Consumer Technology Bill of Rights.

Within minutes, I also signed up with DigitalConsumer.org and faxed a letter of support for the Consumer Technology Bill of Rights. The bill is a simple, positive assertion of the rights that consumers have had until recently. These include:

• The right to “time-shift” media (recording a TV show and watching it later).
• The right to “space-shift” media (copying a CD to a portable MP3 player).
• The right to make backup copies of your media.

Activism is effortless with organizations like this.

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

It's all good i suppose.

Threat Is Seen to Heirloom Software. The personal computer industry began less than three decades ago, but already some of the early software programs that defined the era are an endangered species, the potential victims of “bit rot,” according to a prominent digital archivist. By John Markoff. [New York Times: Technology]

hmm, we've know about this phenomena for a while. why doesn't someone must establish a foundation that will hold such things.

Torvalds Suggests DiBona for SCO Panel. SCO has offered to document its far-reaching infringement claims against Linux for independent experts. The creator of Linux wants someone believable on the panel. [Linux Journal]

I tend to think that it would be good to have a diverse panel of experts. DiBona is a good possibility for this.

CALL FOR PAPERS — note extended deadline

Human Language Technology for the Semantic Web and Web Services

http://gate.ac.uk/conferences/iswc2003/index.html

Workshop at ISWC 2003
International Semantic Web Conference
Sanibel Island, Florida, 20-23 October 2003

Hamish Cunningham
Atanas Kiryakov
Ying Ding

The Semantic Web aims to add a machine tractable, re-purposeable layer
to
compliment the existing web of natural language hypertext. In order to
realise this vision, the creation of semantic annotation, the linking of
web pages to ontologies, and the creation, evolution and interrelation
of
ontologies must become automatic or semi-automatic processes.

In the context of new work on distributed computation, Semantic Web
Services (SWSs) go beyond current services by adding ontologies and
formal knowledge to support description, discovery, negotiation,
mediation
and composition. This formal knowledge is often strongly related to
informal materials. For example, a service for multi-media content
delivery over broadband networks might incorporate conceptual indices of
the content, so that a smart VCR (such as next generation TiVO) can
reason
about programmes to suggest to its owner. Alternatively, a service for
B2B
catalogue publication has to translate between existing semi-structured
catalogues and the more formal catalogues required for SWS purposes. To
make these types of services cost-effective we need automatic knowledge
harvesting from all forms of content that contain natural language text
or
spoken data.

Other services do not have this close connection with informal content,
or
will be created from scratch using Semantic Web authoring tools. For
example, printing or compute cycle or storage services. In these cases
the
opposite need is present: to document services for the human reader
using
natural language generation.

This workshop will provide a forum for workers in the field of human
language technology for the Semantic Web and for Semantic Web Services
to
present their latest results. The aim is to provide a snapshot of the
state of the art, dealing with a wide range of issues, including but not
limited to:

* automatic and semi-automatic annotation of web pages;
* semantic indexing and retrieval of documents, combining the
strengths
of IE and IR;
* integration of data about language in language processing components
with ontological data;
* robustness across genres and domains;
* ease of embedding in Semantic Web applications;
* ontology learning, evolving and merging;
* automatic web service description augmentation;
* automatic semantic structure documentation;
* language technology for automatic Web service discovery;
* adaptation of generation techniques to SWS applications.

The themes of the workshop have partly emerged from the Special Interest
Group on Language Technologies and the Semantic Web (SIG5), part of the
OntoWeb thematic network (http://ontoweb-lt.dfki.de/).

Audience:

The issues addressed by the workshop are at the core of the Semantic Web
enterprise. The killer applications that demonstrate the potential of
this
technology to a mass market have yet to emerge, and will likely not do
so
until a much larger amount of data is available. The techniques covered
by
this workshop are one of the most important routes to generating this
data. The workshop is relevant to:
* researchers from the Human Language Technology areas;
* researchers from the Ontology and Knowledge Acquisition and
Management
areas;
* industrial technology providers involved in Knowledge Management,
Information Integration, Information and Library Science, Web
Services.

Organizing Committee:

Dr. Hamish Cunningham -
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~hamish, hamish@dcs.shef.ac.uk
Atanas Kiryakov – http://www.sirma.bg/ak.htm, naso@sirma.bg
Dr. Ying Ding – http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ying, ying.ding@uibk.ac.at

May 31st 2003 deadline for submission of papers
June 30th 2003 notification of acceptance
July 15th 2003 final copy due
20-23 October 2003 conference

The fee for the workshop will be $50. Participants will be required to
register for the main ISWC2003 conference.

Submissions:

Submissions should be sent electronically in PDF format to the
organising committee:

hamish@dcs.shef.ac.uk naso@sirma.bg ying.ding@uibk.ac.at

Submitted papers should be formatted in the style of the Springer
publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS):
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
The emphasis during reviewing will be on content, not format,
however.

Programme Committee:

Alexander Maedche, Robert Bosch Gmbh, Germany
Asun Gomez-Perez, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
Christopher A. Welty, IBM Watson Research Center, USA
David Harper, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK
Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield, UK
Dieter Fensel, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Dieter Merkl, TU Vienna, Austria
Fabio Crestani, University of Strathclyde, UK
Jan Paralic, Technical University Kosice, Slovakia
John Davies, British Telecom, UK
John Tait, University of Sunderland, UK
Jon Patrick, Univeristy of Sydney, Australia *
Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, UK
Maria Vargas-Vera, Open University, UK
Marin Dimitrov, OntoText Lab, Bulgaria
Paul Buitelaar, DFKI, GE
Robert Engels, CognIT, Norway
Steffen Staab, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Vojtech Svatek, University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic
Wim Peters, University of Sheffield, UK
York Sure, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Yorick Wilks, University of Sheffield, UK

* to be confirmed

This is reminder that the submission deadline for the
MDM/KDD2003
The Fourth International Workshop on Multimedia Data Mining
August 27th, 2003

is in 15 DAYS (May 31st).

You can find more information about the Workshop at
http://research.it.uts.edu.au/emarkets/mdmkdd2003/

We invite you to submit a paper to the Workshop.

The International Conference on Web Services – Europe 2003
(ICWS-Europe'03)

Theme: Web Services Architectures, Infrastructures and Applications

Location: Erfurt, Germany
Date: 2003-09-23 and 2003-09-24

Web site: http://www.jeckle.de/ICWS03-Europe
http://tab.computer.org/tfec/icws03

Important Dates
Deadline Paper Submission: 2003-05-23:
Notification of acceptance: 2003-06-20
Camera ready copies in electronic format: 2003-06-30.

The International Conference on Web Services – Europe 2003 (ICWS-Europe'03) is an international conference focusing on Web Services research and development and will be held in Germany in Oct, 2003. ICWS-Europe'03 is an extended event of the 2003 International Conference on Web Services (ICWS'03) in Europe. It will be held concurrently with Net.ObjectDays'2003 (http://www.netobjectdays.org/node03/en/index.html) in Germany. ICWS provides a forum for researchers and industry practitioners to exchange information regarding advancements in the state of the art and practice of Web Services, as well as to identify the emerging research topics and define the future of Web Services computing. The first ICWS'03 will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, June 23 – 26, 2003.

After some time of early experience Web Services are moving themselves from a new highly fragmented technology to a piece of nowadays infrastructures which promise to address various current challenges. These include classical integration and data access challenges in a heterogeneous environment. Web Services provide an open and technology-agnostic interface, and furthermore propel new usage paradigms in distributed computing infrastructures like Grid services based OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture).

Successful adoption of Web Service technology relies on the definition of interoperable architectural building blocks which can be integrated in existing software architectures, like J2EE or CORBA heritage. Interoperability will surely prove itself as the critical success factor of the Web Service proliferation. In order to accomplish these interoperability various standardization bodies such as the W3C, UN or OASIS founded activities to create specifications and products implementing these building blocks.

In the coming months, more and more early adopters will gain experience in deploying web services in their enterprises. Enterprises might try to extend the reach to external partners and lead to business to business exploring web services based integration. Web services metering, monitoring such as SLA (service level agreement) and choreography or web services flow management within enterprise and across enterprise will gain more attention.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

* Web Services based and Traditional Integration Architectures
* Web services metering
* Web Services and Semantic Web
* Location-based Web Services Applications and Pervasive Services
* Ontology for Web Services
* Grid-based Services
* Emerging Standards
* Case Studies of Web Services Solutions
* Interoperability — Experiences and Desiderata
* Web Services and E-Commerce
* Web Services for Business Process Integration and Management
* Federated Web Services Discovery
* Web Services Choreography and Composition
* Web services performance and modeling

Full papers must not exceed 15 pages (see http://www.netobjectdays.org Menu For Authors). All papers should be in Adobe portable document format (PDF) or PostScript format. The paper should have a cover page, which includes a 200-word abstract, a list of keywords, and author's e-mail address. Authors should submit a full paper via electronic submission to mario@jeckle.de or zhanglj@us.ibm.com. All papers accepted for ICWS-Europe'03 are peer-reviewed and will be published in a special proceedings “Web Services Computing” by Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

General Co-Chairs
* Bogdan Franczyk, Leipzig University, Germany
* Jen-Yao Chung, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Program Co-Chairs
* Mario Jeckle, University of Applied Sciences Furtwangen, Germany
* Liang-Jie Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Industrial Chair
* Zongwei Luo (University of Hong Kong)

Program Committee
* Farhad Arbab (CWI Amsterdam)
* Boualem Benatallah (University of New South Wales)
* Fabio Casati (HP)
* Schahram Dustdar (Vienna University of Technology)
* Jean-Philippe Martin-Flatin (CERN)
* Ulrich Frank (Koblenz University)
* Garciela Gonzales (Sam Houston State University)
* Patrick Hung (Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Org.)
* Arne Koschel (Iona)
* Zongwei Luo (University of Hong Kong)
* Ingo Melzer (DaimlerChrysler)
* Michael Stal (Siemens)
* Son Cao Tran (New Mexico State University)
* Rainer Unland (University of Duisburg-Essen)
* Athanasios Vasilakos (University of Thessaly)

Important Dates

Extended Deadline: 2003-05-23:
Notification of acceptance: 2003-06-20
Camera-ready copies in electronic format: 2003-06-30.
–