Monday, June 27, 2005

Northrop Grumman Buys the Tucana Knowledge Server

It's official! I am very pleased to announce that Northrop Grumman Corporation has purchased the intellectual property of Tucana Technologies, Inc., to include the Tucana Knowledge Server and associated patents, copyrights and trademarks. There is a major new Semantic Web company in town.

Northrop quietly pre-announced the purchase to some of its big customers at SWANS in April, but the deal wasn't officially closed at that time.

Northrop has decided to continue development of TKS and to release a new version sometime in the future. We are still discussing feature sets, licensing and schedule, so don't bother to ask me yet. I'll post it here when I can.

The purchase also included the copyright to Kowari. Stunningly for a company their size, Northrop has not only agreed to support Kowari but rushed to do so. I certainly didn't expect a US federal systems integrator to "get" Open Source Software, but times have clearly changed. Their senior managers have made a legitimate effort to figure out the licensing and how to make it work within their business model. I have confidence that we can figure out a way to make it work for both the Kowari community and Northrop Grumman.

Northrop and Tucana plan to come out with press releases shortly. I'll post the links when they are up.

# vs. / Formally Settled

The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) has formally settled the httpRange-14 issue. Roy Fielding actually posted the results on 18 June, but I've been slack and am trying to catch up. This deserves wider dissemination and probably a full decsription of ramifications in some W3C Notes.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

WISE 2005

I've been asked to join the program committee member for a workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems at the WISE 2005 conference this November. I've never served on a program committee before, but am told it is an interesting and rewarding experience. I hope to review some interesting papers, so get 'em in!

Thanks to Mike Dean (BBN Technologies), Yuanbo Guo and Zhengxiang Pan (both of Lehigh University) for inviting me.

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Too Close to Home

This post on XML-DEV is hilarious, but perhaps a bit worrying for those of us working on the Semantic Web. Thanks to Bijan Parsia for the link.