EP Topic News: 28th November 2002EP Topic News: 28th November 2002
| About topic news We publish topic news occasionally with a separate page for each update, ensuring that links to our email alerter service continue to remain current. |
El.pub News A free email alerter of the latest news items and associated URLs |
 |
Forward to next week |
Back to previous week |
 |
|
Contents |
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) annual report on E-Commerce and Development estimates that despite a general poor showing by IT, e-commerce may have grown by 50% between 2001 and 2002 and that this growth is likely to continue into the future to account for 18% of global sales by 2006. The report includes studies on different sectors including publishing. The publishing section includes information on e-books and copyright issues. The report can be downloaded from the Unctad web site.
URL: http://r0.unctad.org/ecommerce/ecommerce_en/edr02_en.htm
A new standard, which will make it easier to establish trust in the use of electronic signatures, will be reviewed at an open workshop, in London, on December 13, 2002. The workshop is co-hosted by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which is developing the standard and the UK Department of Trade & Industry (DTI). Entitled: "Developing a standard for the provision of harmonised Trust Service Provider status information", the seminar is free and will review the work of the European Electronic Signature Standardisation Initiative (EESSI) programme. A technical report on the work will serve as the basis for discussions. Another workshop on international cooperation between trust service approval schemes will also be taking place the day before, on December 12, 2002 at the same venue.
URL: workshop http://docbox.etsi.org/esi/open/TSLworkshop2002-12-13
URL: ETSI http://www.etsi.org/
The m-ToGuide is a tourism information service being developed by a project being run under the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme. The consortium of 17 organisations, including partners from Italy, Germany, UK, Spain, Germany and Sweden are developing a guide, which will provide "a range of mobile information services" based on GSM/GPRS cellular phone networks and the Internet. Field trials of the system are planned for Siena, Madrid and London.
Following on the success of the virtual conference on e-text, a new organisation EURO-EDU (the European association for the development of higher education and research on the Internet) has launched the first of a series of virtual conferences. Started on November 18th on the web site "Interdisciplines" the conference will study "Art and cognition", the first two contributions are on "Pictorial Language" by Avigdor Arikha and "The Unity of the Kind Work of Art" by Roberto Casati. A second conference on "The Future of Web Publishing" will start on November 25th. The discussions are carried on in a multi-lingual environment, primarily oriented to French and English.
URL: http://www.interdisciplines.org/artcog
URL: http://www.interdisciplines.org/defispublicationweb
URL: http://www.euro-edu.com/
The 6th International Open Forum on Metadata Registries will take place on January 20-24, 2003 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA and will present standards, tutorials, and practical experience about the following technologies:
• Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)
• OASIS/ebXML Registries
• ISO/IEC 11179 Metadata Registries
• Database Catalogues (e.g., relational DBMS/SQL)
• Software Development Repositories
• Software Component Registries
• Terminology and Ontological Registries
• Dublin Core RegistriesA theme will be cooperation and interoperation of these technologies. The conference will highlight the management of metadata and data semantics (meaning) for web services, XML data exchanges, data management, and other applications. Special emphasis will be on using emerging web services and XML technologies together with data management and other technologies already in use.
The practical use of the technologies, metadata management techniques, data standards/harmonisation, and concept/terminology structures will be described and demonstrated in a number of application "tracks". The tracks will gather standards developers, software developers, and practitioners in these fields to demonstrate accomplishments and to discuss experiences. Organizations will demonstrate the use and interoperation of most of the various registries and technologies.
This conference is co-sponsored by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32, OASIS, ECOS, the US Federal CIO Council XML Working Group, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
VREfresh reports that a low-cost, portable VR system has been shown by the VR Applications Center at Iowa State University. The system uses standard personal computers, standard meeting-room video projectors, and other off-the-shelf components. The system is portable and configurable, consisting of a number of self-contained display modules. These wedge-shaped aluminum structures hold an 8-foot-wide by 6-foot-tall, snap-on screen at the wide end and two computers and two projectors at the narrow end. The modules are on wheels to easily move and reconfigure the system. Using four modules, the system can be made into a CAVE-like device with four walls or a single 32-foot long display. To keep costs down, the system uses polarized light and inexpensive polarized glasses to achieve the stereoscopic, 3D images required for VR applications. For sound, it uses an audio system and speakers like those found in most desktop personal computers. The pieces of the system simply lock together like building blocks.
An open-source software environment called VR Juggler, also created by VRAC, allows the new VR system to run a variety of VR applications. VR Juggler is a suite of software tools that provide the infrastructure for creating collaborative, cross-platform, interactive environments. These tools integrate high-end systems, PC graphics clusters, mobile devices like PDAs, and web-based videoconferencing. VR Juggler is used by VRAC, other research organizations, software developers and industrial companies to create powerful VR applications that can run on a variety of systems.
URL: http://www.vrac.iastate.edu
URL: VREfresh http://www.elpub.org/base02vt0214.htm
The European Commission has published a guide to the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), entitled "Participating in European research". The guide is intended as a source of information and assistance to those people or organisations that wish to find out more about the programmes and activities included under FP6. It gives an overview of the fundamental aspects of the objectives and mechanisms of FP6, and is intended as a reference manual rather than an exhaustive guide. Chapters of the publication include:
• What is the Sixth Framework Programme?
• Who can take part?
• How to participate in FP6
• What are the thematic priorities of FP6?
• Where to find useful sources of information and assistanceThe guide is currently available in English as a .pdf download.
URL: http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/fp6/pdf/how-to-participate_en%20.pdf
The UK Government hosted an e-Summit in London on November 19, 2002 at which they presented the results of the first major benchmark report of nine leading economies (the G7 nations, Sweden and Australia) in which national policies and initiatives designed to spur the use of on-line technology among businesses, government and private individuals were benchmarked. The independent report: "The World's most Effective Policies for the e-Economy" - was produced by management and technology consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, supported by the international business school, INSEAD. The purpose of the survey was to discover whether the UK Government had achieved its ambition for the UK to be "the world's best environment for e-commerce by 2002". The survey framework - within which governments' policies and initiatives designed to further the commercial, civic and domestic use of on-line technology have been benchmarked:
• Outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the UK and other nations' e-economies' against a comprehensive 12-point framework, itself based on over 100 statistical indicators.
• Assesses the drivers of strong performance world-wide, in terms of the policy actions of governments and inherent 'environmental' factors over which governments have little control.
• Shows how governments can improve the "e-Maturity" ratings of their nations.
• Makes specific recommendations on how the UK can address areas of weakness and build on strengths.
• Provides case studies of international "best practice".
• Provides a set of detailed benchmarks within a comprehensive framework in which the effectiveness of future governments' policies and initiatives can be measured.
We intend to publish further details concerning the e-Summit and the report, if and, when, they become available, in future issues of El.pub Weekly.
URL: Booz Allen Hamilton http://www.boozallen.com
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released XForms 1.0 as a Candidate Recommendation. XForms 1.0 is believed to provide the foundation for next-generation Web-based forms, based on XML, which will eventually replace HTML Forms. By releasing the specification as a Candidate Recommendation, the W3C believe that it is stable enough for implementation by developers.
URL: http://www.w3.org/
The 6th Framework Programme for European Research and Technology was officially launched by EU Commissioner Philippe Busquin at the three day, European Research 2002 conference, held in Brussels on November 11-13, 2002. According to the organisers, over 9,000 participants attended the event, and for those unable to do so, resources have been published online. These include:
• electronic versions of all press packs, including keynote speeches and conference highlights.
URL: http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/fp6/index_en.html
• "The European Research Area and the Framework Programme".
URL: http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/conferences/2002/
• "Sixth Sense", the on-line Journal of the European Research 2002 conference.
URL: http://www.fp6conferencejournal.org/11/journal_en.html
• details of all the projects who had stands in the display area.
URL: http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/conferences/2002/stands_en.html
The web site of DG Research can be viewed via the URL below.
The November 2002 issue of First Monday (volume 7, number 11) is now available online and includes, articles entitled:
• "The Lives and Death of Moore's Law";
• "Reality Bytes: Cyberterrorism and Terrorist 'Use' of the Internet";
• "Corporate Cyberstalking: An Invitation to Build Theory";
• "Exploring the Future of the Digital Divide through Ethnographic Futures Research;
• "Copyright Contradictions in Scholarly Publishing";
• "Control of B2B E-Commerce and the Impact on Industry StructureThe issue also includes a number of book reviews.
Forrest 0.2 is the first public release of an XML standards-oriented project documentation framework based on Apache Cocoon, providing XSLT stylesheets and schemas, images and other resources. Forrest uses these to render the XML source content into a web site via command-line, robot, or a dynamic web application. Forrest was originally envisioned as a Sourceforge-like documentation management framework for xml.apache.org projects. Eleven months later, Forrest is a much more focused, generic system:
• all xml.apache.org assumptions have been eliminated: Forrest can be used in any project.
• Forrest's cross-project goals have been put on hold while effort is put into making Forrest a good single-project tool.The software is currently experiencing rapid growth, and this release is made in the spirit of "release early and often". Forrest 0.2 can be downloaded in binary or source form and the release notes, which contain important information about known bugs, are also available online.
URL: Forrest 0.2 download http://cvs.apache.org/~jefft/forrest/releases/0.2/
URL: release notes http://cvs.apache.org/~jefft/forrest/releases/0.2/RELEASE-NOTES-0.2.txt
The November 2002 issue of D-Lib Magazine has been published online and includes and opinion piece entitled: "Institutional Repositories: Partnering with Faculty to Enhance Scholarly Communication", along with articles entitled:
• "The NSF National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program: New Projects in Fiscal Year 2002";
• "Software for Building a Full-Featured Discipline-Based Web Portal: The Scout Portal Toolkit";
• "A Metadata Framework Developed at the Tsinghua University Library to Aid in the Preservation of Digital Resources"
• "A Scalable Architecture for Harvest-Based Digital Libraries: The ODU/Southampton Experiments";
• "The Design and Evaluation of Interactivities in a Digital Library"There are also two conference reports from:
• ISMIR 2002 - The 3rd Int. Conf. on Music Information Retrieval, 14-17 October 2002, Paris, France.
• The 2nd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative, "Gaining Independence with e-Print Archives and OAI", 17-19 October 2002, CERN, Switzerland.URL: http://www.dlib.org/
Ektron eWebWP, is believed to be one of the first editors built with Macromedia Flash MX, gives online users quick access to content formatting capabilities regardless of client platform. The product is aimed at site owners and web masters who wish to "deploy a low-cost 'web word-processor', providing site visitors with text formatting capabilities via their browser". Installation is not required because Ektron eWebWP runs on any standard browser with Macromedia Flash Player installed. At 75K, Ektron eWebWP downloads in seconds.
URL: Ektron http://www.ektron.com
The UK-based ANGEL project (Authenticated Networked Guided Environment for Learning) has announced that following the successful JISC / UCISA / UKERNA Access Management Conference on the 6th November 2002, all speaker slides and handouts are available on the project web site. A report on the conference including a summary of the presentations and a list of the questions raised during the conference are also available.
Stevan Harnad, at the University of Southampton, UK is a central figure and authority in the discussions relating to author self-archiving. He has circulated a note of interest:
"The self-archiving FAQ is now gathering together many of the relevant journal publishers' current policy statements on author self-archiving. It is quite remarkable how quickly the consensus is growing! Publishers are behaving extremely constructively and responsibly, and are actually now well ahead of many authors on this! It bodes very well for the future."
Steven is keen to receive additional publishers' policy statements on author self-archiving that El.pub readers may be aware of and that don't feature on the web site below.
URL: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publishers-do
Email: Stevan Harnad mailto:harnad@ECS.SOTON.AC.UK
"Spinning the Semantic Web : Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential" (ISBN: 0262062321), published in November 2002 by MIT, is edited by Dieter Fensel, Dieter Fensel, James Hendler, Henry Lieberman, and Wolfgang Wahlster, and includes a foreword by Tim Berners-Lee. The book is described as the first handbook for the Semantic Web covering, among other topics, software agents that can negotiate and collect information, markup languages that can tag many more types of information in a document, and knowledge systems that enable machines to read Web pages and determine their reliability.
URL: details on Amozon.com http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0262062321/instituteforgl07/002-0946498-0709606
The M4IF has announced its new White Paper on MPEG-4, entitled: "The landscape of advanced multimedia coding", which is available for download from the Forum's web site.
URL: white paper http://www.m4if.org/public/documents/vault/m4-out-20027.pdf
URL: M4IF http://www.m4if.org/
The November 2002 issue of The Safer Internet Newsletter published by European Union's Safer Internet programme has been published. The newsletter is available on the project web site, which also features resources, and is emailed in .pdf format to subscribers, free, on a monthly basis.
With all the transactions being developed for PDAs, it's only natural that we start thinking about how to pay for those purchasing whims online, too. Roman Vichr explains, on the IBM Developer Works web site, m-payment for the e-commerce trade.
URL: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wi-tip29.html?n-wi-1172
The November 1, 2002 edition of the "Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information" and the accompanying "Electronic Sources of Information: A Bibliography" (listing all indexed items) deal with all aspects of electronic publishing and include print and non-print materials, periodical articles, monographs and individual chapters in collected works. This edition includes 1,472 titles. Both the Index and the Bibliography are continuously updated. An introduction, which includes sample search and instructions on how to use the Subject Index and the Bibliography, is also available.
URL: http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/SUBJIN_A.HTM
URL: introduction http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/SUB_INT.HTM
"Rules of interactive storytelling in cross media communication", is the third in a series of articles on cross media communication, published by Europemedia.net, in which the author takes a look at interactive storytelling. (Source: europemedia.net)
URL: http://www.europemedia.net/showfeature.asp?ArticleID=13559
IBM makes available a number of its software products to developers. Among recent announcements:
• Multimodal Browser Extension is a technology that enables Microsoft Internet Explorer to render multimodal applications written according to the proposed W3C standard, XHTML+Voice (X+V). This technology, which includes IBM's automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech engines, allows testing of voice-enabled Web applications written in the X+V language. Learn more and download a free trial version via the link.
URL: http://www.alphaWorks.ibm.com/tech/mmbextension?open&l=TS110702,t=awfl
• Web Performance Tools is a set of applications that allow stress-testing of a web server, a web site, and/or a web application. When the two applications are combined, a stress configuration can be easily and quickly built that, with minor tuning, allows evaluation of the usability of a server, site, or Web application.
URL: http://www.alphaWorks.ibm.com/tech/wptools?open&l=NT110702,t=awfl
We have received a note concerning a meeting which was held in Brussels, Belgium on November 9, 2002 in an attempt to form a Network of Excellence (NoE) in Simulation with a view to a 6th Framework Programme proposal. There were about 50 people present representing most EU countries plus Switzerland and some of the Accession States. According to the note:
"Most of the attendees were 'hard'simulators (simulating machines, software systems, disease spread), and all except one were involved in specific simulation problems. About ten said that they included aspects of human behaviour in their simulations and about 5 specifically mentioned social simulation. Agent-based simulation is obviously a growth area, with about 30% of attendees talking about this. They wanted to develop tools, standards and methodologies to further the art and science of simulation to their problem domains. A few were concerned with relating different types of models and meta-models - on the whole they were not so much concerned with 'top-down' theory but 'bottom-up' practice".
All participants are being asked to answer some questions; give a summary of their research; their opinions of the way forward; and their contact details this week. The coordinator of the meeting Philippe Geril, then intends to send all those involved "draft documents for comment". Readers of El.pub who wish to learn more or become directly involved should email Philippe Geril.
Email: Philippe Geril mailto:Philippe.Geril@rug.ac.be
UK-based Iomart has released Version 3 of its software package NetIntelligence. Designed to be used in organisational units and companies up to 40,000 employees, NetIntelligence v3 offers an integrated solution for intelligently managing "Acceptable Use Policies". The product has the core capabilities of filtering Email and monitoring for "inappropriate use". NetIntelligence is available for all Microsoft and Novell agents; Sun and Linux agents are being developed. NetIntelligence is available direct.
URL: http://www.iomart.com
URL: http://www.netintelligence.com
IDG Executive Forums is adding a European event to its DEMO portfolio of technology product launch conferences. DEMOeurope which will focus specifically on new technology development across Europe will be held in Lille, France, in September 2003. DEMO and DEMOmobile conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products, which are hand-selected by executive producer Chris Shipley from across the spectrum of the personal technology marketplace. Top executives from the leading hardware and software technology companies, venture capitalists, journalists from key industry publications and industry analysts attend to preview the most promising products and technologies for the coming year.
The UK's Video Games trade association, ELSPA (The Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers has announced that a British produced game: Grand Theft Auto 3, has sold over a million copies in the UK and 12 million copies worldwide to date. ELSPA believes that its successor, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, also developed by the British studio, Rockstar North, looks set to be even bigger. On its first two days on sale in the UK, it sold over 250,000 copies, an unprecedented achievement for any game.
ELSPA is now publishing "Official UK Charts for Computer & Video Games" on a weekly basis. Compiled by market analysts ChartTrack the charts include the top 20 selling games across all formats and also provide information on individual formats. The charts also include bi-weekly analysis of the games sector in the UK.
According to ELSPA "computer and video games now dominate the entertainment field in the UK both in terms of consumer spend and also in exports. In the UK, consumers spend more on video games products than on buying or renting videos or trips to the cinema". For more information on video games in the UK, including UK charts and a guide to age ratings, visit the ELSPA web site.
URL: ELSPA http://www.elspa.com
A fully featured FTP server written in Java, is available from the Java Boutique on the Internet.com web site. The FTP server (an implementation of RFC 959) can be used to share files over the Internet -both upload and download are supported along with LDAP.
| About topic news We publish topic news occasionally with a separate page for each update, ensuring that links to our email alerter service continue to remain current. |
El.pub News A free email alerter of the latest news items and associated URLs |
|
|
Forward to next week |
Back to previous week |
|
|
File
Downloads - Please note
|
| File downloads from the El.pub site are currently suspended - the links however have not been updated to reflect this. If you would like access to a particular download file - please email webmasters@elpub.org with a suitable request confirming a description of the file you wish to download. |
El.pub - Interactive
Electronic Publishing R & D News and Resources
We welcome feedback
and contributions to the information service, and proposals for subjects for
the news service (mail to: webmasters@elpub.org)
Edited by: Logical Events Limited - electronic marketing, search engine marketing, pay per click advertising, search engine optimisation, website optimisation consultants in London, UK. Visit our website at: www.logicalevents.org
Last up-dated: 16 February 2024
© 2024 Copyright and disclaimer El.pub and www.elpub.org are brand names owned by Logical Events Limited - no unauthorised use of them or the contents of this website is permitted without prior permission.