Apropos Swiss Webapps

By hannes @ 22:00

[ Developing Software ]

Talking about product-oriented, international web-companies based in Switzerland:

futurelab's snapmania deployed at album.nzz.ch (Image 1) The Swiss Post (owner of search.ch) offers a competing service, together with daybyday.de
map.search.ch now is being integrated into Google's results, just search for a town in Switzerland and find a link to their map. Sweet. (Image 2)
So: The Swiss Post becomes cool. They are not going win in the field of foto-apps, but having confirmed and checked records of just about everybody in the country they will win big in the digital identity business. They're looking for PKI partners.

Just stating the obvious. No?

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Visite à l'EPFL

By hannes @ 19:59

[ Academia ]

Today I went to meet neuroscientist Martin Rumo at EPFL. He's working there at the Biologically Inspired Robotics Group and lives with his fiancée in the pretty town of Morges. I can't say much about his work, but he's going to run stuff on BlueGene/L, currently the most powerful computer in the world. Not bad.
Anyway, I'll quickly have to explain the pictures above:

Inner courtyard of one of the informatics buildings. Special feature: Outdoor whiteboards! Way cool.
Martin at the lab, compiling some movie visualizing some process.
Same lab: A snake bot. There's also a fish bot and some modular robots that dynamically reconfigure and gather as new bots.
The new computer science building. Pas mal.
Presentation of the legendary BioWall.
The beautiful landscape somewhere between Lausanne and Fribourg.

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Last week's stuff

By hannes @ 19:19

[ Undefined ]

Last Monday evening I attended an event by Avenir Suisse on the topic "Engpass Föderalismus"("bottleneck federalism") with a number of high-profile speakers from politics and academia on the panel. They presented an interesting study (statistics, as political as usual) on what I'd call the "informal networks" (commuter networks, etc.) determining the real structure of the country, instead of the structure given by the political structure (the Swiss cantons), and the conflicts arising from this discrepancy.
Glad to see the discussion shifting away from granularity (which isn't really an issue) towards connectedness (or the lack of it) and the costs and benefits involved.
I'm now officially fellow number 398 of the Free Software Foundation Europe, as such I'm going to represent the Swiss FSFE Chapter at the Swiss e-government standardization organisation (eCH). If you have an F/OSS-related opinion on what's happening (or not) at eCH, please drop me a line, ok?
mediagonal, my dearest company, now definitely is becoming the official Swiss Moodle partner. That's good news, especially with our moodle-based IMS/QTI2 infrastructure becoming of age while solid e-learning modules are being built on it for big time clients such as a major national telco and the countries most renowned newspaper.
"Some very disturbing developments have emerged in the Semantic Web community." - Stefano's comments are among the clearest.
I'm thinking about initiating a "Swiss Semantic Web User Group". There's enough people out there in the valleys, and after the exercise in community building phpug) has been I think this should be doable. And I do think there's a lot to learn from each other, I do believe in the utility of strong local expert network, in communities of practice. If you have any ideas about this, please let me know.
I should work more on my Master's Thesis! Dammit.
"Art 36 Basel is making broad use of RFID tags to convey information about the individual pieces to visitors and to collect and distribute personal information about visitors and potential customers." Oh.
On Barry Hardy's initiative (thanks Barry!) I met with a group of Colayer employees on Saturday. Based in Switzerland, they develop a virtual collaboration platform (with about 40 programmers in India) that in itself seems to be pretty flexible. I think they see their product as an enterprise-wide layer (they always referr to it as "The Layer") where virtual organisations can exchange ideas and have their discussions and meetings online, accidental hallway meetings included.
I think that it's mainly the real-time aspects of this that make the product pretty powerful.
A technology tidbit: I was told the server-side platform originally had been implemented in Java, because of performance reasons(?) it now is being reimplemented in C (?), with the side-effect of being Microsoft-only at the moment.
Stepping back a bit, I see some shortcomings in terms of openness and connectivity - "The Layer" seems to be rather monolithic and centralistic, expecting other pieces of enterprise software to integrate into it if need be.
You know that I want systems to integrate, enabling both software and people to collaborate more effectively, but their ideas (as perceived by myself) don't seem to foster that kind of integration (APIs! RDF! Microformats! XML! A mesh of tools and services! Whatever. Perhaps nobody wants all that anyway).
Oh, and by the way: They didn't really think semantic web technologies could be of any immediate use for them. Got invited to meet their CEO some of these day, though.
However: It was a really good thing to talk to folks from one of those rare product-oriented, international web-companies based here in Switzerland. Thumbs up!
If you really read all of the above: I'm sorry. My writing isn't really reader-oriented, it's rather something I do for myself. It's not actually an entertainment blog here, is it. But glad you read it!

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ArtCast - "a podcast in a cultural context and with cultural content"

By hannes @ 00:32

[ Arts ]

ArtCast is up and running!

Patrik and Barbara started their barefaced and broke-from-beginning arts-and-culture podcast with a first show

from VOLTAshow, a new contemporary arts platform running parallel to LISTE and ART (which some say should be f*cking boycotted).

So congratulations to ArtCast, I really did enjoy the show, it's direct and bottom-up just like podcasting is supposed to be. Good job, and I guess we can expect it to become better and better over the coming shows - the two obviously know what they're doing.

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Basel ist okay

By hannes @ 22:56

[ Social ]

I spent all of last week in Basel, becoming a (hold your breath) "Certified Knowledge Manager". More about that most interesting experience later on, now I just want to tell you about how pleasant a stay at good old Basel that was.
Now that ART is starting (remember last year?) there's really quite some stuff going on (some say too much). I had the pleasure to hang around with Barbara Strebel, I really did enjoy go see the Gare Du Nord, hear the organizer of the ART Conversations, and stop by at the UBERMORGEN vernissage at plug.in, things like that. I liked it.

The first image above I took at some kind of performance called "Staatsempfang - Das rotokoll" (Anna Geering, Jo Dunkel and 25 performers), a parody mock-up of a Swiss state reception, with all the bells and whistles that took place at the Kunstmuseum, the second one is a shot taken from the UBERMORGEN BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR,

Jep, that was somewhat funny.

My girlfriend had just left me (and is with some student of political science called Paul now, and I felt -pathetically- felt like wounded deer at dusk), so that Basel program was a good one indeed.

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ESWC05 Report

By hannes @ 22:50

[ Semantic ]

As I didn't manage to do any conference blogging at the 'Second European Semantic Web Conference', here are a few (late) impressions, memories, and dodgy conclusions:

First a conclusion: The Semantic Web is sexy. Right, we knew that before, but looking at the sharp increase in the number of attendees it clearly must be pretty attractive. Stars like the most-unusual, all-pink dressed Jeremy Carroll or the astounding Lederhosen-Dieter prove the point. No doubt, that thang's hot.
Then: There were a couple of conference papers with Swiss contributions. In fact I didn't expect the UniSG MCM to be involved twice ( "A POP-based Replanning Agent for Automatic Web Service Composition", "Towards an Ontology-Based Distributed Architecture for Paid Content"), seeing some EPFL folks over there was no surprise at all (paper: "Optimally Distributing Interactions between Composed Semantic Web Services"). There must have been many, many more Austrians than Swiss, though. From a mentality point of view I'd say the Semantic Web is more Swiss than Austrian, but let's better not this discuss this :-)
Besides attending the main conference presentations, I afforded to attend one tutorial and one workshop - as said, that trip wasn't about holidays. The tutorial, "MDA Standards for Ontology Development" wanted to align theory and practice by connecting UML via its ultimate meta-meta-model(!), the self-describing MOF with all that Semantic Web trumpery. Very, very interesting, but after the meta-meta-level it started to feel a bit esoteric, so I doubt this will help a lot reconciling the UML engineers with the OWL and RDF zealots. Cool stuff, anyway.
The Best Paper Award ironically went to the a non-European group, for a paper on Temporal RDF -and deservedly so.
Then there was THE WORKSHOP (on "Scripting for the Semantic Web", see pictures), my first personal appearance on the academic stage with a peer-reviewed paper. I was underprepared and nervous, but it was fun indeed. This scripting workshop mainly was a PHP workshop, which is pretty cool and certainly promising.
Finally: Thanks a lot to PAI for sponsoring me a bit, as well as to the mediagonal crew for being so flexible and understanding for all my adventures in those research things.