By Stephen Downes
July 4, 2003
Copying Troubles a Hiccup for Linux
Festival
This is ridiculous. According to this
item (via elearnspace), CD copiers declined to create
copies of Linux distributions because of copyright
agreements. The excuse offered was that the SCO case
created an issue. Then it was argued that the owner of the
CDs could not prove they had the rights. Both excuses are,
of course, flimsy. The real reason surfaces: Microsoft has
signed "no compete" causes with the copiers, prohibiting
them from copying Linux distributions. To those of you in
Microsoft who told me, to my face, that Microsoft has
changed, I can only laugh. By Richard Wood, New Zealand
News, July 1, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Relation between Ontologies and
Schema-languages: Translating OIL-specifications in
XML-Schema
"Ontologies provide a shared and
common understanding of a domain that can be communicated
between people and application systems," writes the author.
A schema, meanwhile, "provides [the] basic vocabulary and
predefined structuring mechanisms for providing information
in XML." Consequently, "Ontologies applied to on-line
information source may be seen as explicit
conceptualizations that describe the semantics of the
data." In other words, a schema defines what properties an
object can have, while an ontology specifies the possibile
values of those properties. So (very roughly) a schema
would say that a car could have a "colour" while an
ontology wuld say that a "colour" could be "red, orange,
yellow, green, blue or purple." Ontologies can be defined
using a language called OIL, or Ontology Interface Layer.
The bulk of the article is devoted to explaining OIL,
comparing it with XML Schemas, and showing how the two
language systems interact. Tough, technical, but well worth
reading. By Michel Klein, Dieter Fensel, Frank van Harmelen
and Ian Horrocks, Linköping Electronic Articles in Computer
and Information Science, December 31, 200-31 8:33 p.m.
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Blogger API Update
Change
continues to sweep the blogging and RSS development
community as Blogger (recently purchased by Google)
announces that it is abandoning its old XML-RPC based
application program interface (API) and is developing a new
protocol based on SOAP. This change comes as a consequence
of the recent Echo project, an alternative to RSS for
blogs. This announcement comes by way of their brand new
Blogger Developers Network blog. By Evan Williams, Blogger
Developers Network, July 1, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Peter
Suber, who until last September published the Free Online
Scholarship (FOS) news regularly, is now able to devote
much more time to the same enterprise after obtaining
support from SPARC. Additionally, he maintains the Open Access News blog, which has just
changed its name from FOS News. This is great news, as
anyone who is familiar with Suber's work will attest. By
Peter Suber, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, July 4, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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