I’ve noticed AI05’s Call for Papers. The topics covered include Natural Language, Agent and Multiagent Systems, Machine Learning, User Modeling, E-Commerce, Automated Reasoning, Web Applications, Reasoning under Uncertainty, Education, Data Mining, Games, Robotics, Manufacturing, and many more.

Edd Dumbill has a cool post on what the future of the Web is.

What’s hot:

• Intellectual property and privacy law. If exchange and manipulation of data is key to the future web, then we need to understand that and be the ones in control. If corporations have too much control of data, as they are striving for, that’s the equivalent of API lock-in, and we’ll all suffer. But on the other hand, we want to tightly control the data about ourselves. An interesting conflict, about which I’d like to write more in future.
• Transformation and annotation. Nobody’s going to own a unique hold on the form of expression of the data flying around in “web 2.0″, but they’re certainly going to want to transform between those forms. From the crude “emergent keywords” of del.icio.us to the intensive but scope-limited integration done by Google and A9, there’s going to be a lot of value in joining together previously isolated data islands.
• Network engineering. Dumb, happy protocols that give quick results are on the rise. Look at the RSS madness, servers being pummelled. And RSS isn’t even mainstream yet, though it’s about to get that way. It gets messier before it gets better.

What’s not:

• Complicated web service standards. Forget the WS-I lunacy. Web applications for computers were happening before the web services standards junk. Amazon would still be providing their interfaces with or without SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, and indeed all the evidence is that their users prefer to use the simpler HTTP/XML APIs anyway. As far as the web is concerned, the WS-* work is about sprinkling XML pixie dust on a failing idea.
• Frameworks and silos. Don’t believe anyone who claims to have a wonderful new framework that’ll solve your problems if only you’d migrate everything you do to it. The web is all about separate pieces, loosely joined. The really clever businesses know how to manage uncertainty, they’re not looking to eliminate it. Circling the wagons will not integrate you into the web, neither will it promote web-like innovation inside a business.

Looks like GPL is an ever expanding world. Through slashdot, I learned that there is GPL IDE for C# called SharpDevelop. Given that there is nothing wrong, apparently, with C# as a language, maybe I’ll need this one day. It is also being ported to Mono so it should eventually run under Linux too.

From Downes’, I learned that the Journal of Educational Technology & Society has a special issue on “Ontologies and the Semantic Web for E-learning”.

The papers are:

• Ontologies and the Semantic Web for E-learning (Guest editorial)
• Web Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Education
• What can the Semantic Web do for Adaptive Educational Hypermedia?
• The New Challenges for E-learning: The Educational Semantic Web
• Ontology Enabled Annotation and Knowledge Management for Collaborative Learning in Virtual Learning Community
• Reasoning and Ontologies for Personalized E-Learning in the Semantic Web
• Semantic Services in e-Learning: an Argumentation Case Study
• Semantic Description of Educational Adaptive Hypermedia based on a Conceptual Model

Richard Hotte started his own blog called Formation à distance et technologies.

He starts his blog by asking whether one can be an eLearning researcher without having a blog:

Peut-on être enseignant et chercheur dans le domaine des technologies de l’information appliquée à la formation, surtout en formation à distance et en ligne sans avoir son blogue ?

Our music recommender site, inDiscover, is now a Bell Sympatico/MSN web site. The MSN part does stand for Microsoft so we did sell our soul a bit, but it is not any worse than sending Word documents by email.

It is also now fully bilingual (French/English).

The site is simple, you download (free) songs, rate them and the system will recommend new songs you are likely to like. There are a few twists to the site and you better go there yourself if you want to see how it works.