I feel the same way. RDFa is the only standard and is the one seeing measurable adoption, with big names as Best Buy and the IPTC (Reuters, AP, AFP, etc.) recently announcing their adoption. Heck, even Google and Yahoo were already supporting RDFa for ecommerce through GoodRelations.
This decision does seem more driven by politics then technical reasons. If it would be a truly innovative step, I'm more sympathetic to following actors instead/until a standard has been written, but in this case I seems a somewhat conscious effort to avoid a perfectly good W3C-standard...
The comment "It's a sad day for the freedom of scientific research", misses the complexity of the debate surrounding the inherently political balance between technological advances driven by private interest and the opinion and interest of the larger populace.
A colleague a has published extensively and recently on this very subject, the debate and issue of GGO's in Belgium, these two publications, available from his homepage are highly recommended:
Maeseele, P. (2011) On News Media and Democratic Debate: Framing Agricultural Biotechnology in Northern Belgium. International Communication Gazette 73 (1-2): 83-105.
Maeseele, P. (2010) Science journalism and social debate on modernization risks. Interview by Filippo Bonaventura. Journal of Science Communication 9 (4): C02.
I find it also interesting to look at the link between taxation and welfare systems. To simplify: in liberal welfare regimes (US, UK) there is relatively litte taxation of the middle and (especialy) higher income groups, and little redistribution to the lower groups. In continental welfare regimes (Belgium, Germany,...) the middle group get taxed more heavily, and there is more distribution to the lower, but the highest income group gets left alone (still more taxation then in the US&UK). In the Scandinavian model, there is the largest amount of redistribution, but the brunt is carried by the highest income groups, while the taxation of the middle group is relatively low--not a bad setup, seem from an egalitarian & economic perspective...
the 9600GT will give you decent gaming performance these days... I was in the middle of placing an order for PC-parts, including the 9600GT, when I saw this story in the rss-feed. Now I'm wondering, is an announcement like this likely to push prices lower for the 9600GT (released in feb)? And while I'm at it: linux support seems better for NVidia's 9600GT then ATI's mid-range competitor, the HD 3850, but does anyone here has any experience with those cards running linux?
NASA's an other big name who recently started using semweb-technology "for real": "Last week POPS--the expertise location service we built for NASA--went into production as an Agency-wide application; it's thought to be the first "institutional" (that is, business) Semantic Web app deployed Agency-wide at NASA. http://clarkparsia.com/weblog/2008/02/07/our-babys-all-grows-up/
I don't know if it is a development that influenced this move by AAP, but the EC is considering new guidlines on open access to research that is funded by EU-grants:
"The European Commission is preparing new guidelines for the 3 billion a year European scientific publishing industry that could put pressure on major firms such as Elsevier or Oxford University Press to give free access to articles based on EU-funded work.... The EU should consider establishing a "policy mandating published articles arising from European Community-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives" the report states." (EUObserver, 25/01)
Seems reasonable imho... On a personal and self-interested note, I would also like software that is funded by EU & government (through academia) to be open sourced where possible, starting with the named entity recognition software behind News Explorer (which is developed by the EU's Joint Research Center);-)
Ignoring your flaimbate jab, I do find the difference with the approach of the Flemish publishing-industry interesting. They simply chose to opt-out from Google News.be when it was launched, but stayed in de google.be index (try site:standaard.be, or site:vrtnieuws.net). The later choice seems logical if you want to get revenue from your pay-per-article section (like De Standaard), and shows that they are not opposed in principle to being indexed; but why then opt-out of Google News?
The only reason I can think of atm., is the involvement of all the major (Flemish) publishing concerns like VUM/Corelio, Roularta, Concentra,... in Mediargus, an -- very usefull, but expensive for individuals -- aggregation en clearing service for (mainly) Flemish media.
Mabye they see Google News (but not the standard google index) as competition for that initiative? Dunno...
Cosing; as a matter of fact here is it in full. From the page:
"Artist Brian Springer spent a year scouring the airwaves with a satellite dish grabbing back channel news feeds not intended for public consumption. The result of his research is SPIN, one of the most insightful films ever made about the mechanics of how television is used as a tool of social control to distort and limit the American public's perception of reality."
"a fact checker... that compiles things from various sources and then presents it to a human to do final checking?"
Offtopic, but you may wish to play around with FACTory, a 'game' where you anwser trivia-like questions mined from the web and other sources. If enough people agree that a statement is true, it is entered in the Cyc Knowledge Base, a quite large knowledge base suitable for natural language processing, AI and/or Semantic Web-research.
(You have also a LGPL-version, OpenCyc, and ResearchCyc -- free for non-commercial/research use.)
Slashdot Mirror
I feel the same way. RDFa is the only standard and is the one seeing measurable adoption, with big names as Best Buy and the IPTC (Reuters, AP, AFP, etc.) recently announcing their adoption. Heck, even Google and Yahoo were already supporting RDFa for ecommerce through GoodRelations. This decision does seem more driven by politics then technical reasons. If it would be a truly innovative step, I'm more sympathetic to following actors instead/until a standard has been written, but in this case I seems a somewhat conscious effort to avoid a perfectly good W3C-standard...
I find it also interesting to look at the link between taxation and welfare systems. To simplify: in liberal welfare regimes (US, UK) there is relatively litte taxation of the middle and (especialy) higher income groups, and little redistribution to the lower groups. In continental welfare regimes (Belgium, Germany, ...) the middle group get taxed more heavily, and there is more distribution to the lower, but the highest income group gets left alone (still more taxation then in the US&UK). In the Scandinavian model, there is the largest amount of redistribution, but the brunt is carried by the highest income groups, while the taxation of the middle group is relatively low--not a bad setup, seem from an egalitarian & economic perspective...
NASA's an other big name who recently started using semweb-technology "for real": "Last week POPS--the expertise location service we built for NASA--went into production as an Agency-wide application; it's thought to be the first "institutional" (that is, business) Semantic Web app deployed Agency-wide at NASA. http://clarkparsia.com/weblog/2008/02/07/our-babys-all-grows-up/
I don't know if it is a development that influenced this move by AAP, but the EC is considering new guidlines on open access to research that is funded by EU-grants:
Seems reasonable imho... On a personal and self-interested note, I would also like software that is funded by EU & government (through academia) to be open sourced where possible, starting with the named entity recognition software behind News Explorer (which is developed by the EU's Joint Research Center) ;-)
Ignoring your flaimbate jab, I do find the difference with the approach of the Flemish publishing-industry interesting. They simply chose to opt-out from Google News.be when it was launched, but stayed in de google.be index (try site:standaard.be, or site:vrtnieuws.net). The later choice seems logical if you want to get revenue from your pay-per-article section (like De Standaard), and shows that they are not opposed in principle to being indexed; but why then opt-out of Google News?
... in Mediargus, an -- very usefull, but expensive for individuals -- aggregation en clearing service for (mainly) Flemish media.
The only reason I can think of atm., is the involvement of all the major (Flemish) publishing concerns like VUM/Corelio, Roularta, Concentra,
Mabye they see Google News (but not the standard google index) as competition for that initiative? Dunno...
Cosing; as a matter of fact here is it in full. From the page:
"Artist Brian Springer spent a year scouring the airwaves with a satellite dish grabbing back channel news feeds not intended for public consumption. The result of his research is SPIN, one of the most insightful films ever made about the mechanics of how television is used as a tool of social control to distort and limit the American public's perception of reality."
Isn't really a novel idea, it reminds me of this prototype, developed by General Electric for the US Army in the sixties (see also).
"a fact checker ... that compiles things from various sources and then presents it to a human to do final checking?"
Offtopic, but you may wish to play around with FACTory, a 'game' where you anwser trivia-like questions mined from the web and other sources. If enough people agree that a statement is true, it is entered in the Cyc Knowledge Base, a quite large knowledge base suitable for natural language processing, AI and/or Semantic Web-research.
(You have also a LGPL-version, OpenCyc, and ResearchCyc -- free for non-commercial/research use.)