April’s Contributions on Bright Hub

In April, I contributed two articles to the Web Development channel over on Bright Hub:

• Introducing The Aptana Cloud
• HTML vs. XHTML: The Five Key Takeaways

ORION/CANARIE National Summit

Just in case you haven’t heard:

… join us for an exciting national summit on innovation and technology, hosted by ORION and CANARIE, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Nov. 3 and 4, 2008.

“Powering Innovation – a National Summit” brings over 55 keynotes, speakers and panelist from across Canada and the US, including best-selling author of Innovation Nation, Dr. John Kao; President/CEO of Intenet2 Dr. Doug Van Houweling; chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley Dr. Robert J. Birgeneau; advanced visualization guru Dr. Chaomei Chen of Philadelphia’s Drexel University; and many more. The President of the Ontario College of Art & Design’s Sara Diamond chairs “A Boom with View”, a session on visualization technologies. Dr. Gail Anderson presents on forensic science research. Other speakers include the host of CBC Radio’s Spark Nora Young; Delvinia Interactive’s Adam Froman and the President and CEO of Zerofootprint, Ron Dembo.

This is an excellent opportunity to meet and network with up to 250 researchers, scientists, educators, and technologists from across Ontario and Canada and the international community. Attend sessions on the very latest on e-science; network-enabled platforms, cloud computing, the greening of IT; applications in the “cloud”; innovative visualization technologies; teaching and learning in a web 2.0 universe and more. Don’t miss exhibitors and showcases from holographic 3D imaging, to IP-based television platforms, to advanced networking.

For more information, visit http://www.orioncanariesummit.ca.

Evolving Semantic Frameworks into Platforms: Unpublished ms.

I learned yesterday that the manuscript I submitted to HPCS 2008 was not accepted
It may take my co-authors and I some time before this manuscript is revised and re-submitted.
This anticipated re-submission latency, along with the fact that we believe the content needs to be shared in a timely fashion, provides the motivation for sharing the manuscript online.
To whet your appetite, the abstract is as follows:

Evolving a Semantic Framework into a Network-Enabled Semantic Platform
A data-oriented semantic framework has been developed previously for a project involving a network of globally distributed scientific instruments. Through the use of this framework, the semantic expressivity and richness of the project’s ASCII data is systematically enhanced as it is successively represented in XML (eXtensible Markup Language), RDF (Resource Description Formal) and finally as an informal ontology in OWL (Web Ontology Language). In addition to this representational transformation, there is a corresponding transformation from data into information into knowledge. Because this framework is broadly applicable to ASCII and binary data of any origin, it is appropriate to develop a network-enabled semantic platform that identifies the enabling semantic components and interfaces that already exist, as well as the key gaps that need to be addressed to completely implement the platform. After briefly reviewing the semantic framework, a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) based implementation for a network-enabled semantic platform is provided. And although the platform is in principle usable, ongoing adoption suggests that strategies aimed at processing XML via parallel I/O techniques are likely an increasingly pressing requirement.

Cyberinfrastructure: Worth the Slog?

If what I’ve been reading over the past few days has any validity to it at all, there will continue to be increasing interest in cyberinfrastructure (CI). Moreover, this interest will come from an increasingly broader demographic.

At this point, you might be asking yourself what, exactly, is cyberinfrastructure. The Atkins Report defines CI this way:

The term infrastructure has been used since the 1920s to refer collectively to the roads, power grids, telephone systems, bridges, rail lines, and similar public works that are required for an industrial economy to function. … The newer term cyberinfrastructure refers to infrastructure based upon distributed computer, information, and communication technology. If infrastructure is required for an industrial economy, then we could say that cyberinfrastructure is required for a knowledge economy. [p. 5]

[Cyberinfrastructure] can serve individuals, teams and organizations in ways that revolutionize what they can do, how they do it, and who participates. [p. 17]

If this definition leaves you wanting, don’t feel too bad, as anyone whom I’ve ever spoken to on the topic feels the same way. What doesn’t help is that the Atkins Report, and others I’ve referred to below, also bandy about terms like e-Science, Grid Computing, Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), etc. Add to these newer terms such as Cooperative Computing, Network-Enabled Platforms plus Cell Computing and it’s clear that the opportunity for obfuscation is about all that’s being guaranteed.

Consensus on the inadequacy of the terminology aside, there is also consensus that this is a very exciting time with very interesting possibilities.

So where, pragmatically, does this leave us?

Until we collectively sort out the terminology, my suggestion is that the time is ripe for immediate immersion in what cyberinfrastructure and the like might feel like or are. In other words, I highly recommend reviewing the sources cited below in order:

1. The Wikipedia entry for cyberinfrastructure – A great starting point with a number of references that is, of course, constantly updated.
2. The Atkins Report – The NSF’s original CI document.
3. Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery – A slightly more concrete update from the NSF as of March 2007.
4. Community-specific content – There is content emerging on the intersection between CI and specific communities, disciplines, etc. These frontiers are helping to better define the transformative aspects and possibilities for CI in a much-more concrete way.

Frankly, it’s a bit of a slog to wade through all of this content for a variety of reasons …

Ultimately, however, I believe it’s worth the undertaking at the present time as the possibilities are very exciting.

Platform Acquires Scali Manage

From the joint release:

Platform Computing announced today it has acquired the Scali Manage business from Massachusetts-based Scali Inc. Scali Manage is an integrated and flexible High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster management and monitoring system. This strategic acquisition supports Platform’s vision to be the partner of choice for HPC infrastructure software worldwide. The Scali Manage product complements Platform’s existing HPC offerings and extends Platform’s products’ cluster and grid management capabilities.

As someone who worked for both companies, I can honestly state that this really does sound like a win-win outcome.

Scali has chosen to focus on its industry-leading MPI product.

Platform has broadened its cluster-management offering in a very significant way.

I remain a huge fan of Scali Manage more than a year after my departure from Scali.

Why?

Scali Manage is standards-based.

To appreciate the depth of this statement, please read my blog post from March 2006.

Moreover, Scali Manage is likely still the only software that can make this claim. Yes, there are open source offerings. But none of these are based on open standards like WBEM and Eclipse.

With people and technology transferring from Scali to Platform, I expect a very rosy future for Scali Manage.

Announcing HPCS 2008!

Even though HPCS 2007 is still a recent memory, it won’t be long before it’s time to start thinking seriously about HPCS 2008. Next year’s event is being hosted at Universite Laval. The timing is excellent, as Quebec City will be celebrating its 400th anniversary!

HPCS 2007: My Presentation Now Available

I’ve made the presentation I made at HPCS 2007 available online.

This presentation corresponds to the paper I wrote for the same event.

I hope to find a few femtoseconds to blog about the event soon!

Anticipating HPCS 2007

Last year’s event took place at Memorial University in Newfoundland. And although the event was memorable from an academic perspective, it was also memorable from a cultural perspective. In my brief follow up to last year’s event, I alluded to humor as one of the cultural elements. Because it’s difficult to really capture the local humor, I suggest you simply watch it in action:

This year’s event is in Saskatoon. While I’m looking forward to an intellectually stimulating event, I doubt it could possibly be as culturally stimulating!

Annotation Really Is A Big Deal!

My expressed interest in annotation began as a footnote:

An alternative approach has the following two steps: First, extract RDF from the .GGP and .AUX files as before. Second, incorporate data contained in the .LOG file via annotation. Annotation is a well-established practice [45, Chapter 4] involving RDF and the XML Pointer Language (XPointer, [22]) — essentially a URI-centric fragment identifier. This conversion flow is currently under investigation and the corresponding manuscript is in preparation.

This footnote appeared in a paper that was published by the IEEE for HPCS 2006. The alluded-to manuscript will soon be available from the IEEE and will be presented in mid-May at HPCS 2007.

In addition to this manuscript on annotation, along with my co-authors, I’ve recently submitted a broader-based treatment to a special issue (“Geoscience Knowledge Representation for Cyberinfrastructure”) of Computers & Geosciences (C&G). The abstract of the C&G submission is as follows:

Incorporating Annotations into Formal and Informal Ontologies: Experiences and Implications

L. I. Lumb, J. R. Freemantle, J. I. Lederman & K. D. Aldridge

Abstract

Traditionally, and to a first approximation, annotations can be regarded as comments. In the case of the Web Ontology Language (OWL), this perspective is largely accurate, as annotations are internal constructs included with the language. As internal constructs, annotations in OWL Description Logic (DL) are also constrained to ensure, ultimately, that they do not negatively impact on the ontology’s ability to remain computationally complete and decidable. Formal ontologies, however, can also be annotated externally with the XML Pointer Language (XPointer). Because XPointer-based annotations are quite likely to result in violations of the constraints traditionally placed on OWL DL’s built-in annotations, there exist potentially serious consequences for maintaining self-contained formal ontologies. Insight gained in modeling annotations in formal ontologies using top-down strategies can be applied to informal ontologies. In part, the previous practice of incorporating feature-based annotations directly into informal ontologies is regarded differently, as the XPointer-based annotations may require more complex OWL dialects in which computational completeness and decidability cannot be guaranteed. Critical to the development of informal ontologies is Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL), as it facilitates the extraction of Resource Description Format (RDF) relationships from representations cast in the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). In order to fully enable the creation of informal ontologies, however, an analogous functionality is required to extract OWL classes, properties and individuals from RDF-based representations. Although a strategy for this capability has been specified, hopefully community based efforts will soon target a corresponding implementation.

Key words:
Annotation, Formal Ontology, Informal Ontology, Ontology, Semantic Web, XPointer, Web Ontology Language

In addition to these papers, I’ve blogged a lot about annotation. And the more I delve into annotation, the more I’m taken by it’s applicability. For example, I’ll be making a presentation at CANHEIT 2007 on annotation and wikis.

Annotation really is a big deal!

HP Labs Innovates to Sustain Moore’s Law

I had the fortunate opportunity to attend a presentation by Dr. R. Stanley Williams at an HP user forum event in March 2000 in San Jose.

Subsequently, I ran across mention of his work at HP Labs in various places, including Technology Review.

So, when I read in PC World that

Hewlett-Packard researchers may have figured out a way to prolong Moore’s Law by making chips more powerful and less power-hungry

I didn’t immediately dismiss this as marketing hyperbole.

Because of Moore’s Law, transistor density has traditionally grabbed all the attention when it comes to next-generation chips. However power consumption, and the resulting heat generated, are also gating (sorry, I couldn’t resist that!) factors when it comes to chip design. This is why there is a well-established trend in the development of multicore chip architectures. With the multicore paradigm, it’s an aggregated responsibility to ensure that Moore’s Law is of ongoing relevance.

Williams has found a way to sustain the relevance of Moore’s Law without having to make use of a multicore architecture.

Working with Gregory S. Snyder, the HP team has redesigned the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) by introducing a nano-scale interconnect (a field-programmable nanowire interconnect, FPNI). As hinted earlier in this posting, the net effect is to allow for significantly increased transistor density and reduced power consumption. A very impressive combination!

Although Sun executive Scott McNealy is usually associated with the aphorism “The network is the computer”, it may now be HP’s turn to recapitulate.