Summer interns

In order to expedite the proress on the Venice 2.0 information infrastructure, I have advertised summer 2008 internships in Venice for WPI Computer Science majors. Seven students applied, including one PhD candidate and one Masters grad. So, it looks like two WPI CS students will be in Venice from June 15 to August 15 to help get our web presence established. It's going to be a great experience for them and a great benefit to our efforts.

WikiVenice

We now have our very own media-wiki, thanks to the tireless dedication of Kyle Miller (who completed his project in Venice in the fall of 2007). We are migrating our Venice 1.0 wikibook from wikidot to this new site, which resides on the Venice server, so we have more control and fewer limits. Take a look!

MQP 2.0

Thanks to the collaboration of Prof. Gary Pollice, I was able to recruit four WPI Computer Science majors (Craig Blanchette, Tim Cheng, Eric Clayton and Justin Fyles), who will be completing their Major Qualifying Project (MQP) in Venice this fall. Their work will contribute to the 20th anniversary by providing ways for the general public to access our datasets through web services. The project is being coordinated with the ongoing work on LOUIS as part of the GIS 2.0 activities, such as Ploppit and Plukkit. The team will create APIs that will enable the creation of the Web 2.0 applications that in turn will leverage our data repository for the benefit of local Venetians as well as visitors. The team will implement one of those applications in order to test the underlying web-services infrastructure. Prof. Pollice will be the primary advisor of the MQP and we plan to get him to Venice at the end of the term in Venice (by Dec. 13, 2008).

Everyblock Venice

One of the various threads that I am following up on is the possibility of having Everyblock.com take on Venice, after they're done with Chicago, San Francisco and the other 3 cities they are supposed to complete as part of a multimillion dollar grant from the Knight foundation (of Knight Ridder fame). It's not surprising that the Knight foundation, historically associated with journalism, would sponsor everyblock, since this outfit is the brainchild of journalist-turned-mashup-prophet Adrian Holovaty, who became an instant celebrity in the 2.0 world because of his chicagocrime mashup (now replaced by an updated everyblock page). I met Daniel X. O'Neil (I love the X) in Boston, where he was discussing the possibility of bringing Everyblock to Boston with City officials with whom I have been collaborating in my capacity as the WPI Boston Project Center director. Daniel is the "people person" in the Everyblock triumvirate, so we had lunch and discussed how cool it would be to have a "newsfeed for your block" in the city of canals... It would mesh well with the Mashup Camp.

Evacuating St. Mark's Square

One of the fun things we're working on with Redfish is an autonomous agent model for the evacuation of Saint Mark's square in case of an emergency. The current version is a a very early stage, but it already looks cool. Unfortunately, Venice has been named as a possible terrorist target, plus we've had a major fire in the main theater (the Fenice Theater) in 1996, so this is not as far-fetched as it seems. The full blown project should be sponsored by the local "protezione civile", which is the Italian version of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) in the US.

WPI Santa Fe Project Center?

Redfish (Steve Guerin, Owen Desmond) and the Santa Fe Institute (Irene Lee) are all interested in the possibility of collaborating on the creation of a WPI project center in Santa Fe. Upon returning to WPI, I have discussed this possibility with Natalie Mello and Rick Vaz of IGSD and I think we will give it a try next year, probably in term D, to give me a chance to come back from Venice and prepare some pioneering teams in term C. We'll probably start with a "bootstrap IQP" as we did in Venice 20 yeas ago.

Dspace and OAI-PMH

The people at Knowledge Reef introduced me to Dspace, which is a data repository system developed at MIT, which abides by the Open Archive Inititiative (OAI) standards. Dspace will organize both documents and datasets and will allow semantic systems, like Knowledge Reef to extract metadata through the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH). We agreed that we should try to store both the Venice Project Archive documents as well as the Venice Data Repository datasets in Dspace, so that Knowledge Reef could then harvest our data with OAI-PMH and make it available on the semantic web... This would be really really cool. And a very appropriate way to celebrate our 20th anniversary by moving beyond "old school" systems and into the 21st century. The Venice Project Center knowledgebase will be one of the first on the semantic web!

Knowledge Reef

Today I had a meeting with Marko and Josh from Knowledge Reef, which is a Santa Fe company that is pioneering work in the much touted "semantic web". They are working specifically with technical/educational institutions to provide "rich" search services of linked data in semantically-organized online repositories of knowledge. The principles behind the semantic web are the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the "triples" (vs. "tuples") concept, whereby each element of a knowledgebase is represented in subject-verb-predicate form, where the subject is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), i.e. a URL or a URN. Fascinating stuff. Josh is the creator of Ripple, a scripting language for the semantic web. We all agreed that it would be great if the Venice Project Center could be one of the beta sites for their imminent release.

Santa Fe Complex

Our friends at Redfish are embarking in a new ambitious adventure called The Santa Fe Complex. It's a space next to their offices and will be host to a variety of activities, including but not limited to: interactive and computational art exhibits, educational activities, civic participatory events, complexity research, advanced visualization experiments and much more. I wish temll the best of luck! And I plan to collaborate with them on some of the activities at the Complex.

Santa Fe Institute

During my visit to Santa Fe, I had an opportunity to visit the Santa Fe Institute again. The institute is the world leader in research in the field of complexity. It was founded by George Cowan, a WPI alumnus. I had previously visted the institute in 2007 and met with Luis Bettencourt. This time, I met with Irene Lee, with whom I intend to collaborate on educational projects in the future. Together with Steve Guerin of redfish, we have already submitted an NSF proposal, and we are planning to submit anotherone soon. I think this collaboration has a lot of potential...