EP Topic News: 14th November 2002EP Topic News: 14th November 2002
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The El.pub Analytic pages of El.pub were awarded four stars by Emerald Abstracts Computing Coolsites ("indexed reviews of the best of the Web"). This joins the 5 star award previously awarded, by Emerald Abstracts, to the entire El.pub site. As the announcement states:
"Only exceptional sites are included in Coolsites and are eligible to display this award. Coolsites provide the same intelligent access to online resources that we have been providing to more traditionally published material since 1961.
Our specialist reviewers evaluate every site on five key criteria: style, structure, ease of use, quality of information and usefulness to the practitioner. Every site receives a quality rating of between one and five stars and is categorized, with all major aspects of computer science covered.As an additional accolade, El.pub Analytic has been added to Emerald Abstracts Computing Coolsites as the October General Literature Coolsite".
The review is accessible via the link below, click on the link entitled: "this month's web site reviews".
URL: see http://www.emeraldinsight.com/abstracts/computing/coolsites/gl.htm
In last week's news we ran an item regarding the Online Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Ross Somerville, the Production Manager, has asked us to point out that the deadline for registrations of interest from technology partners closed on Friday 8 November, 2002. We apologise to readers who would have been interested in submitting proposals - however the intention of the news item was to signal that the project was underway rather than to seek registrations.
URL: Dictionary of New Zealand Biography http://www.dnzb.govt.nz
URL: http://www.mch.govt.nz/ref/enz/news.html#roi
URL: NZ Ministry for Culture & Heritage web site http://www.mch.govt.nz
Email: Ross Somerville mailto:ross.somerville@mch.govt.nz
The UK government has published a report on the video games industry and proposals to boost its position in the world market. The report was created with Spectrum Strategy Consultants and industry experts. Although the study is primarily about the UK industry it contains figures and comparisons with other European countries. The study is available for download from the DTI web site.
URL: http://www.dti.gov.uk/cii/services/contentindustry/computer_games_leisure_software.shtml
The first joint Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) interoperability testing event organised by the DSL Forum and ETSI's Plugtest Service took place in Saarbruken, Germany from October 14-18, 2002. Thirty six companies from Europe, North America and Asia attended and the results of the tests will feedback into the DSL standards development process, in which both the DSL Forum and ETSI are active. The event was sponsored by the European Commission through its eEurope initiative.
URL: DSL Forum http://www.dslforum.org/
URL: ETSI Plugtests http://www.etsi.org/plugtests/
URL: eEurope Initiative http://www.eeurope-standards.org/
URL: ETSI http://www.etsi.org/
EUD-Net (End-User Development Network) is a European Commission supported Network of Excellence (NoE) whose main purpose is:
"to prepare a research agenda in the end-user development field for the 6th Framework Programme and to increase contacts among highly-qualified research centres, both academic and industrial, in order to speed-up the production of innovative ideas and approaches."
NEMIS (Network of Excellence in Text Mining and Its applications in Statistics) aims to bring together researchers, academics and practitioners working in the text mining domain and to coordinate ongoing research efforts at the EU level. The purpose of text mining (TM), drawing on techniques from fields such as data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, natural language processing, case-based reasoning, statistics and knowledge management, is to aid in the interpretation of large quantities of semi-structured and unstructured data.
Further information on the project and the text mining domain is available via the NEMIS web site.
URL: http://nemis.cti.gr
KTweb is described as a community building and awareness raising service in the area of digital content, media and knowledge technologies. Created by the MULTIPLE project, a European Commission funded support activity, the project runs a web site and workshops to:
• help projects achieve commercialisation of their results
• bring R&D issues and research activities to the attention of technology players
• bring projects and market actors together, to encourage actions for project exploitationURL: http://www.ktweb.org
CHIPS (Consumer Hybrid Intelligent Products & Services) is a European Commission supported, multi-partner, European working group created to define the RTD issues associated with the development of consumer hybrid intelligent products and services. The group is particularly interested in the factors associated with design, content, market, social and environmental impact, stressing the importance of collaboration between creative professionals and technical implementors. The project has published a number of resources, including:
• "Making Sense" - an initial survey of the field in which the project is active. The project is seeking comments on this report.
URL: http://www.chipsweb.org/reports/survey.pdf
• a report from a seminar held in London in June, 2002 on "Inter-product Communication"
URL: http://www.chipsweb.org/reports/research_and_standards.pdf
• a report from a Workshop entitled: "Beyond the Gadget" held in March 2002.
URL: http://www.chipsweb.org/ws1web/
• a newsletter, the first issue of which was published in October 2002.
Further information concerning the work of the project is available on the web.
The European Commission is funding a network of excellence (NoE) in Interactive Music Multimedia, called Musicnetwork. The network is being developed because the Commission believes that "large gaps exist between research results and industrial needs, and between users' requirements and available information technology products". Musicnetwork has been created to assist the music industry to enter the marketplace by drawing on the assets and mutual interest of the different actors in using, technologies, tools, products, formats and models.
One of the main objectives of the Musicnetwork is to "connect all the main groups in Computer Music and Music Industry", and the project organisers are now looking to expand to as many new participants as possible. Participants can benefit from a number of services proposed by Musicnetwork including: a large archive, best practice guidelines, tutorials, free workshops, a discussion forum, visibility for products or technologies / research results, market watch and analysis.
Workshops are proposed to reflect the working groups set-up under the Musicnetwork: notation, multimedia standards and music, music and libraries, music accessibility, optical music recognition, restoring, digital right management (DRM), protection, distribution. The first Open Workshop for discussion about Multimedia Music aspects will take place on 11-12 December 2002, Darmstadt, Germany, after the WEDELMUSIC 2002 Conference. (Details are published on the web site).
Participation in the Musicnetwork is open to all: industries, research centres, publishers, libraries, archives, music distributors, school of music, conservatories, and associations. Membership currently includes about 20 participants from several EU states. Participant registration is via the web site below.
URL: Musicnetwork http://www.interactivemusicnetwork.org
URL: WEDELMUSIC 2002 Conference http://www.wedelmusic.org/wedelmusic2002/index.html
CMSD 2003, The International Conference On Cross-Media Service Delivery is being organised by the CONTESSA project. Scheduled to take place on May 30-31, 2003, in Santorini, Greece a call for papers is open until January 15, 2003.
The conference aims to bring together a cross-disciplinary core of participants to address the technical and business issues of cross-media publishing and service delivery technologies. The conference seeks to promote discussion and interaction between researchers, technology experts, electronic media publishers, digital content providers, as well as e-business companies, ISPs, network operators, broadcasters, and multimedia equipment and software developers. Of particular interest is the exchange of concepts, industrial prototypes, research ideas, and other results that could contribute to the academic arena and, more importantly, be adopted by the business and the industrial community.
Further information, including a full list of topics and themes addressed by the conference, is available from the CONTESSA project web site.
The URESCOM Summit 2003: "Evolution of Broadband Services - satisfying user and market needs" takes place on September 29 - October 2, 2003 in Heidelberg, Germany. The conference aims at capturing a snapshot of ongoing activities in these areas, providing value to executives, business professionals and technical experts from network operators, service providers, equipment manufacturers, content providers as well as to the research community. It aims to look into technical issues of advanced services and technologies, showing how the advances in service creation technologies can support the creation of user-friendly services. It will consider usability and user acceptance of advanced services and devices, as well as looking at their business relevance.
A call for papers is open until 3 March, 2003 alongside a call for tutorials. Further details on the detailed coverage of the event is available from the conference site.
WEBHOSTS is a socio-economic study of the market for web hosting in Europe. The project team undertaking the study is funded by European Commission through the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme. The intention of the study is to research into hosting service providers and industrial users, in particular small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to evaluate the impact of web hosting on the development of e-business.
The rationale behind the study is the belief that, "e-business technologies are resource-demanding", and, "while large corporations have the necessary resources, SMEs do not". It concludes that, "as a result, many SMEs are left out of a crucial market segment and their potential revenue and market share remain unrealised". Information should be available via the web site below - though when we tried the site seemed to hang.
Dr Christine Thornton, the Project Coordinator of the EDUCAT - Education Content Assembly Toolset project, supported by the European Commission has requested that we circulate this brief announcement to El.pub readers.
"Would you like to create your own simulations that can run on the Internet or standalone? Visit our web site, via the link below, to find out more about the Education Content Assembly Toolset. It is a simple programming toolset for non computer professionals to build their own interactive educational software. Doctors, Engineers and Business managers in several European Universities and Businesses are using it to build simulations for education and training".
The project is organising the "Interactive Content in Education Conference", in London, UK on April 25, 2003 - details on the web site.
URL: EDUCAT http://www.cat.med.ic.ac.uk
RevXml is described as "a tool for the tracking of revision of XML / SGML/ XHTML-tagged documents and data". Developed by Palstar Document Management and Language Engineering based in the Netherlands, the tool tracks changes between two documents or data and generates revision markers (indicating addition, deletion and change) in the revised document, which themselves take the form of additional XML tags or arbitrary strings to be defined by the user.
The company suggest the RevXml be used as "middleware". "For instance, an XML Editor may use it to visualise the revisions between two XML documents. A Document Management System will be able to store the deltas and a Publishing System may generate exact revision bars".
URL: Palstar http://www.palstar-nl.com
The ITU has organised a workshop entitled "Satellites in IP and Multimedia" on December 9-11, 2002 at ITU Headquarters, in Geneva. As the ITU explains:
"In an increasingly competitive world, satellite operators are looking to enter new markets in order to raise profits. Satellite's ability to deliver multimedia and IP services is seen by many service providers as the most logical next step. This workshop will examine the business case for satellite services, network management issues and multimedia delivery mechanisms. There will also be sessions examining the role of satellite communications in developing regions, and discussion on next generation satellite based IP and multimedia services. Speakers include high-level representatives from ITU, manufacturers and service providers".
The workshop will be of interest to those within network operators responsible for strategic planning and operations, as well as those within manufacturers of telecoms equipment responsible for product design and development. The workshop is open to both ITU members and non-members, and is free of charge.
For further information and registration follow the link below.
Pira International are arranging the "Marketing For Publishers Conference" on January 29-30, 2003 in London, UK. Topics to be covered include, how to:
• gain maximum effectiveness in your marketing strategy
• lower costs and attain good returns on marketing investment
• choose the best balance of marketing channels for your product
• effectively use the Internet as a marketing tool and to generate revenue
• gather and use customer information effectively
• brand your product
• work efficiently with other companies in the supply chainThe programme will include case studies providing examples of effective marketing strategies from different publishing sectors. There will also be a "Workshop on Generating Revenue Publishing on the Internet" which will take place on January 31, 2002 following the conference. The workshop will provide a practical, hands-on approach to setting up a web site, how best to maintain it and examine methods of attracting customers. It will also consider funding the site through payment for content or selling ad space. To request the full conference programme, contact Louise Bools at Pira.
Email: Louise Bools mailto:louiseb@pira.co.uk
URL: http://www.piranet.com
Steve Outing's Stop The Presses! column on Editor & Publisher Online concludes that, "News sites to go on diets". The author believes that "news web site home pages have been gradually piling on more and more headlines, links, graphics, photos, and ads for quite a few years. It's reached the point of absurdity. Even award-winning news sites now contain hundreds of links on their home pages. It's time for them to go on home-page diets". Read the complete column at:
URL: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/features_columns/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1750692
URL: http://tinyurl.com/2bx3
Through the release of Ektron CMS200 version 2.0, Ektron claims that it has expanded its multilingual, browser-based content management solution from Microsoft ASP to Microsoft ASP.NET, Macromedia ColdFusion and PHP. The company claims the product is the the "only content management solution that runs simultaneously on various Web application servers".
Registration is now open for the European Commission Information Day on Technology Enhanced Learning which will take place on 5 December 2002 in Luxembourg. The sessions are open to all interested parties on a "first-come first-served" basis as the number of participants that can be accommodated in the conference facilities is limited. Attendance to the meeting is free, but please note that the European Commission cannot cover travel and subsistence expenses of participants. Further information along with the online registration form is available via the link below.
XML.com reports that, "ontologies have come out of the research labs and into common use for modeling complex information". In view of this, the site is running a feature entitled: "Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools" which is a survey of tools available for editing ontologies. As part of this survey the author also provides an introduction to what ontologies are, how they vary, and how they are constructed.
There is also an article, "Standards for Electronic Instructional Materials", which reports on US legislative proposals to implement an electronic standard for learning materials. Such a standard, likely to be XML-based, could radically improve the lot of visually impaired children at school, concludes the article.
URL: Ontologies article http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/11/06/ontologies.html
URL: Electronic Instructional Materials http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/11/06/imaa.html
URL: XML.com http://www.xml.com/
The programme for the ERPANET OAIS (Open Archival Information System) Training Seminar scheduled for Copenhagen, on November 28-29, 2002 is now available online. The intention is that participants will gain familiarity with the main features of the OAIS model, and examine some of the processes involved in its interpretation and application. In particular, attendees will acquire an appreciation of how to move from model to implementable preservation solution.
Expert speakers will contribute their experiences, accumulated knowledge and familiarity of the model in order that the participants can also share this knowledge with colleagues in their home institution. This seminar has been designed to appeal to a broad array of information professionals, public bodies, commercial as well as non-profit organisations, researchers, and anyone with an interest in learning more about the preservation of digital information.
The cost of this seminar is €150. This price includes learning materials, lunch, and additional refreshments. The event is co-hosted by ERPANET, the Royal Library, Denmark, and Denmark’s Electronic Research Library.
The European Commission funded ERPANET Project is establishing an expandable European Consortium, which "will make viable and visible information, best practice and skills development in the area of digital preservation of cultural heritage and scientific objects".
A call for papers is open for the ICCC/IFIP 7th International Conference on Electronic Publishing, ELPUB 2003, to be held in Guimarães, Portugal, 25 - 28 June 2003. The conference aims to bring together researchers, lecturers, developers, industrialists, businessmen, entrepreneurs, managers, users and all those interested on issues regarding the development of electronic publishing in the widest context. These include human, cultural, economic, social, technological, legal and commercial which will be covered in a conference programme (with two tracks: general and technical), workshops, tutorials, posters and panel debates.
The call for papers is open until January 15, 2003 - further information from the Programme Committee.
Email: Programme Committee mailto:programmelpub@unb.br
According to latest findings released by Frost & Sullivan, the international marketing consulting company, Bluetooth has progressed beyond its simple cable replacement origins, with numerous different deployment models anticipated from the home and office, through to specific industrial solutions and commercial environment uptake. Michael Wall, Industry Analyst at Frost & Sullivan, believes that Bluetooth's potential for "more formalised wireless networking applications" may be driven by the "technology’s increasingly low power consumption and relatively robust modulation technique".
This potential is further enhanced by the anticipated widespread deployment of devices such as notebook PCs, cellular phones and PC accessories which are, or will be, Bluetooth-enabled. Apparently the decision of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) to increase the bandwidth of Bluetooth to over two mbps in the next release of the technology will "significantly spur adoption of Bluetooth networking equipment". These findings will be published in a report from the company during November 2002 (Report Code: 9515-6, priced at €2,500).
URL: http://frost.com
The University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics have announced two research posts in the field of computer vision. Applications are being invited for two researchers to work on a European Commission funded project entitled, "CAVIAR: Context Aware Vision using Image-based Active Recognition". The researchers will be required to investigate topics related to appearance based recognition, such as might be applied to pedestrian behaviour analysis. At Edinburgh these include: foveated feature extraction, feature grouping, spatial and temporal attention, representing and recognising objects, contexts and situations, reactive integration and control architectures.
Applicants for the post (which is available immediately, and will run for up to three years) should have a PhD (or an MSc plus suitable experience) in an appropriate area, such as computer vision or image processing and should have experience with the C or C++ or Java programming languages. Further particulars are available via the web sites below, and informal inquiries may be made to Bob Fisher. Closing date for applications is November 25, 2002.
URL: http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/rbf/CAVIAR/details.htm
Email: Bob Fisher mailto:rbf@inf.ed.ac.uk
An announcement and call for papers has been sent to us for LIDA 2003 - Libraries in the Digital Age. The annual course and conference is scheduled to take place in Dubrovnik and Mljet, Croatia on 26-30 May, 2003. The general aim of the event is to address the changing environment for libraries and information systems and services in the digital world, with an emphasis on examining contemporary problems, advances and solutions.
The conference will focus on two themes: World Wide Web and information retrieval (IR); World Wide Web and libraries. The first of these will cover research and development and the second addresses advances in applications and practice. LIDA seeks to bring together researchers, practitioners, and developers in a forum for personal exchanges, discussions, and learning. there is also a call for workshops and tutorials. The deadline for submissions is 10 January 2003.
The OASIS Open Office XML Format Technical Committee has been formed, whose stated purpose is "to create an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications". The TC intends that the resulting file format will "meet the following requirements":
• be suitable for office documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents.
• be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) v1.0 and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications.
• retain high-level information suitable for editing the document.
• be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based languages or tools.
• keep the document's content and layout information separate such that they can be processed independently of each other, and it should 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever possible and permitted.The Committee intends to use the OpenOffice.org XML format specification as the basis for its work. In announcing the TC, OASIS states that the use of the format is due to the fact that "it meets these criteria and has proven its value in real life". It goes on to confirm that, "Sun Microsystems intends to contribute the OpenOffice.org XML Format to this TC at the first meeting of the TC, under reciprocal Royalty Free terms". Further information from the OASIS web site.
The New York Times web site has an article and link on new scientific font standard being developed by six publishers of scientific, technical and medical journals. The Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) project is developing the set of STIX fonts which "promises to contain every character - more than 7,000 in all - that might be needed in a technical article published in any scientific discipline". The developers intend that the fonts will be shared freely with publishers, software manufacturers and scholars, under the condition that they not be altered. To view the full article on The New York Times site, registration may be required. (Source: New York Times)
URL: article http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/07/technology/circuits/07next.html
URL: STIX http://www.stixfonts.com
The O'Reilly Network Newsletter reports from the the CTIA Wireless Conference in Las Vegas with a study of the state of mobile gaming in the US, and how it compares with other markets globally. The first report, "Will Mobile Games Sweep the Nation?" provides an overview of the state of gaming in the US, and a follow-up report "will delve into the actual software development and delivery".
URL: article http://oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2002/10/31/mobile_games.html
URL: O'Reilly Network http://oreillynet.com/
CORDIS, the European Commission's Research and Development Information Service, is providing a new service to accompany the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) 2002-2006. From the announcement:
"The service offers a step-by-step approach to help understand all activities as well as participation in European funding opportunities, for which €17.5 billion has been earmarked.
The service plans to offer comprehensive and timely information on the structure, budget and content of all FP6 activity areas as well as insights into traditional and new instruments. It will also offer a glossary aimed at assisting familiarisation with Commission's terminology. In addition, the service links to related news and relevant key events.
The FP6 service will display all calls for proposals, which will be published from 17 December 2002 onwards. Potential participants will have access to a call service (making available all relevant documents) , a review of potential partners and a link to the electronic proposal preparation and submission system (EPSS) .
Dedicated pages offer a global overview of steps to participation, including information on rules for participation, administrative procedures, evaluation criteria and contractual issues. The service will also act as a key to obtain additional information, including contact details for infodesks and local support, partnering facilities, searchable reference documents and fast and secure tools. Complete services will be developed for each activity area".
The proceedings and tutorial handouts of the ISMIR 2002 - The 3rd Int. Conf. on Music Information Retrieval can now be ordered through the URL below.
We have received the following information concerning an Expression of Interest (EoI) submitted to the FP6 call. GAMENET: is a proposed EU Network of Excellence in Intelligent Computer Games and Their Simulation under thematic priority 1.1.2i. This network aims to link together academia and games companies across Europe, as well as linking in with other proposed games networks in complementary areas. In the short term the Network will seek to expand the existing knowledge base in the field of computer games, e-learning, AI and graphics. Medium term aims are to promote and manage industrial placements of students and researchers. Long-term aims are to establish a scientific organisation to supervise and advise EU scientists and developers about next generation computer games.
GAMENET is being coordinated by the Games Simulation and AI Research Group at the School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wolverhampton, UK and Ghent University in Belgium. The intention is to focus on the perceived challenges for developers of next-generation computer games, which include providing:
• "Human imitation/intelligence" for games characters and their environments
• Designing "believable" characters
• Simulating Virtual Worlds with intelligent path planning, navigation
• Developing strategies for negotiating with characters, task planning, team work between characters
• New techniques for rendering games characters
• New delivery platforms e.g. TV, multiuser, Internet
• Wider applications areas including "edutainment", business trainingThe group organises, the annual International Game-On Conferences, (the 3rd Game-On 2002 Conference is due to take place on 29-30 November 2002, in Harrow, UK) and has published IJIGS: The International Journal of Intelligent Games and Simulation. The group will be holding a GAMENET planning meeting at Game-On 2002 on November 30, 2002. Contact Professor Norman E Gough or Dr Qasim Mehdi for further details.
URL: IJIGS http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1822/ijigs11.htm
URL: Game-On 2002 http://biomath.rug.ac.be/~scs/conf/gameon2002/index.html
Email: Professor Norman Gough mailto:n.gough@wlv.ac.uk
Email: Dr Qasim Mehdi mailto:q.h.mehdi@wlv.ac.uk
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