Pages

What is Computational REST ?

I have written about REST before.CREST is about computational REST.I think the concept will be a milestone in developing applications on Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA).ROA is a set of guidelines of implementing REST architecture.This wikipedia article give a simple idea of the world of representations.

The image is taken from here gives an illustration of the kind of message passing used in Representational State Transfer.

REST is architectural style of distributed systems.RESTful Webservices are gaining importance in developing scalable applications.The web 2.0 technologies,ajax,mashups,comet,pub-sub technologies do envision the power of computing using internet.The computational resources in the web can be accessed by URIs.Whats buzz CREST ?

A client needs to execute a program.The origin server executes the code and return the result.This form the basis of CREST or Computational REST. Code snippets having conditional logic can be sent and the response will reflect the behavior of application.So the application can become more client centric.It can be like a service behavior changes with different client conditions.Computational REST (CREST) as an architectural style to guide the construction of computational web elements... The idea is similar to mobile code.This idea is originated from Rethinking Web Services from First Principles .They have given the underlined principles of REST and CREST.The technology is under research.So internet technologies are heating up.
The technology for using REST for process intensive integration is in a budding stage only.The distributed processing in REST way.. Programmability of web is becoming complex and disruptive!

A pretty pass time on competency management and ontology

I happened to read about competency management systems (CMS) and some researches going on it.Just curious about the how they are made and all.. Why we need as CMS ? Whats competence ? Read In large organizations human beings as skilled resources are managed using HRMS tools in an effective manner so that maximum productivity can be achieved....

I have read that in armies the skilled men are selectively recruited to complete mission critical tasks. In a super industrial society the human workers are picked as components and assembled as a team and the task is executed.After that , they are dispersed and combined with others.The process go on.This happens commonly in big software companies.So the softwares like CMS used to manage people in a company or team, for manageability and efficiency (mostly quantifiable).This is mainly because the world is entirely a knowledge economy.So knowledge management is the essential factor in any sector.The employees are to be trained very well on the desired competencies.The gapping skills have to be filled.The information about people,process,products and all resources has to be managed.
The companies do involve business process and related information works.Software companies do have people like domain experts,subject matter experts,developers,managers etc Knowledge management (KM) combines tools and technologies to provide support to the capture, access, reuse and dissemination of knowledge, generating benefits for the organization and their members.The skills of employees need to be updated as technology is becoming advanced day by day due the fast and wide distribution of information.As new generation internet technologies and concepts like web 2.0, social tools etc did make things more advancing beyond our imagination.I found that NASA uses CMS for managing the skills of their work force.I tried searching on net again.Then I learned that ontology based relationships (or rule based systems) can define the model for competency.One can build frameworks that allows them to build shareable ontologies and knowledge bases represented with Semantic Web Languages and to develop Competency-Based Web Services dedicated to Human Resource Management.A simple ontology look like this -
Pretty n00b .. i think .. :D
I think it basically a research subject and for more complex scenarios more complex systems will be evolved .Thats what I understood.World is too competitive!!

Links for the interested :
http://www.ontology-advisory.org/
http://www.successfactors.com/
http://professional-learning.eu/overview
Papers i found here here

Good pass time..

Simal - Integrating social semantic nature of web to open source projects


Open source projects are becoming more prominent and powerful due to the web 2.0 / 3.0 revolution.There are mammoth number of projects get huddled in the web.Sites like sourceforge,freshmeat etc have thousands of open softwares cataloged in them.There are projects undertaken by universities and academicians.Many developers around the world work on various technologies .What if socialization is happening to the project endeavors ? How to integrate and share information of multiple projects around the web ?

Simal is a tool for building and tracking projects and the people involved in those projects.It is a framework for building project registry.Meta-data data models like RDF and document languages like XML do provide a solid foundation for cataloging mechanisms.The catalogs can be generated from RDF documents maintained and hosted by the projects themselves.This entry contains a description of what the project is doing, team members, community's structure, deliverables, etc.By exposing such data it is possible for interaction between related projects.The project catalog is built by importing Description of a Project (DOAP) files from projects.DOAP have an RDF vocabulary.

The DOAP for the project looks like this

The DOAP project design is explained by Edd Dumbill here , here , here.

The RDF semantics is used to build a community like feature.It can use the RSS feeds (trac/wiki changes,version control feeds,mailing list feeds etc) from the project and aggregate it.It could be a sort of friendfeed.The bugs,changes,their solutions etc can be updated among various projects.

A very interesting thing I noted is the addition of FOAF into the vocabulary.FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralized database.The Person Browser in their sample demo shows the implementation of the feature.Simal has REST API providing a high level means of accessing the data stored in the registry.

The integration of OpenSocial API and gadgets availability can make the application more widespread.The Simal Web module provides an open social container.Simal uses Shindig which is a refernce implementation of Open Social Standard.

Simal is utilizing the social semantic nature of web (termed web 3.0 ?) to make the open source revolution more powerful.

What about Simal used in large software companies ? Project repository cataloging that could give information about projects,people team, their social networks,projects done with other organizations.Simal will become a powerful utility in developing next generation project management and enterprise applications.

See demo

Visual Analytics -- Programming meets Art



Images provide an effective form of communicating information.From cave age men to gadget chimps of new era draw,use,share images as a medium of message and emotions.As time progressed we have gathered to process most of the information around us.So the data is large..immense and unimaginable... People use these bits to analyze,predict factors affecting the context.The area , Visual Analytics , I believe is one of the challenging fields for the information engineers.Visual analytics has been defined as "the science of analytical reasoning supported by the interactive visual interface.More ..


I have seen most blogs , web 2.0 sites having a visual element known as "tagcloud".Information is tagged and the visitor is informed with the relevance of the site with the level of occurence for each word.It creates a semantic space ... mmm like a cloud.Its merely a statistical visualization for the frequency of use of tagged words.Its a relevance-by-size lists.It thus provides a form of information filtering tool.I don't want to discuss more about the lexical analysis or polysemous distribution, but the power of visualization and the interactivity model. I came to know that a lot of interesting things happen in information graphics field.The one I came through was a project released IBM called ManyEyes.Essentially Many Eyes is a mashup machine for visualizing data! Here.They have a gallery of visualizations.The software engineering meets art.They uses Prefuse, a set of software tools for creating rich interactive data visualizations. Written by Jeff Heer, this toolkit supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. Also Google, provides an excellent API for visualization .

Robert Tappan Morris, the guy who developed the first worm was trying to map the total computers in the world.Interestingly, currently there is a project running to visualize the nodes around the globe !
Opte is a project that lets you graphically map the internet. The data represented and collected here serves a multitude of purposes: Modeling the Internet, analyzing wasted IP space, IP space distribution, detecting the result of natural disasters, weather, war, and aesthetics/art.


This graph is by far our most complex. It is using over 5 million edges and has an estimated 50 million hop count.

Asia Pacific - Red
Europe/Middle East/Central Asia/Africa - Green
North America - Blue
Latin American and Caribbean - Yellow
RFC1918 IP Addresses - Cyan
Unknown - White

Cool..