EP Topic News: 5th September 2002

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IEP Concertation Meeting

The second concertation meeting of the Interactive Electronic Publishing (IEP) sector will be held in Luxembourg on October 23-24, 2002. The closed concertation meeting for members of IEP projects will take place on the afternoon of October 23. The meeting, open to all members of current IEP projects, will feature presentations from new IEP projects, present administrative issues concerning projects and start discussions concerning the 6th Framework programme (FP6) and the DG INFSO reorganisation.

In parallel to this closed concertation meeting, an information day on FP6 matters will also be running on October 23-24, 2002 in Luxembourg (see item below), to which IEP project members are also welcome to attend.

A full agenda for the concertation meeting has been circulated to project coordinators and is also available from Pascal Jacques, Head of Sector Interactive Electronic Publishing. IEP Projects wishing to make a presentation at the closed concertation meeting should contact Pascal via the contact points below.

Contact: Pascal Jacques, European Commission DG INFSO/D1, Head of Sector Interactive Electronic Publishing, EUFO1195, 10, rue Robert Stumper, L-2557 Luxembourg
Tel : +352 4301 38034
Fax : +352 4301 38069
E-mail: pascal.jacques@cec.eu.int

IST within FP6 Information Day

The European Commission's Information Society Directorate General has announced an "Information Day on the early stages of implementation of the IST programme within FP6" in Luxembourg, 23-24 October 2002.

Discussions regarding the IST successor programme 2002-2006 are approaching completion. The first call for proposals is expected to be launched towards the end of the year. Following the successful FP6 workshop held on 15-16 May 2002, an Information Day is planned for 23-24 October next. The purpose of the Information Day is to provide participants with first-hand information on the likely scope and content of the calls for proposals that will be launched in the first year of operation of the new programme.

The Information Day will consist of two sessions, addressing RTD topics relating to Interface Technologies and Cognitive Systems on day 1, and Knowledge Technologies and Cross-media Digital Content on day 2.

Please note that the above sessions will be open to all interested parties on a 'first-come first-served' basis. This preliminary announcement is being sent to registered participants in the mid-May workshop, to organisations that submitted an expression of interest in response to the call launched in March last, and to coordinators of ongoing IST projects in the above areas.

Please book the above dates in your diary pending the final agenda and invitation, which will be circulated / published on a suitable web site in the second week of September. Early declaration of your intention to participate in this event can be sent to Joseph Kirsch (via the email below) specifying name, affiliation, email address and the Day / RTD topics you are most interested in. The preliminary agenda is as follows:

Interface Technologies and Cognitive Systems - 23 October, 2002

• Welcome and introduction
• IST within FP6, overview and state of play
• New instruments, administrative provisions governing cost-shared projects, call roadmap
• Q&A

• Interface Technologies
- Intended scope and focus in 2003
- Partnerships and intended use of new instruments
- Hints and tips for prospective proposers
- Q&A

• Cognitive Systems
- Intended scope and focus in 2003
- Partnerships and intended use of new instruments
- Hints and tips for prospective proposers
- Q&A

• Informal discussions

Knowledge Technologies and Cross-media Digital Content - 24 October, 2002

• Welcome and introduction
• IST within FP6, overview and state of play
• New instruments, administrative provisions governing cost-shared projects, call roadmap
• Q&A

• Cross-media Digital Content
- Intended scope and focus in 2003
- Partnerships and intended use of new instruments
- Hints and tips for prospective proposers
- Q&A

• Knowledge Technologies
- Intended scope and focus in 2003
- Partnerships and intended use of new instruments
- Hints and tips for prospective proposers
- Q&A

• Informal discussions

Email: Joseph Kirsch mailto:Joseph.Kirsch@cec.eu.int

Animation tool

Stagecast is a visual programming language for creating rule based animations. It must be one of the coolest programmes I have come across and very easy to use. The product is clearly aimed at children and teachers (you can generate all sorts of educational simulations easily). An evaluation download version is available and (essential!) tutorial. Available on Windows and Mac.

URL: http://www.stagecast.com/cgi-bin/templator.cgi?PAGE=Cool/INDEX

3D messaging

3dMe have launched 3dMe Messenger, a character based messaging platform that allows users to select a 3-D character, animate its expressions and record or key in the messages that the character will speak to the recipient of the message. The user can then create and send the complete message to friends or associates via an email or an Instant Message attachment on their PCs. One unique feature is the Mood Wheel, in which the user can select and control a character’s facial expressions and moods, ranging from excited or silly to sad or bored. The 3dMe service is initially targeting heavy Internet communicators including power users of email, Instant Messaging, Chat and games, and also plans to unveil cross platform initiatives to appeal to WAP, SMS, MMS and picture messaging users.

The 3dMe Messenger platform is available on a free trial basis from 3dMe and download.com. The annual subscription price for the platform, all upgrades and a new character-a-month is available at the introductory price of US$ 9.95.

URL: 3dMe http://www.3dme.com
URL: download.com http://www.download.com

The "seeing" handset

The arrival of camera-enabled mobile phones from the world’s top three handset manufacturers; the Motorola A820, the Nokia 7650 and SonyEricsson's P800 provides new opportunities to access information, services and graphics. Using new technology from a partnership between International Wireless and Bango.net, users can now point a "seeing" handset at a bar code and content is delivered straight to the mobile phone creating an instant transaction.

"I could purchase theatre tickets by scanning a code on a poster or download a train timetable simply by scanning a bar code at the train station", said Anil Malhotra, Director of Alliances at Bango.net.

Content providers register the bar codes as Bango Numbers and then link these to specific content such as pictures, text, video and sound, located on mobile-enabled web sites and data servers. International Wireless' CodePoint software interprets these symbols and sends a coded number to Bango.net where it is mapped onto a specific URL. "We're working with leading handset manufacturers on embedding the CodePoint software into handsets and expect to announce partnerships in this area shortly", said Kevin Wells, President, CodePoint Division of International Wireless. "As the Bango.net platform also enables charging for content, businesses now have the ability to collect micro-payments for premium content, opening up significant revenue opportunities from the use of mobile phones."

URL: International Wireless http://www.international-wireless.com
URL: Bango.net http://www.bango.net

Anti-virus abilities assessed

GFI have released a white paper analysing the results of research by five anti-virus testing labs (ICSA Labs, West Coast Labs, Virus Bulletin, AV-Test.org, and Virus TestCenter). The white paper, "One Virus Engine is Not Enough", concludes that "no single product catches a comprehensive range of email viruses and malware within a variety of compressed and uncompressed file formats". The results of the tests are likely to be of particular interest to larger organisations exchanging a wide variety of file formats. You can view the white paper, and assess the opinions expressed, via the link below.

URL: white paper http://www.gfi.com/mailsecurity/wpmultiplevirusengines.htm
URL: GFI http://www.gfi.com/

3D games for mobiles

UK Company, Superscape is planning to develop and distribute 3D games for mobile handsets using its Swerve 3D applications platform and games from US company, THQ Wireless. The games will be based upon THQ Wireless' (intellectual property) and that of selected brands, to which THQ holds the wireless gaming rights. THQ's catalogue includes over 100 titles. Once the initial content development has been completed by Superscape and tested by both companies, it is planned "that revenue distribution and joint marketing agreements will be signed".

URL: Superscape http://www.superscape.com
URL: THQ http://www.thqwireless.com

Cut price Adobe s/w for students

Adobe has announced its "Education Print-to-Web Promotion" - discounted software for students, lecturers and teachers. The package, which includes full versions of Adobe's InDesign 2.0, Acrobat 5.0, Photoshop 7.0, Illustrator 10, GoLive 6.0 and LiveMotion 2.0 is available from August 1 to October 31 2002 and is priced at an estimated average street price of £315 + VAT. The collection can be purchased through one of Adobe's participating education resellers - a list is available via the link below.

URL: http://www.adobe.co.uk/education

The Semantic Grid

The Semantic Grid is a web site run by a group of UK researchers whose: "vision of the infrastructure that is needed to support the full richness of the e-Science vision draws on research and development in both the Grid and the Semantic Web, and adopts a service-oriented approach. We call it the Semantic Grid." They have written a report entitled: "Research Agenda for the Semantic Grid: A Future e-Science Infrastructure" which can be downloaded in .pdf format. (Source: AgentNews)

URL: http://www.semanticgrid.org/
URL: Agent News http://agents.umbc.edu

XHTML 2.0

A couple of appraisals of the recently drafted XHTML 2.0 standard from the W3C:

• on XML.com, Kendall Clark considers the significant changes to this next generation of the HTML language

URL: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/08/07/deviant.html

• whilst the overview provided in Web Reference Update considers that the new specification could be viewed as both "a blessing and a curse for Web developers".

URL: http://www.webreference.com/xml/column62/

URL: XHTML 2.0 W3C page http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/

Electronic Textbook Design Guidelines

EBONI, a project supported by the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), has published "Electronic Textbook Design Guidelines" which provides a guide for designing hypertext books, based on usability assessments. The Document is available for download in HTML, .pdf and Word formats.

URL: http://ebooks.strath.ac.uk/eboni/guidelines/

OECD Computer Security Guidelines

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has released principles for computer security that emphasize democracy, transparency, privacy, and education. Announcing the guidelines, EPIC, confirmed that "the OECD principles are intended to protect important civil society values as countries and private sector organisations go forward with computer security plans". The OECD Security Guidelines set out nine principles: Awareness, Responsibility, Response, Ethics, Democracy, Risk Assessment, Security Design and Implementation, Security Management, and Reassessment. Each principle is followed by a definition and then a one paragraph description.

URL: OECD Guidelines http://www.oecd.org/pdf/M00033000/M00033182.pdf
URL: press release http://www.epic.org/redirect/oecd_redirect.html
URL: EPIC Alert newsletter http://www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_9.15.html
URL: EPIC http://www.epic.org/

Moviestore uses Media Mogul

Moviestore, a UK-based provider of film and television imagery is installing the Media Mogul digital asset management system from Picdar to provide online access to its image collection. Moviestore supplies newspapers and magazines, particularly TV listing titles, with imagery from its ever-expanding library of more than one million pictures and by September, plans to offer around 20,000 of its top images online.

URL: Picdar http://www.picdar.com
URL: Moviestore http://www.moviestorecollection.com

Adobe Digital Video s/w update

Adobe has updated its Digital Video Collection 8.0, to include the recently announced Premiere 6.5 software, as well as the latest versions of After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator. Premiere 6.5, the latest version of Adobe's digital video editing software, includes the following enhancements: real-time preview, the Adobe Title Designer, and support for MPEG-2 export and DVD authoring. Premiere is aimed at professional editors wishing to produce high-quality video for distribution via DVD, tape, CD-ROM and the web.

The complete Digital Video Collection 8.0 package is compatible with both Macintosh OS X and Windows XP and has an estimated street price of £975 + VAT.

URL: http://www.adobe.co.uk
URL: Adobe Premiere 6.5 http://www.adobe.co.uk/premiere

e-library evaluation project

eVALUEd is a HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) funded project, based at the University of Central England. It has been set-up to develop a transferable model for e-library evaluation and to provide dissemination and training in electronic library evaluation. The project started in December 2001 and will complete in May 2004.

At this stage, the project is conducting a survey to examine good practice in electronic library evaluation, which includes electronic information services, digital collections and virtual libraries. One survey covering all Higher Education Institutions in the
UK has already been completed and a second, of software and solutions providers, is currently being conducted. The project would now like to extend this research to Libraries and Information Services based in other sectors and/or outside of the UK. They have requested that interested organisations participate in this survey by completing their
online questionnaire (see link below).

Once all of this data has been collected and analysed, the project hopes that they will have an accurate picture of digital library evaluation and to inform their subsequent recommendations as to how evaluation can be effectively organised and implemented.

For further information on the project and to join their mailing list follow the links below.

URL: online survey http://www.cie.uce.ac.uk/evalued/eval.htm
URL: eVALUEd project http://www.cie.uce.ac.uk/evalued
URL: mailing list http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/digi-eval.html

Scholarly EP Bibliography V. 44

Version 44 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, presenting over 1,650 selected articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet, has been published online. An article about the bibliography has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

URL: HTML http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html
URL: .pdf format http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.pdf
URL: article http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-02/bailey.html

Examining paid content's future

A new "Stop The Presses!" column, "Examining paid content's future", by Steve Outing has been posted on the Editor & Publisher Online web site. The author casts a critical eye over several significant trends which have emerged in recent months that are "reshaping the online news business".

Notable points raised by the study conducted by comScore Networks, determined that US consumers spent $675 million for online content in 2001, a 92 percent increase over 2000 spending levels. Further, industry growth accelerated into the current year, as U.S. consumers spent $300 million for online content in the first quarter of 2002, a 155 percent increase over the same quarter last year.

URL: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/features_columns/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1604039
URL: http://tinyurl.com/10vq
URL: Editor & Publisher Online http://www.online-publishers.org/

Agent-based computational economics

The news notes on agent-based computational economics (ACE) for August 2002 are now available online. ACE is the computational study of economies modelled as evolving systems of autonomous interacting agents. The August 2002 ACE news notes include announcements regarding books, journals, software, web sites, and miscellaneous news items that might be of use to people interested in ACE-related research. These notes are also archived (along with all past distributed news notes) at the ACE web site.

URL: August notes http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/ace0802.htm
URL: ACE home page http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/ace.htm

OpenSAML

Internet2 project, a group of organisations researching the development of the next generation Internet, have announced the availability of OpenSAML, an open source reference implementation of the Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML). SAML is described as a framework defined by the Security Services Technical Committee within the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) that will, for example, play a part in making it easier to log into multiple Web sites. OpenSAML is an open source reference implementation of this standard that was developed by the Middleware Architecture Committee for Education (MACE), which has, according to its developers, attracted broad interest from academic and corporate sectors.

URL: OpenSAML http://middleware.internet2.edu/opensaml
URL: Internet2 http://www.internet2.edu

E-archiving commercial scientific journals

A report on the initial results of a Digital Preservation Planning Project carried out by the Yale University Library and Elsevier Science has been published. The project examined "the challenges and opportunities of digitally preserving a collection of commercially published scientific journals". The initial project designed a prototype archive to examine the an e-journal archive environment. The report is available for download in .pdf format. (Source the Scout Report)

URL: report http://www.library.yale.edu/~okerson/yea/
URL: Scout Report http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/2002/scout-020816.html

IPR-Helpdesk Newsletter No 2

Issue No 2 of the IPR-Helpdesk Newsletter, IPR Bulletin has been published online. The newsletter is available free, though registration is required.

URL: http://www.iprhelpdesk.org/

Flash-based site authoring

The WebDesignHQ Flash-SiteBuilder v2.0 is described as "a user-friendly community based Multimedia Flash Web Site creation tool". It features an automatic publishing system that enables users to build and update web sites online via a web browser. The solution is principally aimed at web designers and web hosting companies who have many clients that need constant updates. According to the software's developers end users do not require "FTP, HTML, or Flash knowledge to build and customise a web site".

URL: SiteBuilder http://www.webdesignhq.com

IBM resources for web publishers

IBM have announced a couple of experimental software tools/technologies of potential interest to electronic publishers: The IBM Multimodal Annotation Tool and Conversation Support for Web Services. Release notes from IBM confirm that:

• The IBM Multimodal Annotation Tool assists in annotating MPEG files with MPEG-7 meta data. Both video and audio annotations can be created. Each shot in the video sequence can be annotated with static scene descriptions, key object descriptions, event descriptions, and other lexicon sets. Audio segments can be delimited and described as well. The annotated descriptions are stored as MPEG-7 descriptions in an XML file. The IBM Multimodal Annotation Tool can also open MPEG-7 files in order to display the annotations for the corresponding MPEG file. This tool also allows customized lexicons to be created, saved, downloaded, and updated.

URL: http://www.alphaWorks.ibm.com/tech/multimodalannotation?open&l=NT081902,t=awfl

• Conversation Support for Web Services is a technology that proposes and implements a conversational model of e-business interaction by extending and building on the Web Services architecture. In the conversational model, the interoperability technology consists of two distinct parts: messaging and conversation support. Messaging is the plumbing needed to send and receive electronic communications with others. Conversation
support governs the formatting of messages that are to be sent, the parsing of messages that have been received, and the sequencing constraints on the exchange of multiple, correlated messages. It is a separate subsystem that mediates between the messaging system and business processes. These pre-programmed interaction patterns are captured in a progamming element called Conversation Policies.

URL: http://www.alphaWorks.ibm.com/tech/cs-ws?open&l=NT081902,t=awfl

IBM have also announced that XML EditorMaker is available under its emerging technology commercial licensing programme. XML EditorMaker is described as a "Java tool that automatically generates visual editors out of XML Schema files (DTD files). The goal of XML EditorMaker is to alleviate the tedium of having to write editors for XML documents".

URL: http://www.alphaWorks.ibm.com/tech/xmleditormaker?open&l=LS081902,t=awfl

SALT to impact VoiceXML?

VoiceXMLPlanet.com has published a brief article which considers how the recent SALT submission to W3C could impact the future of VoiceXML. The SALT specification was submitted to the Voice Browser and Multimodal Interaction working groups of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and this article discusses the implications for VoiceXML developers and those companies who currently provide support for the VXML standard.

As we reported on El.pub (15th August 2002), The SALT Forum has announced the availability of Version 1.0 of the Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) specification.

URL: http://voicexmlplanet.com/articles/saltsubmission.html
URL: SALT Forum http://www.saltforum.org/
URL: SALT announcement http://www.elpub.org/base02t0077.htm#sal

XML and mapping ontologies

According to an article in XML.com whilst XML and knowledge management seem destined to be involved with one another for a very long time, but one of the perennial problems of knowledge management is the issue of competing, alternative ontologies. If one accepts the premise that there is unlikely to be a single ontology per knowledge domain, then there will be a requirement to map ontologies to one another. This article, entitled: "Business Maps: Topic Maps Go B2B", attempts to show how topic maps can be used to help solve interoperability problems between XML business to business (B2B) vocabularies.

URL: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/08/21/topicmapb2b.html

Mobile gaming

Europemedia, reports that "wireless games account for 52 per cent of mobile data traffic in Japan. In South Korea, 92 per cent of mobile Internet users play wireless games, generating 50 per cent of the total mobile Internet traffic in the country". In an article entitled: "Mobile gaming: hand holding rules", the author examines "why everyone is suddenly jumping on the mobile games band-wagon".

URL: http://www.europemedia.net/showfeature.asp?ArticleID=12082

PULMAN Network of Excellence

The PULMAN Network of Excellence has been launched under the European Commission’s research programme for a User-Friendly Information Society (DG Information Society). The aim of the PULMAN Network is to stimulate and promote sharing of policies and practices for the digital era, in public libraries and cultural organisations which operate at local and regional level.

Activities and plans of the PULMAN Network include the publication of Digital Guidelines Manuals covering all aspects of innovative public library service provision, such as support for access to culture online, lifelong learning, social inclusion, digital literacy and e-government. This first, and provisional, edition of the guidelines has been published in English (other languages will follow), and the project is requesting comments on these before the end of November 2002. Following this, a second edition will be produced.

URL: PULMAN Guidelines http://www.pulmanweb.org/DGMs/DGMs.htm
URL: PULMANWeb http://www.pulmanweb.org/

Online Journalism Review

Online Journalism Review, a Web-based journal produced at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. News briefs from around the world give you the latest developments that affect online journalism.

URL: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/page_one/

Resourceshelf blog

An El.pub reader in Washington DC, Gary D. Price, who compiles and edits the Resourceshelf blog has requested that we bring it to the attention of our wider readership. Gary highlighted a number of items that he thought would be of particular interest to our other readers:

• Quiver (whose technology has been featured in El.pub has recently been sold to Inktomi.
URL: http://www.quiver.com/corp/acq_annmnt.html

• "U. of Texas at Austin Plans Online Gateway to Digitized Resources" (via The Chronicle of Higher Education)
URL: http://chronicle.com/free/2002/07/2002072501t.htm

• Archives - Art (Source: Wired News), "How to Preserve Digital Art", from the article, "A consortium of art institutions is launching a new project, Archiving the Avant Garde: Documenting and Preserving Variable Media Art, which will propose a set of rules to document and preserve variable media art. The collaboration includes the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org, the Franklin Furnace Archive and the Cleveland Performance Art Festival and Archive."
URL: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,53712,00.html

• E-Books - Statistics (Source: Open eBook Forum), Open eBook Forum Releases Industry Growth Statistics
URL: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/f_headline.cgi?bw.072202/222032049

• Online Industry - ProQuest, Newspaper Archives - "ProQuest Releases Complete Digital Backfile of The New York Times"
URL: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/micro_stories.pl?ACCT=no&TICK=PQE&STORY=/www/story/07-19-2002/0001767264&EDATE
See Also: In June, Gale released a digitised archive of The Times (London).
URL: http://www.gale.com/Times

URL: Resourceshelf http://resourceshelf.freepint.com
Email: Gary D. Price mailto:gary@freepint.com

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