In this case a commons resource, this very potent and quite viral phrase, was created by millions of people. But it was poisoned by a very select number of 'bloggers'. Possibly a dozen, but no more than 30, we'd guess.

Who is poisoning the well?

The phrase "greenwash" will be familiar to many of you: it's where a spot of judicious marketing paint is applied to something decidedly rotten, transforming it into something that looks as if it's wholesome and radical new, but which is essentially unchanged.

This is the first Googlewash we've encountered. 42 days, too."

"There is an emerging second superpower, but it is not a nation. Instead, it is a new form of international player, constituted by the "will of the people" in a global social movement...Thus the new superpower demonstrates a new form of "emergent democracy" that differs from the participative democracy of the US government. Where political participation in the United States is exercised mainly through rare exercises of voting, participation in the second superpower movement occurs continuously through participation in a variety of web-enabled initiatives. And where deliberation in the first superpower is done primarily by a few elected or appointed officials, deliberation in the second superpower is done by each individual—making sense of events, communicating with others, and deciding whether and how to join in community actions. Finally, where participation in democracy in the first superpower feels remote to most citizens, the emergent democracy of the second superpower is alive with touching and being touched by each other, as the community works to create wisdom and to take action." This is probably more about the idea of "emergent democracy".

Second Superpower

" Reducing software piracy by just 10 percentage points worldwide would generate 1.5 million jobs and add US$400 billion to the world economy, according to a study released Wednesday by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and IDC...Based on estimates from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a full 10-point drop could provide money for...Primary education for about 4 million children." Why won't someone think of the children!? These are fairly ridiculous claims and one-sided. "The study doesn't look at any potential negative impact to consumers, such as paying higher prices for non-pirated software. Gantz admitted that some economic benefit to no-cost software exists, and consumers could be affected by law enforcement actions.

The hidden cost of pirated software is fewer legal software choices for customers, Gantz added, and the benefits of a legitimate software market had more impact on the economy than any benefits from consumers using pirated software."

Study: Reduced piracy to create millions of jobs

I did my own quick survey to see how many applications and tools are using Jena: MIES, JemBlog, Ontolog, DSpace, Joseki, Euler proof mechanism (for just RDF/XML to N3 triple generation), RDF Grapher, EOR, IsaViz, RDFAuthor, DAMLJessKB, IdeaGraph, Ontology Middleware Module, Semantic Web Engine, RDF Topic Maps, TRIPLE, FenFire, DAML+OIL Plugin for Protege-2000, MDF, Sesame, and DELI (used for CC/PP in Cocoon).

SVG-OWL Viewer Version 3.0 This converts OWL (if you can find some) to SVG (if you can find a viewer). I got it going, it's a little buggy and under OS X put the SVG in the root directory but apart from that it's good. There's also a last call on 5 OWL drafts.

Mapping relationships - the next step in knowledge management? "I feel that this is a sign the next wave is coming and its foundation is in the move from unstructured to structured information. Blogs are one of the key platforms for moving from unstructured to structured information. They are providing a rich ecosystem to experiment with various structured data and metadata technologies. How long will it be before blogs become part of all the major platforms?"

Meta Information Exchange System "The WYMIWYG meta information exchange system (mies) allows you to add and retrieve comments, notes, explanations, ratings and similar information (i.e. annotations) about webpages. Mies shares the annotations in a decentralized and trust based network with peers.

Soon it will also be possible to share bookmarks in the same decentralized manner. This means that the list of your categorized bookmarks will be permanently updated with new bookmarks that are very likely to be of interest for you. This will be like having a highly personalized edition of yahoo or dmoz.

This is a first step towards a more decentralized and open way knowledge is acquired and produced."

It uses Prevayler and Jena to provide a zero configuration RDF store.

Some useful links dealing with RMI: Accelerate your RMI programming, Flatten your objects, and Java RMI: Serialization.