I have been discussing the efficacy of our internal search tools and how hard it is to find stuff, and to be honest, assumed that it was the crapness that most users accuse their IT colleagues of. However a colleague, Bernard Horan recommended that I read “Searching the Workplace Web“, which suggests a different answer. Searching the Workplace Web argues that intranet’s are different from the internet and that more flexible, and different search algorithms are required to search an intranet; the most successful internet search algorithms are not necessarily going to work well on an intranet. …
What is the semantic web?
Today, Andreas Blumaur of the Semantic Web School, based in Vienna, Austria undertook a one day “Introduction to the Semantic Web”. Much of this is new to me, some of it is old, but uses new words to describe old concepts and none of it is particularly easy. It’ll take me a couple of days to work out what I’ve learned today and put it into my personal knowledge framework. …
Knowing me, knowing you in Zurich
I travelled to Zurich for a workshop on social media. It was a requirements gathering exercise and I originally published two articles, on the sun/oracle blog, one on Zurich and one on some ideas which became the social graph. These ideas were presented by Bertolt Meyer of Humbolt University, Berlin, who has recently published research into the fact that Knowledge Repositories don’t work. …
The duty to publish bites
I have been talking to some customers about Sun’s policy to publish Solaris as CDDL, and found that some of their staff are ‘balls out’ fans of the GPL; this places a duty to publish your source code if you have used GPL code and publish your binary. This is a very serious duty, and I am not sure these fans are getting management or their legal departments approval. The register reports that British Telecom have decided to publish their home appliance code because they feel that otherwise they may be in violation of the GPL since their home hub appliance uses Linux which is published under the GPL.
They are being hunted by http://gpl-violations.org/, whose page states
The ultimate goal is to make vendors of GPL licensed software understand that GPL is not public domain, and that there are license conditions that are to be fulfilled.
ooOOOoo
Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, republished here in June 2016. …
FLOSS, innovation and competiveness in the EU
While serving on the NESSI sterring committee, I got hold of a copy of “Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies sector in the EU“. There is a press release at Cordis here. and a slideshare version here. …