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!
Comments
Markus Hegi
-
http://colayer.com
2005-06-23 18:25:17
Thanks for the friendly review! - Actually we think that Colayer is one of the most flexible software you can have, as it is fully based on XML, also internally (no 'tight' relational structures, all eXtensible). Our aim was always to create an extremelly flexible platform to cope with and adapt best to the 'chaotic' way of human communication and co-creation
- but you are right in the sense of Interfaces: Colayer is a very young product, many basic innovations still happening and we are concerned that if we would focus right now on Integration, the innovation speed would drop quite a bit ... - so, many Interfaces to be built in future.
Yes, lets get together once and chat - I am about half of my time in Switzerland, then mostly in Davos - pass by, if you have time!
Some additional info about TECHNOLOGY - Yes, because of performance, we went from a C#.NET platform to a C core and .NET interfaces. We tried Java, but it was too slow for the core of the Software - The current version is compiled for a windows platform, there is however no Microsoft specific code, so we plan a Linux version with Java Interfaces for end of the year -
Looking forward meeting you - on the layer, and/or physically -
Regards
Markus Hegi - CEO Colayer
2005-06-23 18:25:17
Thanks for the friendly review! - Actually we think that Colayer is one of the most flexible software you can have, as it is fully based on XML, also internally (no 'tight' relational structures, all eXtensible). Our aim was always to create an extremelly flexible platform to cope with and adapt best to the 'chaotic' way of human communication and co-creation
- but you are right in the sense of Interfaces: Colayer is a very young product, many basic innovations still happening and we are concerned that if we would focus right now on Integration, the innovation speed would drop quite a bit ... - so, many Interfaces to be built in future.
Yes, lets get together once and chat - I am about half of my time in Switzerland, then mostly in Davos - pass by, if you have time!
Some additional info about TECHNOLOGY - Yes, because of performance, we went from a C#.NET platform to a C core and .NET interfaces. We tried Java, but it was too slow for the core of the Software - The current version is compiled for a windows platform, there is however no Microsoft specific code, so we plan a Linux version with Java Interfaces for end of the year -
Looking forward meeting you - on the layer, and/or physically -
Regards
Markus Hegi - CEO Colayer
Shadab Lari
-
http://colayer.com
2005-06-23 22:56:31
Hello Hannes, It was nice meeting you for sometime in Zurich. We would prefer to have our further interactions/discussions on 'The Layer' i.e. colayer.com collaboration portal. What you will have to do is:
1. Go to our corporate website (http://colayer.com) and you will find a link on the top right "Get your Test Space".
2. Please click on that link "Get your Test Space" and you will get a sign up form.
3. Put your details (prefered userid and password) and on submission of that form, your own community will be created by the system.
4. Like demonstrated to you on the offline version, you will have to click on the section and start interacting with us...
Lets keep colayer's Semantic web live through 'The Layer'...
Best Regards,
Shadab Lari
2005-06-23 22:56:31
Hello Hannes, It was nice meeting you for sometime in Zurich. We would prefer to have our further interactions/discussions on 'The Layer' i.e. colayer.com collaboration portal. What you will have to do is:
1. Go to our corporate website (http://colayer.com) and you will find a link on the top right "Get your Test Space".
2. Please click on that link "Get your Test Space" and you will get a sign up form.
3. Put your details (prefered userid and password) and on submission of that form, your own community will be created by the system.
4. Like demonstrated to you on the offline version, you will have to click on the section and start interacting with us...
Lets keep colayer's Semantic web live through 'The Layer'...
Best Regards,
Shadab Lari
Jerome
-
jerome [at] ifeedyou.com
2005-06-24 17:44:24
Anything new in the "Swiss Semantic Web User Group" side ?
2005-06-24 17:44:24
Anything new in the "Swiss Semantic Web User Group" side ?
