Two cool technologies that I discovered recently and that I will present to the interested audience at FZI on Monday Sep. 10th, 2007.
Slides are online at: http://www.slideshare.net/loffenauer/2007-09-10-fzi-training-groovy-grails-v-ws
I just learned, that the EXIST Gründerstipendium provides grants of up to 112.000 € (150.000 USD) to teams of max. three scientists to work out a business idea in preparation of a startup. They don’t want any shares, just a good idea in form of a grant proposal (in German). All you have to do is: (1) have a good technology-oriented business idea (2) win the support from a German university or research center to support your idea, which will provide free office space and infrastructure to the team for the duration of one year. More details in my personal summary and on the EXIST website at (www.exist.de).
Well, just wanted to explain that this was done out of pure (scientific) curiosity, I don’t expect to get rich with this 
Will see how well Google’s semantic analysis of my blog content really works … and how much one can really earn on a very low traffic blog like mine. My first impression is not great, I really get totally unrelated ads, where I would wonder if someone clicks on it (I may not do that myself, Google will suspend the account for fraudulent behaviour…)
This vertical search engine searches the public content of the global top 500 universities according to the “Academic Ranking of World Universities 2007“ that is published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University annually.
This new vertical search engine searches the public web sites of the 800+ organizations known to contribute to German research according to the BMBF Forschungslandkarte ( http://www.bmbf.de/de/5355.php, a list maintained by the German federal ministry for education and research.
I just discovered that you can build custom vertical search engines with Google COOP. This provides great opportunities, for example one can provide a custom search engine for the public web pages of companies in a merger setting.
As we are just in such a setting with the formation of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), which consists of the University of Karlsruhe and Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, I have created a custom search engine for these two organizations (plus the other research institutes located in Karlsruhe).
A nice service that I discovered today puts your past travel on a map
Status: 43 countries visited (19% of all countries)
Progress: so still 81% to go… but statistically there are 50 years left …
My talk for the FZI advisory board and interested public had about 60 attendants and was well received. Video on YouTube will be published next week.
The very interesting I3 workshop was well-visited today, despite its’ hard to find location in the Banff Springs Hotel. My presentation of our paper in this workshop was well received and we got interesting feedback towards the correctness of describing geographic features by Lat/Long coordinates vs. complex spatial areas and using the founding date of a town as an indicator for ranking candidate towns.
Geographic names have always been important identifiers. People typically use names and not coordinates to identify geographic features. Therefore to establish identity beyond coordinates, name disambiguation is required to identify the exact geographic feature that is denoted by a name. This paper introduces an ontology-based approach to disambiguate geographical names in texts. The ontology defines the central conceptual basis of our approach and is used to rank geographic features based on disambiguation rules that take into account structural information contained in the ontology (e.g. population of a town), as well as textual indicators contained in the text at hand. Our first evaluation on a subset of the well-known Reuters 21578 corpus indicates promising results both in terms of precision and recall.
This is a paper that was accepted for the I3 Workshop collocated with WWW 2007 in Banff, Canada.