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Topic News: 17th January 2002EP
Topic News: 17th January 2002
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CONTENTS
WEDELMUSIC
2002
Sustainable Decision Making Conference
Courses on EU project skills
21st Century Literacy Summit
Information Society for All
VoiceXML resources
Content rating / filtering projects
DocPro - DocBook transformation
Open Source XML database
XSLT/XPath conformance testing
Machine translation in Europe
IBM Websphere "portlets"
Latest books from O'Reilly
Web services standards explained
Webstyle 2.1
Building Palm applications
Breeze XML Binder 3.0
Games - UK sales rocket
Test-drive Autodesk's ADT 3.3
UN Information Society Summit
JoDI special on metadata
ASP industry report
Games-to-Teach project
European eCommerce legislation
Broadcom and Palm collaborate on Bluetooth
Trusted content alliance
WEDELMUSIC 2002, the 2nd International Conference on Web Delivery of Music will take place in Darmstadt, Germany, on 9-11 December 2002. The event is being run by the Interactive Electronic Publishing sector, IST project, WEDELMUSIC and is sponsored by: Fraunhofer Institute, University of Florence, IRCAM with the support of the IEEE CS TC on Computer Generated Music. The music industry's pioneering role in the use of Internet technology to broadcast audio and music files continues to break new boundaries. However current state of the art still distributes music either on paper or on CD or similar media. However, the possibility to distribute music in several other formats, such as symbolic, audio (in its several available formats) and as images of music scores opens several new avenues for research.
WEDELMUSIC-2002 aims to deal with these major topics in music-related fields, in order to address new ways to distribute music to larger audiences. Topics of interest include but are not restricted to the following aspects:
- Protection formats and tools for musi
- Transaction Models for delivering music
- Business Models for publishers
- Copyright ownership protection
- High Quality Audio Coding
- Watermarking techniques for various media types
- Formats and models for distribution
- Multimedia Streaming and Delivery
- MPEG-7 and MPEG-21
- Databases/archives for institutions: publishers, libraries, theatres, etc.
- Content based retrieval
- Conversion aspects, techniques and tools
- Music Sheet Digitalisation, techniques and tools
A call for papers is open until 31 March 2002. Research case studies, applications and experiments are particularly welcome. Papers of between 2-5,000 words, written in English should be submitted in PDF format via the email below.
Email: submissions mailto:WEDELMUSIC2002@igd.fraunhofer.de
URL: http://www.wedelmusic.org/wedelmusic2002
Two EU projects, Terra2000 and ASSIST are arranging a conference on "Sustainable Decision Making" in Maastricht, Netherlands, on February 18-19, 2002. Both projects have particular (and synergistic) interests in building the knowledge necessary to explain the impacts of Information Society Technologies and the Global Networked Society, and thus to inform decision making. The conference will also feature a number of workshops and will be linked to a more wide-ranging discussion on the future of the EU. A full conference programme and registration information is available online.
Hyperion and the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (EARMA) have organised the following courses in Brussels:
- "How to Negotiate, Manage, Administer and Finish an EU R&D Contract", which includes auditing of cost statements, February 26, 2002
URL: http://www.hyperion.ie/course825.htm- "How to Write a Technology Implementation Plan", February 27, 2002
URL: http://www.hyperion.ie/course826.htmThere are 25 places available on each course. The course outlines are available via the related links above. To book a place send an email to Mary McCarthy via the email below.
Email: Mary McCarthy mailto:mary.mccarthy@hyperion.ie
URL: Hyperion http://www.hyperion.ie/
URL: EARMA http://www.earma.org/
The Bertelsmann Foundation and the AOL Time Warner Foundation are hosting the "21st Century Literacy Summit" on March 7-8, 2002 in Berlin, Germany. 21st Century literacy focuses on the sensible use of information technology and the Internet in the future, not only in schools, but also in all areas of modern society. 21st Century literacy encompasses a wide range of abilities and skills that are needed to enhance education, business and public policy.
The Summit intends to promote a transatlantic dialogue of decision-makers from politics, business and academia who can help address these issues. At the Berlin conference, high-level speakers will present international examples of efforts currently taking place to meet the challenges related to this "New Literacy". Challenges will be identified and recommendations put forward on how they should be met.
Working languages of the conference will be English and German (with simultaneous translation) and participation is free of charge. Bertelsmann Foundation and AOL Time Warner Foundation will cover one overnight accommodation in Berlin. In addition, there is a "limited budget available to subsidise travel expenditures for participants from non-commercial institutions". Contact Carsten Welp at the Bertelsmann Foundation if you are interested in receiving a personal invitation (and, if you are eligible, an application sheet for travel funding). Invitations and conference program will be sent out late January 2002.
Email: Carsten Welp mailto:carsten.welp@bertelsmann.de
Tel: +49 5241 81 81361
News of a major British Council conference, TISA2 (Towards an Information Society for All) - "New Pathways to Knowledge" scheduled for Berlin, Germany on 8-9 March 2002. The conference builds on the successful conference held in 2001 in Bologna, where practitioners and policy makers from around Europe met to consider the present state of development of the emerging Information Society across Europe.
TISA2 takes as its point of departure that to achieve joint progress everyone involved in the Information Society must focus on a range of factors and activities that while implemented in different ways will be underpin all developments. Such factors include the nature and importance of national and regional Information Society policies, technical and infrastructure issues relating to the creation of physical networks and access routes that are available to all (for example ICT centres in public spaces), the high importance of electronic content and of cooperation and partnership.
The conference language will be English. Further details, including a registration form are available online.
A couple of resources related to VoiceXML:
- In "Making Better Voice Portal Applications", Todd Elvins, the co-founder of Indicast, gives his "top ten" list of VoiceXML application development design hints.
URL: http://www.cconvergence.com/article/CTM20020103S0003- Details of a new forum, the VoiceXML Italian User Group.
URL: http://www.vxmlitalia.com/
A meeting has been arranged, to present the projects funded under Action Line 2 (filtering and rating) of the European Commission's Safer Internet Action Plan will be held on 29 January 2002, in Luxembourg. The purpose of the meeting is to:
- allow those involved in rating and filtering projects (whether or not funded by the Action Plan) to meet and explore possible co-operation;
- allow those interested in content rating and filtering from a user perspective to obtain information on current and planned work in rating and filtering projects funded by the Action Plan, possibly with a view to contributing to such work;
- give added visibility to Action Plan activities in the area of content rating and filtering.
A total of 13 projects have been funded under action line 2, details for which are available online. The meeting will take place in English and participants are expected to make their own arrangements for travel and accommodation. Register, not later that 27 January, 2002 by e-mail with "register for 29 Jan meeting" in the subject line, giving the full name of the participant, organisation, and country.
Email: registration mailto:iap@cec.eu.int
URL: projects http://europa.eu.int/information_society/programmes/iap/projects/filtering/index_en.htm
URL: Safer Internet Action Plan http://europa.eu.int/iap
US company, Command Prompt, has released DocPro 0.2.0, a tool for professional technical authors whom maintain a large amount of SGML/XML based documentation. The software takes DocBook documents and transforms them into a user defined format, such as Postscript or HTML.
According to the developers, "DocPro will correctly transform multiple documents, to multiple output formats. It includes the capability to arbitrarily set font sizes, margins, callout definitions etc... via a GUI interface". Apparently the GUI provides an easy way (by point and click) to configure DocBook DSSSL and XSLT stylesheets. The software currently runs on x86 Linux only, though a release for YellowDog Linux (PPC) and MacOS X is planned. The Deluxe version comes with the DocParse tools for converting HTML to DocBook. There are one-time and subscription based licensing models available for immediate purchase. Complete details available from the product web site.
URL: Command Prompt http://www.commandprompt.com/
Version 0.7 of the eXist Open Source XML database is available for download. According to its developers this release represents a major step forward with respect to stability and performance. The list of changes is has been published online, the most important include: improved scalability and APIs, experimental support for XSL on the server.
eXist is described as "an Open Source native XML database with pluggable storage backends and support for fulltext search. XML is either stored in the internal, native XML-DB or an external RDBMS. The search engine has been designed to provide fast XPath queries, using indexes for all element, text and attribute nodes. eXist is lightweight and well suited for large document collections. The server is accessible through easy to use HTTP and XML-RPC interfaces and supports the XML:DB API for Java programming".
Interested users and developers are encouraged to join the mailing list (see link below).
URL: http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=17691
URL: http://exist-db.org/
URL: list of changes http://exist-db.org/changes.html
OASIS is requesting input concerning the creation of its XSLT/XPath Conformance Test Suite. Broadly speaking, XSLT and XPath are W3C Recommendations for the definition of the rules to transform XML data into a variety of presentation styles, such as human readable reports (HTML) or other XML vocabularies.
Developers who have created test files for XSLT processors are being encouraged to submit them to the OASIS XSLT/XPath Conformance Technical Committee. The submissions will be used in helping to define the final form of the test suite. Complete submission guidelines are available via the link below.
The Euromap Language Technologies monthly newsletter includes a feature article which considers: "The State of Machine Translation in Europe and Future Prospects". Euromap Language Technologies is a European Commission supported initiative dedicated to promoting greater awareness and faster take-up of Human Language Technologies within Europe.
URL: feature article http://www.hltcentral.org/page-917.0.shtml
URL: Euromap newsletter http://www.hltcentral.org/newsletter
Email: Euromap project mailto:euromap_coord@cst.ku.dk
Stellent, has released its portal applications ("portlets") software for use with IBM's WebSphere server. Websphere is aimed at companies wishing to build web-based applications based on the portal concept. The "portlets" provide content management functionality to applications: such as search, content publishing (from other applications), and workflow. The portlets are available via the Stellent web site.
URL: portlets http://www.stellent.com/ibmportlets
URL: WebSphere http://www.ibm.com/websphere
URL: Stellent http://www.stellent.com/
A raft of new books available from O'Reilly which are likely to be of interest to readers of El.pub, most also feature a free chapter online (as indicated):
- "Programming Visual Basic .NET" - a guide to application development with VB .NET, covers how VB .NET applications work. Chapter 8, "ADO.NET: Developing Database Applications", is available online.
URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/progvbdotnet/
URL: Chapter 8 http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/progvbdotnet/chapter/ch08.html- "Programming Web Services with SOAP" - a guide to using SOAP and other leading Web services standards, (eg. WSDL and UDDI) which introduces the concepts of the web services architecture and to the XML underlying the standards. It explains how to write web services with Apache SOAP, Java and Perl's SOAP Lite. Chapter 3, "Writing SOAP Web Services", is available online.
URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/progwebsoap/
URL: Chapter 3 http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/progwebsoap/chapter/ch03.html- "The Web Design CD Bookshelf" can be read by any web browser, contains more than 3000 pages of O'Reilly reference guides and tutorials and is fully searchable and cross-referenced with an index for each book and a master index for the entire collection.
URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webcdbk/
XML.com have published an article by Paul Kulchenko, co-author of O'Reilly's "Programming Web Services with SOAP" (see item above), entitled: "Web Services Acronyms, Demystified". The article attempts to remove the confusion concerning the web service standards and architectures being proposed.
Webstyle 2.1 is the latest of Xara's template-based web graphic creation software. The upgrade, includes a FrontPage add-in and a Dreamweaver extension which add "Webstyle graphics" to the Insert menu of FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Clicking Insert starts Webstyle, where you can create and edit your graphic and a Save inserts back into a web page, "avoiding the need to fiddle with graphic files, HTML and javascript".
URL: Webstyle 2 http://www.xara.com/products/webstyle/
URL: trial version download http://www.xara.com/downloads/webstyle/
URL: Xara http://www.xara.com/
The IBM developerWorks Newsletter from January 10, 2002, IBM's resource for developers includes the third in a series of tutorials on "Building Palm OS applications". Parts1 and 2 of the tutorial are also available, along with a number of others. Registration is required.
URL: tutorial http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/education/r-wiplm4.html?n-wi-1102
URL: developerWorks newsletter http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/?n-1102
The Breeze Factor has released Breeze XML Binder 3.0 for Java, their "latest XML/Java data-binding solution". This release includes support for DTD and XSD binding to Java, XML Namespaces support, DOM support, and a number of other features. An evaluation version is available for download.
Figures released by The European Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) show that UK sales of video games and other leisure software products and games consoles reached an all time high in year 2001 with sales values reaching just over £1.6 billion, a 36% increase on the previous year. 51.2 million units of games hardware and software were sold during the twelve months, 21% up on the previous year.
The biggest growth area last year was in sales of console hardware and software boosted by the launches of the new PS2 and Gameboy Advance consoles. The total value of console hardware sales increased by 121% on the previous year, reaching an all time high of £567 million on the back of 4 million consoles sold during the year. The boom in consoles inevitably fed through to software sales with a record 30.5 million units of console software sold (up 26% on last year) worth £711 million. The market for home computer software also fared better than the previous year with the volume of units sold up by 10% to 16.7 million whilst the value of sales remained static at £346 million.
According to ELSPA, the UK leisure software market is the third largest country market in the world, after USA and Japan. In the UK, consumers now spend more on leisure software than on renting videos or cinema visits. In terms of exports, ELSPA also reported that the value of UK exports of leisure software products exceeded those for both British film and TV.
Autodesk has launched Autodesk Architectural Desktop 3.3 (ADT 3.3) Test Drive, a free two hour self-paced tutorial designed to show current users of Autodesk software how to use the advanced features of ADT 3.3. The Test Drive includes a 15-day trial CD of a full version of ADT 3.3. According to the company, ADT 3.3 "incorporates object technology which efficiently creates an architectural model in 2D or 3D with intelligent objects such as curtain walls, window assemblies, structural members and clash detection to quickly create a building model".
The Test Drive is aimed at existing users of AutoCAD-based products (such as AutoCAD LT, Autodesk Land Desktop, AutoCAD and associated products) who are reviewing their solutions as well as those who are considering upgrading an earlier version of ADT. The Test Drive is available direct from Autodesk or via the Autodesk Authorised Dealer network.
URL: test drive http://www.autodesk.co.uk/TESTDRIVEADT
URL: Autodesk http://www.autodesk.co.uk/
The United Nations is promoting the organisation of the World Summit on the Information Society, which is expected to promote access by all countries to information, knowledge and communications technologies for development. The summit, to be held in two phases, the first in Geneva in 2003 and the second in Tunisia in 2005 is being organised by The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in cooperation with other interested organisations and partners. The proposed themes of the Summit address the central issues raised by the Information Society and include:
- Building the infrastructure
- Opening the gates: universal and equitable access to the information society
- Services and applications
- The needs of the user
- Developing a framework
- ICT and education
Under each of these broad themes, consideration will be given to the relevant developmental, economic, policy, social, cultural and technological aspects.A series of preparatory meetings will be held in 2002, beginning with the first PrepCom from 1-5 July 2002 in Geneva. Additional information about the World Summit on the Information Society can be found on the ITU web site, along with the full text of the Resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly.
URL: World Summit http://wsis.itu.int/
URL: Resolution http://www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2002/UNGA_res-e.html
The Journal of Digital Information (JoDI) have published a special issue on metadata which includes selected papers from the Dublin Core 2001 Conference (DC-2001, the Int. Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications) held in Tokyo, Japan. The eight papers selected from a possible 50 presented at the conference have been re-written and focus on metadata models, querying of metadata, an architecture for a specific application area, and a first empirical study of experiences with metadata creation. Links to specific papers are given below:
- "RDF Declarative Description (RDD): A Language for Metadata"
- "zetoc: a Dublin Core Based Current Awareness Service"
- "What Terms Does Your Metadata Use? Application Profiles as Machine-Understandable Narratives"
- "MetaXPath"
- "Author-generated Dublin Core Metadata for Web Resources: A Baseline Study in an Organization"
- "A Metadata Kernel for Electronic Permanence"
- "The ABC Ontology and Model"
- "Multilingual Access to Dublin Core Metadata of ULIS Library"
The Journal of Digital Information is an electronic journal published only via the Web and is currently free to users thanks to support from the British Computer Society and Oxford University Press. The editors have announced a new call for papers, on Interactivity in Digital Libraries. This issue has already attracted quite a few offers of papers, especially from projects involved in the NSF-sponsored National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) programme. More papers are welcome.
The INT Media Research report, "2002 ASP Industry Insight: The Rise of the Provider Web" is described by its authors as "an in-depth report providing insight into what direction successful ASPs will take in 2002". It analyses the behaviour and trends of the ASP industry over the past few years, finding that ASPs have experienced a rapid rise and a sudden shakeout, and are now regrouping amid fear and hesitation from the investor community and industry watchers.
The report reveals that "ASPs, now more than ever, must minimise their margin for error in their strategic decision making in order to survive". The report, available in pdf format, is priced at US $ 395 from AllNetResearch.com.
URL: http://allnetresearch.com/item/0,3008,2330135_1,00.html
URL: INT Media Research http://www.intmediaresearch.com/
As part of Microsoft i-Campus, a five-year research alliance between MIT and Microsoft, the Games-to-Teach Project intends to explore best practices in game design and production, current educational theory, and emerging technological platforms and to apply such understandings to new models of computer and video games that present and explore educational content.
"Until now we've seen so-called 'edutainment' that has all of the entertainment value of a bad lecture and the educational value of a bad game," said Henry Jenkins, director of Comparative Media Studies and principal investigator on the project. "Our goal is to reverse that polarity by combining MIT-quality science and engineering subjects with state-of-the-art game design."
Jenkins and his colleagues believe computer and video games are emerging as a powerful new teaching medium that enables robust interactivity, providing for new pedagogical models and stronger collaborations across disciplines. Jenkins hopes the conceptual prototypes developed within the project will provide the games industry and government agencies with the blueprints for exploring full-scale development, production, and release of "games to teach" in coming years. There are a number of introductory papers including the project's "vision" available online.
URL: project home http://cms.mit.edu/games/education/index.html
URL: project vision http://cms.mit.edu/games/education/research-vision.html
eLexPortal.com provides current information about variations in legislative and regulatory eCommerce matters across the EU by:
- presenting eCommerce information relating to legislation and policy in a user-friendly manner;
- explaining eCommerce policy in the EU;
- providing user-tailored answers about eCommerce legislation and regulatory policy throughout the European Union.
Access to this Portal is currently free-of-charge. Register at the site for access to various on-line services, including: receiving e-mail alerts; submitting contributions for publication on the Portal; accessing the Interactive Forum; and requesting support from the HelpDesk.
Broadcom Corporation, a provider of integrated circuits enabling broadband communications, and Palm are working together to develop "an advanced Bluetooth architecture for use in a next-generation Palm handheld computer". Palm will use this architecture, which is based on Broadcom's Blutonium line of transceivers, as a building block for creating "innovative Personal Area Networks".
URL: Palm http://www.palm.com/
URL: Broadcom http://www.broadcom.com/
Software AG, Inc. (the US subsidiary of Software AG) has formed "the Trusted Content Alliance" along with Lexign and AuthentiDate to develop secure, digital content management, based on each of the companies' expertise in the content management arena. Software AG will provide the content management solution based on its Tamino XML server; the Lexign Suite is a software platform for managing trusted transactions in the LAN, Web, or wireless environment; AuthentiDate adds "legally binding data non-refutability".
URL: Trusted Content Alliance http://www.trustedcontentalliance.org/
URL: Lexign http://www.lexign.com/
URL: Software AG Inc. http://www.softwareagusa.com/
URL: AuthentiDate http://www.authentidate.com/
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