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Saturday, May 28, 2011

THE SEMANTICS ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2011

(CLICKING ON THE TITLE WE ARE REDIRECTED TO W3C ORG )


DEAR FELLOW  READERS,HELLO,
ON 18/5/11 THE ANNUAL MEETING OF  EUROPEAN SEMANTICS SOCIETY  WAS HOLD IN EU COMMISSION'S ,ALBERT BORSCHETTE CONFERENCE CENTRE  AT BRUSSELS.
THE EVENT WAS FOLLOWED ,APART FROM EUROPEAN STAKEHOLDERS AND BY THE U.S.A  Federal Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP) ,BEING REPRESENTED BY ITS DIRECTOR DR.BRAND NIEMANN.
THE SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES ARE THE NEXT STEP BEFORE WEB 3.0 AND WEB 4.0.
OUR EPAPHOS TEAMWORK HAD FOLLOWED ALSO THE E- PROCUREMENT WORKSHOP ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CRISES ON THE PROCUREMENT PROCEDURES ,ON 25/11/11 .
WE WOULD LIKE TO THANK DR.NIEMANN FOR  HIS GENTLE RESPONSE AND PROVIDED INFORMATION,TO OUR QUESTIONS,WHICH  INSPIRED US FOR THE PRESENTATION LAID BELOW,ABOUT THE FUTURE OF SEMANTICS INTEROPERABILITY.
EUCHARISTΩΜΕΝ
A.CH.





Semantic Wave Report: Industry Roadmap to Web 3.0 and Multibillion Dollar Market Opportunities.

Project10X’s landmark industry study charts the evolution of semantic technologies and applications and projects the growth of multi-billion dollar markets for Web 3.0 products and services.
Semantic Wave maps the frontier.

The technology section of the report examines five strategic technology themes and shows how innovations in these areas are driving development of new categories of products, services, and solution capabilities. These themes include: executable knowledge, semantic user experience, semantic social computing, semantic applications, and semantic infrastructure. The study examines the role of semantic technologies in more than 100 application categories.  An addendum to the report surveys more than 300 companies that are researching and developing semantic technology products and services. 
The market section of the report examines the growth of supply and demand for products, services and solutions based on semantic technologies. Specifically, the report segments and discusses semantic wave markets from five perspectives:
research and development, information and communication technology, consumer internet, enterprise horizontal, and industry verticals. Viewed as horizontal and vertical market sectors, each presents multi-billion dollar opportunities in the near- to mid-term. The study presents 150 case studies in 15 horizontal and vertical sectors that illustrate the scope of current market adoption. 

Semantic Wave Report tells the story of web 3.0.  

The semantic wave embraces four stages of internet growth.
The first stage, Web 1.0, was about connecting information and getting on the net. Web 2.0 is about connecting people — putting the “I” in user interface, and the “we” into a web of social participation. The next stage, web 3.0, is starting now. It is about representing meanings, connecting knowledge, and putting them to work in ways that make our experience of internet more relevant, useful, and enjoyable. Web 4.0 will come later. It is about connecting intelligences in a ubiquitous web where both people and things can reason and communicate together. 
Over the next decade the semantic wave will spawn multi-billion dollar technology markets that drive trillion dollar global economic expansions to transform industries as well as our experience of the internet. Drivers and market forces for adoption of semantic technologies in web 3.0 are building. The Semantic Wave Report projects:
  • Public and private sector R&D relating to semantic technologies in the 2008-2010 period will exceed $8 billion.
  • Global ICT markets for semantic technology infused products and services will grow from  $2.1 B in 2006 to $52.4 B in 2010.
  • During this same period, number of suppliers with R&D, products, and services in the semantic space will more than double, as major IT, telecom, and consumer electronics players enter the semantic space. 
  • Consumer internet will become a major growth area for semantic technology. Consumers account for about one-fourth of global ICT spending. Drivers for semantic technology here include the growth of internet enabled mobility and the success of web 2.0. However, the study projects that the double-digit growth rates for internet and mobile advertising, content and entertainment will prove to be the most powerful economic driver for adoption of semantic solutions. 
  • Enterprise adoption of semantic technologies will increase dramatically. Public and private sector enterprises represent three-fourths of global ICT spending. Where do semantic technologies apply in the enterprise? Everywhere, according to the case studies summarized in the report. Service oriented computing middleware and a broad range of conventional commercial off-the-shelf software will move to semantic technologies. 
  • Industry verticals will buy semantic technologies packaged as whole solutions that address specific business problems and deliver value. Near to mid-term the semantic wave will drive restructuring of publishing, media, entertainment, information services, and software industries. Longer term, the impact knowledge technologies will transform government, manufacturing, and service sectors worldwide.

What is the Role of Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 Semantic Technologies in the Coming Era of Transparent, Collaborative, Connected E-Governance?

The US has a new administration that values transparency, citizen participation, collaboration, information sharing, and internet technology. This presentation maps the role of information and communication technologies (specifically, cloud computing, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 semantic technologies) in the evolution of government information systems from e-gov (silos with web front ends) to connected governance (e.g. distributed social computing environments for collaborative work, information sharing, knowledge management, and participatory decision-making.) We suggest steps that government at all levels should consider taking now.



Web3 And The Next Internet - New Directions And Opportunities For STM Publishing

The new ecosystem for scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publishing is digital, trans-semiotic, data and knowledge intensive, social, connected, collaborative, community-driven, mobile, multi-channel, immersive, and massively networked and computational.
In this era of open, co-evolving, networked techno-socio-economic processes, commercial publishing models based on exclusive literature collections are simply not enough.
By understanding changes coming with Web 3.0 and the next internet, STM publishers can identify new roles and profitable business opportunities.

Semantic Technology Solutions for Gov 2.0: Citizen-Friendly Recovery.gov and Data.gov with Transparency, Opennes, and Collaboration

The Obama administration has set the goal of achieving and unprecedented level of openness, participation, transparency, and collaboration in government. This applies especially to the accessibility of government information and the tracking of stimulus expenditures. This presentation discusses ways that cloud computing, web 2.0, and web 3.0 semantic technologies can be used to deliver citizen-friendly solutions for recovery.gov and data.gov that fulfill the goals of the new administration, and includes a practical demonstration based on technology developed by Cambridge Semantics.


more at  http://www.project10x.com/





VIDEO SOURCE   http://www.generalsemantics.org/

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Saturday, May 21, 2011

FUTURE SUSTAINABILITY ON G(R)AIA DEPENDS FROM (M)AR(E)S COLONIZATION

(CLICKING ON THE TITLE WE CAN READ AN OUTDATED NASA'S ARTICLE )

How We Can Fly to Mars in This Decade – And on the Cheap



SpaceX, a private firm that develops rockets and spacecraft, recently announced it will field a heavy lift rocket within two years that can deliver more than twice the payload of any booster now flying. This poses a thrilling question: Can we reach Mars in this decade?

It may seem incredible—since conventional presentations of human Mars exploration missions are filled with depictions of gigantic, futuristic, nuclear-powered interplanetary spaceships whose operations are supported by a virtual parallel universe of orbital infrastructure. There’s nothing like that on the horizon. But I believe we could reach Mars with the tools we have today, or will have in short order.  Here's how it could be done:


The SpaceX’s Falcon-9 Heavy rocket will have a launch capacity of 53 metric tons to low Earth orbit. This means that if a conventional hydrogen-oxygen chemical rocket upper stage were added, it would have the capability of sending 17.5 tons on a trajectory to Mars, placing 14 tons in Mars orbit, or landing 11 tons on the Martian surface.

The company has also developed and is in the process of demonstrating a crew capsule, known as the Dragon, which has a mass of about eight tons. While its current intended mission is to ferry up to seven astronauts to the International Space Station, the Dragon’s heat shield system is capable of withstanding re-entry from interplanetary trajectories, not just from Earth orbit. It’s rather small for an interplanetary spaceship, but it is designed for multiyear life, and it should be spacious enough for a crew of two astronauts who have the right stuff.

Thus a Mars mission could be accomplished utilizing three Falcon-9 Heavy launches. One would deliver to Mars orbit an unmanned Dragon capsule with a kerosene/oxygen chemical rocket stage of sufficient power to drive it back to Earth. This is the Earth Return Vehicle.

A second launch will deliver to the Martian surface an 11-ton payload consisting of a two-ton Mars Ascent Vehicle employing a single methane/oxygen rocket propulsion stage, a small automated chemical reactor system, three tons of surface exploration gear, and a 10-kilowatt power supply, which could be either nuclear or solar.

The Mars Ascent Vehicle would carry 2.6 tons of methane in its propellant tanks, but not the nine tons of liquid oxygen required to burn it. Instead, the oxygen could be made over a 500-day period by using the chemical reactor to break down the carbon dioxide that composes 95% of the Martian atmosphere.

Using technology to generate oxygen rather than transporting it saves a great deal of mass. It also provides copious power and unlimited oxygen to the crew once they arrive.

Once these elements are in place, the third launch would occur, which would send a Dragon capsule with a crew of two astronauts on a direct trajectory to Mars. The capsule would carry 2500 kilograms of consumables—sufficient, if water and oxygen recycling systems are employed, to support the two-person crew for up to three years. Given the available payload capacity, a light ground vehicle and several hundred kilograms of science instruments could be taken along as well.

The crew would reach Mars in six months and land their Dragon capsule near the Mars Ascent Vehicle. They would spend the next year and a half exploring.

Using their ground vehicle for mobility and the Dragon as their home and laboratory, they could search the Martian surface for fossil evidence of past life that may have existed in the past when the Red Planet featured standing bodies of liquid water. They also could set up drilling rigs to bring up samples of subsurface water, within which native microbial life may yet persist to this day. If they find either, it will prove that life is not unique to the Earth, answering a question that thinking men and women have wondered upon for millennia.

At the end of their 18-month surface stay, the crew would transfer to the Mars Ascent Vehicle, take off, and rendezvous with the Earth Return Vehicle in orbit. This craft would then take them on a six-month flight back to Earth, whereupon it would enter the atmosphere and splash down to an ocean landing.

There is nothing in this plan that is beyond our current level of technology. Nor would the costs be excessive. Falcon-9 Heavy launches are priced at about $100 million each, and Dragons are even cheaper. Adopting such an approach, we could send expeditions to Mars at half the mission cost currently required to launch a Space Shuttle flight.

What is required, however, is a different attitude towards risk than currently pervades the space policy bureaucracy. There is no question that the plan proposed here involves considerable risk. So does any plan that actually involves sending humans to Mars, rather than talking about it indefinitely. True, there are a variety of precursor missions, technology developments and testing programs that might be recommended as ways of reducing risk.  There are an infinite number of such potential missions and programs.  If we try to do even a significant fraction of them before committing to the mission we will never get to Mars.


But is it responsible to forgo any expenditure that might reduce somewhat the risk to the crew? I believe so. The purpose of the space program is to explore space, and its expenditures come at the cost of other national priorities. If we want to reduce risk to human life, there are vastly more effective ways of doing so than by spending $10 billion per year for the next two or three decades on a human spaceflight program mired for study purposes in low Earth orbit. We could spend the money on childhood vaccinations, fire escape inspections, highway repairs, better body armor for the troops—take your pick. For NASA managers to demand that the mission be delayed for decades while several hundred billion dollars is spent to marginally reduce the risk to a handful of volunteers, when the same funds spent elsewhere could save the lives of tens of thousands, is narcissistic in the extreme.

The Falcon 9 Heavy is scheduled for its first flight in 2013. All of the other hardware elements described in this plan could be made ready for flight within the next few years as well. NASA’s astronauts have gone nowhere new since 1972, but these four decades of wasteful stagnation need not continue endlessly. If President Obama were to act decisively, and bravely embrace this plan, we could have our first team of human explorers on the Red Planet by 2016.

The American people want and deserve a space program that is really going somewhere. It’s time they got one. Fortune Favors the Bold. Mr. President, seize the day.



By Robert Zubrin, Wall Street Journal, 05.14.11

Dr. Zubrin is president of Pioneer Astronautics and of the Mars Society (www.marssociety.org). An updated edition of his book, “The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must,” will be published by The Free Press this June.

SOURCE  http://www.marssociety.org/

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Sunday, May 15, 2011

Removing the roadblocks to a pan European market for Public Sector Information re-use

(CLICKING ON THE TITLE WE CAN READ THE VIEW OF OPEN RIGHTS GROUP ORG. )



DEAR FELLOW READERS ,HELLO,
LAST WEEK AND ON 10-11/5/11 WE FOLLOWED AN OPEN DATA WORKSHOP,AT EUROPEAN COMMISSION'S BORCHETTE  CONFERENCE CENTER AT BRUSSELS.
ALL MAIN STAKEHOLDERS AROUND THE GLOBE,WERE THERE AND AN INTERESTING DEMOCRATIC DIALOG WAS DEVELOPED.
DURING THE SESSIONS IT WAS CONCLUDED THAT THE OPEN DATA COMMUNITY HAS A LOT MORE TO WORK ON,DUE TO A LAPSE OF PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY,COMMON STANDARDS AND RAPID EVOLUTION OF TECHNOLOGY.
OUR EPAPHOS TEAMWORK PROPOSED ,AT A EUROPEAN LEVEL,AN ALLIANCE WITH THE OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY,IN ORDER OUR EUROPEAN  TARGETS ,TO BE ACHIEVED FASTER.

THE PROGRAM WAS AS BELOW:

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

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Friday, May 06, 2011

THE VICTORY AND THE FAILURE

(clicking on the titled link we are directed to  article "The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System " )

WE WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THE BUYING OF 100 TONNES OF GOLD FROM THE STATE OF MEXICO,WHICH ACCORDING TO THE NATURAL ECONOMIC LAWS,SHOULD CREATE A RISE ON THE PRICES OF THE PRECIOUS METALS,NOWADAYS. EVEN IF SOME BIG INVESTORS LIKE SOROS ,WERE SELLING OUT ,THIS CANNOT BALANCE SUCH A BIG PURCHASE  AND EXPLAIN THE INSTANT DOWN FALL OF THE PRICES.
THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR ATTENTION AND SUPPORT


A) Mexican Central Bank Quietly Buys 100 Tons of Gold
Mexico has quietly purchased nearly 100 tons of gold bullion, as central banks embark on their biggest bullion buying spree in 40 years.


The purchase, reported in monthly data published by Mexico’s central bank, is the latest in a series of large gold buys by emerging market economies intent on diversifying reserves away from the faltering US dollar.

China, Russia and India have acquired large amounts of gold [GCCV1 1487.60 6.20 (+0.42%) ] in recent years, while Thailand, Sri Lanka and Bolivia have made smaller purchases.

Central banks became net buyers of gold last year after two decades of heavy selling – a reversal that has helped propel the price of bullion to a series of record highs.

On Wednesday gold was trading at about $1,510 a troy ounce, down 4 percent from a nominal record high of $1,575.79 reached on Monday.

As a result of Mexico’s purchase, central banks, sovereign wealth funds and other so-called “official sector” buyers are on track to record their largest collective purchase of gold since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, which pegged the value of the dollar to gold, in 1971.

GFMS, a precious metals consultancy, had predicted that the official sector would make net gold purchases of 240 tons this year, compared with a post-Bretton Woods peak of 276 tons in 1981.

Philip Klapwijk, GFMS executive chairman, told the Financial Times that forecast “might turn out to be conservative” in light of Mexico’s surprise move.

The dollar [.DXY 73.99 -0.21 (-0.28%) ] has plunged 10 percent against the world’s major currencies since January and is trading near an all-time low.

Mexico bought 93.3 tons of gold in February and March, according to the central bank, in a haul valued at $4.5 billion at current prices and equivalent to 3.5 percent of annual mined output.

The country’s foreign exchange reserves have ballooned since last summer, buoyed by its interventions in the currency market to prevent the peso from appreciating.

“[The buying] seems to confirm there’s an appetite now among emerging economies with large forex reserves to add to their gold reserves,” said Matthew Turner, precious metals strategist at Mitsubishi, the Japanese trading house.

“Gold is seen as one way in which to diversify away from the dollar or euro-denominated assets.”

Although gold has quintupled in value over the past decade, it has fallen back in recent days led by a 20 percent tumble in the price of silver.

Just as central banks unwittingly marked the bottom of the market a decade ago with large sales of gold from their reserves, some investors fear that the current rush to buy may signal a top.

SOURCE GLOBAL RESEARCH


B)FEARS AND FAILURE

From G.D.P. to private-sector payrolls, from business surveys to new claims for unemployment insurance, key economic indicators suggest that the recovery may be sputtering.
And it wasn’t much of a recovery to start with. Employment has risen from its low point, but it has grown no faster than the adult population. And the plight of the unemployed continues to worsen: more than six million Americans have been out of work for six months or longer, and more than four million have been jobless for more than a year.

 It would be nice if someone in Washington actually cared.

 It’s not as if our political class is feeling complacent. On the contrary, D.C. economic discourse is saturated with fear: fear of a debt crisis, of runaway inflation, of a disastrous plunge in the dollar. Scare stories are very much on politicians’ minds.

 Yet none of these scare stories reflect anything that is actually happening, or is likely to happen. And while the threats are imaginary, fear of these imaginary threats has real consequences: an absence of any action to deal with the real crisis, the suffering now being experienced by millions of jobless Americans and their families.

 What does Washington currently fear? Topping the list is fear that budget deficits will cause a fiscal crisis any day now. In fact, a number of people — like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairmen of President Obama’s debt commission — have settled on a specific time frame: terrible things will happen within two years unless we make drastic spending cuts.

 I have no idea where that two-year deadline comes from. After all, what we do in the next couple of years hardly matters at all for U.S. solvency, which mainly depends on what we’ll do in the long run about Medicare and taxes. And, for what it’s worth, actual investors — people putting real money on the line — are notably unworried about any near-term fiscal crisis: the Treasury Department continues to have no trouble selling debt and remains able to borrow very cheaply, indicating high confidence on the part of investors that debts will be repaid in full.

 Do the scare-mongers even believe their own stories? Maybe not. As Jonathan Chait of The New Republic notes, the politicians most given to apocalyptic rhetoric about the deficit are also utterly opposed to any tax increase; they argue that debt is destroying America, but they’d rather let that happen than accept even a dime of higher taxes. Yet the inconsistency and probable insincerity of their fear-mongering hasn’t stopped it from having a huge effect on policy debate.

 The deficit isn’t the only unfounded fear. I’ve written before about misguided inflation fear, but, for now, let me focus on a new issue that has suddenly begun to loom large in opinion pieces and remarks on talk shows: fear of a disastrous plunge in the dollar. (Who sends out the memos telling people what to worry about, and why don’t I get them?)

 What you would never know from all the agitated dollar discussion is that the recent dollar slide is actually tiny compared with big drops in the past, notably under the administration of George W. Bush and during Ronald Reagan’s second term. And you’d also never know that those earlier dollar slides, far from hurting the economy, were beneficial, because they helped U.S. manufacturing compete on world markets.

 Which brings me back to the destructive effect of focusing on invisible monsters. For the clear and present danger to the American economy isn’t what some people imagine might happen one of these days, it’s what is actually happening now.

 Unemployment isn’t just blighting the lives of millions, it’s undermining America’s future. The longer this goes on, the more workers will find it impossible ever to return to employment, the more young people will find their prospects destroyed because they can’t find a decent starting job. It may not create excited chatter on cable TV, but the unemployment crisis is real, and it’s eating away at our society.

 Yet any action to help the unemployed is vetoed by the fear-mongers. Should we spend modest sums on job creation? No way, say the deficit hawks, who threaten us with the purely hypothetical wrath of financial markets, and, in fact, demand that we slash spending now now now — which might well send us back into recession. Should the Federal Reserve do more to promote expansion? No, say the inflation and dollar hawks, who have been wrong again and again but insist that this time their dire warnings about runaway prices and a plunging dollar really will be vindicated.

 So we’re paying a heavy price for Washington’s obsession with phantom menaces. By looking for trouble in all the wrong places, our political class is preventing us from dealing with the real crisis: the millions of American men and women who can’t find work.

BY PAUL KRUGMAN

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 6, 2011, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Fears And Failure.

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