Why the 'Star Trek Computer' Will Be Open Source and Apache Licensed

psykocrime writes "The crazy kids at Fogbeam Labs have a new blog post positing that there is a trend towards advanced projects in NLP, Information Retrieval, Big Data and the Semantic Web moving to the Apache Software Foundation. Considering that Apache UIMA is a key component of IBM Watson, is it wrong to believe that the organization behind Hadoop, OpenNLP, Jena, Stanbol, Mahout and Lucene will ultimately be the home of a real 'Star Trek Computer'? Quoting: 'When we talk about how the Star Trek computer had “access to all the data in the known Universe”, what we really mean is that it had access to something like the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud. Jena provides a programmatic environment for RDF, RDFS and OWL, SPARQL and includes a rule-based inference engine. ... In addition to supporting the natural language interface with the system, OpenNLP is a powerful library for extracting meaning (semantics) from unstructured data - specifically textual data in an unstructured (or semi structured) format. An example of unstructured data would be the blog post, an article in the New York Times, or a Wikipedia article. OpenNLP combined with Jena and other technologies, allows “The computer” to “read” the Web, extracting meaningful data and saving valid assertions for later use.'" Speaking of the Star Trek computer, I'm continually disappointed that neither Siri nor Google Now can talk to me in Majel Barrett's voice.

Comments

No, that is not what we mean.

[Culture20]

'When we talk about how the Star Trek computer had âoeaccess to all the data in the known Universeâ, what we really mean is that it had access to something like the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud.

The Enterprise computer was not hampered by being in another galaxy, nor was Voyager's computer hampered by being in the Delta Quadrant. They had local copies of all the data at all times.

Re:*cough*

[Marxist Hacker 42]

LCARS any version will never be open sourced because Paramount/CBS will never release their rights to the design.

Now the original 23rd century design, which was all voice interface and blinky lights, would be neat, but pretty damn hard to implement until we can get a computer to "recognize speech" instead of "wreck a nice beach".

Re:In The Words Of William Shatner

[ArcadeMan]

I believe that should be "Get. A fucking. Life, eh?"

Re:*cough*

[tnk1]

That was only a problem because you were trying to talk to a Klingon interface. Klingon computers interpret everything as targeting orders.

Takedown notice != legitimate copyright claim

[Phil Urich]

The original post about the takedown request can be found at http://web.archive.org/web/20111130013603/http://code.google.com/p/moonblink/wiki/Tricorder. It says in part,

It's apparently the graphical design that's at issue, not the name. According to Wikipedia, "Gene Roddenberry's contract included a clause allowing any company able to create functioning technology to use the name". Now that GR is dead, I guess CBS believes they own swoopy curves.

Since I don't have legal weasels of my own, or the time to deal with this, that's it for Tricorder.

It's far from clear that CBS has any copyright on LCARS, it's more that any entity like CBS with enough money to throw at the legal system can get away with claiming such, and random people just have to go along with it thanks to the way our legal system works.