Berlios.de back online

Nathan Yergler, April 23rd, 2007

After the downtime we “reported”:http://techblog.creativecommons.org/2007/04/23/cc-tools-berlios-unavailable/ this morning, Berlios is back online. ccPublisher “downloads”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcPublisher are now available again. We’ll be mirroring the downloads to another server to protect against future outages.

wiki.creativecommons.org skin available

Nathan Yergler, April 23rd, 2007

The skin for Creative Commons’ “wiki”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org is now available from Subversion. You can find decidedly minimalist details (where else) “in the wiki”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcWikiSkin.

CC Tools @ Berlios Unavailable

Nathan Yergler, April 23rd, 2007

Back in November, 2005, SourceForge wasn’t looking so hot: no Subversion support, despite repeated promises for it, seemingly increasing down time, that sort of thing. “Berlios”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlios seemed to be the obvious alternative, and so we moved the “ccPublisher”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcPublisher project to it. It was undergoing a period of really active refactoring, and Subversion actually made some of that easier. SourceForge actually launched their Subversion service not long after we left, but there was never a compelling reason to merge things back together — the two codebases didn’t have tons of intersection points and there was never a pressing need that would raise the idea to the top of the task list.

Unfortunately Berlios has apparently taken a big dirt nap. I was traveling over the weekend and when I came back online yesterday there were several messages asking about ccPublisher downloads (which were hosted at Berlios). At this point it appears Berlios has been down for at least 72 hours. I haven’t been able to find anything online about what happened or when (if) service is expected to return. The bad news (yes, that wasn’t really the bad news) is that we don’t have backups (outside of Berlios, of course) for the ccPublisher installers.

So until we get things figured out, downloads of “ccPublisher”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcPublisher, the “command line tools”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Command_Line_Tools, and anything else hosted at Berlios (just some libraries, I think) are all unavailable. We’re working on getting things restored and will keep everyone updated.

Summer of Code: “Converting biomedical text mining data to RDF, integrating results with existing Neurocommons RDF data, generating a RDFa-based web interface for presentation”

matthiassamwald, April 18th, 2007

About the project

The Neurocommons project wants to lay the foundation for a Semantic Web for neuroscience by creating resources that others will want to link to, extend, and build upon, and in so doing, to set an example that can be replicated in other scientific disciplines. One aspect of that goal is to make relationships in biomedical texts openly accessible on the Semantic Web.

The proposed project will add to the value of the Neurocommons project in two ways:

1) It will use the Whatizit text mining resource of the European Bioinformatics Institute as a source to generate RDF.
The text mining data of Whatizit are of a high quality and provide rich information that complements existing text mining data from the Neurocommons project. The RDF derived from Whatizit will be integrated with the existing Neurocommons annotations, resulting in a significantly increased coverage. The software written will demonstrate a typical pipeline for conversion of text mining results to good quality RDF.
The Whatizit service can mine either Pubmed abstracts or free text supplied by a user. We will provide a simple interface so that open access scientific articles can be easily acquired and mined by the tool, so that users with rights to non-open access scientific articles can mine that text and submit the resultant RDF, which, as knowledge, is not protected by copyright.

2) Software will be written to set up a website to present the information derived from the Neurocommons textmining and the Whatizit derived facts. Pages on this website will use RDFa for markup, integrating the human readable text with the machine readable markup in a single document.

The resulting resource will not only be valuable for neuroscientific researchers – it will also serve as a model implementation that unifies text mining, Semantic Web standards and the philosophy of Science Commons / Creative Commons for the advancement of scientific research and global information exchange in general.

About myself

My name is Matthias Samwald and I come from Austria. I have studied neurobiology at the University of Vienna from 2000 to 2005. The work of my doctoral thesis, starting in 2005, is focussed on the use of Semantic Web technologies in neuroscience and biomedicine. Since 2006 I am a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an ‘invited expert’. I am an active participant of the “Semantic Web in Health Care and Life Science Interest Group” of the W3C.

My curriculum
My doctoral thesis and corresponding publications

Summer of Code Project: “OpenOffice.org Writer Add-in for Publishing CC Licensed Documents”

ksiomelo, April 14th, 2007

Hi there!

I also was selected for the Google Summer of Code with this project mentored by Nathan R. Yergler. An introduction about the project:

The goal of this project is to provide a tool for supporting the process of licensing documents. Microsoft Office has a Creative Commons plug-in to put licenses metadata in its documents. I propose a similar Creative Commons add-in for OpenOffice.org that would allow license information to be embedded in OpenOffice.org documents. Despite being a requested feature for OpenOffice.org for more than two years, nothing has materialized. Having a simple way to add Creative Commons licenses will help to spread those licenses much more broadly. Making licenses available as Autotext for example, is one way this can be reached.

At first moment, I will concentrate on OOo Writer plugin, but of course, I have plans to extend this functionality to Calc and Impress as well. Get the full proposal here. If you have any suggestion, please let me know.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Cassio Melo, I’m 22 old and I live in Recife, Brazil. I’m an undergraduate at the same university of Alan Kelon (Informatics Center, Federal University of Pernambuco).

Beyond my passion for Computer Science, I also have interests in Business and Economy. Eric Drexler and Clayton Christensen are my preferred authors.

I did work for a summer in my undergraduate course at Federal University of Pernambuco with the SimPLe, which is an open source software factory using Product Line approach for action games domain.

This year, I developed an OOo plugin to replace the existing OOo notes. Public distribution will begin in the near future.

Additionally I have a year of industrial experience, having worked as a software engineer on C.E.S.A.R, developing a tool (codenamed BART project) for software components search and retrieval. We also have developed plugins for Eclipse, MS Word and OpenOffice.org for supporting artifacts searching. As a member of the R.i.S.E group, I’ve worked on algorithms for ranking software components.

You can view my full profile here.

Finally, I would like to share the thanks with my friends. We hope to bring new energy and enthusiasm to CC projects. :)

Summer of Code: “Indexing Embedded License Claims in Tracker”

Jason Kivlighn, April 14th, 2007

Hello all,

I’m Jason Kivlighn, a selected student for Google’s Summer of Code. Here’s the gist of my project:

Working under Creative Commons, I will extended the Tracker search and indexing engine to support the extraction of license claims. Because of the various forms that the license may take, I will build support based on the recommendations of Creative Commons, as outlined at http://creativecommons.org/technology/usingmarkup…
At the very least, the project will result in Tracker gaining support for indexing license claims embedding in MP3, OGG, PDF, HTML, and XML formats.

http://code.google.com/soc/cc/appinfo.html?csaid=1B2CE25E80A89A15

Now for a little about myself. I’m an undergraduate at the University of Washington in Seattle majoring in Computer Engineering. I’ve been an Open Source enthusiast since I found Linux as a development platform about 6 years ago. I developed Krecipes for a few years and now am working on Sidestream, a network for artists to distribute their works. I like hacking together projects here and there as I see fit. My UW campus shortest route finder was a fun little project to settle the “What’s the fastest way from X to Y” disputes once-and-for-all.

My spring quarter is a hassle of Comp. Eng. studies and TA’ing for the ‘Programming Languages’ course; but as summer rolls around, I’ll be ready for a summer of hacking with Tracker and CC :-)

Summer of Code Project: “Including RDFa support in Nutch: Updating the ccNutch plug-in”

Alan Kelon, April 13th, 2007

Hello!

I’m one of the selected students for Google Summer of Code 2007 and I’m pleased to be joining Creative Commons community this summer. My project title is Including RDFa support in Nutch: Updating the ccNutch plug-in under mentoring of Nathan R. Yergler. The abstract (with hyperlinks missing in soc page) is:

RDFa is emerging standard from W3 Consortium to provide a syntax that expresses semantics in structured data using a set of elements and attributes that embeds RDF in HTML, such as a license on a document or
a photo’s creator name and its camera setting information.

Nutch is an open source search engine that uses Lucene for searching the Web (or a subset of it) or in a customized form for an intranet. ccNutch is a plug-in for Nutch to search Creative Commons content. Currently, ccNutch indexes only text documents and does not support RDFa very well.

The inclusion of RDFa in ccNutch will be a great improvement for the advances of semantic web because we could easily index image, audio and video contained in web pages through their RDFa meta-data and then search them. In this way, we will be increasing our range of searchable artifacts available under creative licenses that is a worth to try.

My first step is to update ccNutch with the source code from Lucene repository. Then I’ll start to write the Requirements Document and Architecture to define precisely what I’ll do. To do so, I’m going to study the ccNutch and Nutch code base more deeply as well to study the RDFa standard. After that, I’ll write the Project Plan document to define our schedule, milestones and make risk assessment.

Right now, let me introduce myself: My name is Alan Kelon, I’m 23 years old and I live in Recife, Brazil. I am a 1st year Ph.D. student in Computer Science (in Portuguese) at Informatics Center (in Portuguese), Federal University of Pernambuco (in Portuguese), a.k.a. CIn/UFPE. The university and my house are very close to Ricardo Brennand Institute :-) I also hold a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Federal University of Pernambuco (2005-2007) – entitled as “A Software Process Proposal to Open Source Software Factories” – and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Federal University of Paraíba (2005). In 2006, I was a teaching assistant in a Software Engineer graduate level class. The course was entitled “Software Engineering: Building Open Source Software Factories”. This year edition of the course will be starting at the end of this month and I’ll be lecturer again. This year, I lectured in a undergraduate leval class entitled “Advanced Topics in Software Engineering: Open Source Software”.

Since my undergrad studies I’m involved with free software. The first contact was to to build and maintain a Beowulf Linux cluster and to developed a high availability system from 10/2002 to 01/2005. In the past, I was also with Debian in my local community, played with AndroMDA in the very early stages of OpenERP, developed VENSSO CRM (in Portuguese), mentored/founded GVS and Telescope. This last one is my active research project as part of my Ph.D. Finally, I lead the research group on Open Source and Distributed Software Development at Informatics Center, Federal University of Pernambuco, and C.E.S.A.R – Recife Center for Advanced Studies and Systems –, with strong collaboration of the local software industry, where I have the opportunity to advocate the open source development model and philosophy.

All in all: “Talk is cheap, show me the code”. Let’s do it now ;-)

More Summer of Code projects

Mike Linksvayer, April 12th, 2007

Nathan blogged the five accepted Creative Commons/Science Commons projects.

There’s also at least one CC-related SoC project being mentored by another oganization: ccHost/Inkscape integration by Bruno Luís Gonçalves Dilly, mentored by Bryce Harrington for the Inkscape project. Bruno was a CC SoC student last year and Bryce just completed a contract project for CC…

It’s also worth noting three of the proposals we would have loved to accept, if only Google had given us eight slots instead of five (no complaints!):

• An OpenOffice plugin for finding and importing CC licensed content (see ThinkFree’s implementation, contrast with the accepted OO.o project to CC license OO.o documents, similar to the MS Office Addin).
• A CC licensing module for Gallery2.
• CC census, extending our adoption statistics project.

Many other projects are outlined on the CC developer challenge pages. Sorry only five could be accepted with Google financial support!

WordPress MU v. Lyceum

Nathan Yergler, April 12th, 2007

We’re preparing to launch “hosted blogging”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCi_Blogs service for our “international affiliates”:http://creativecommons.org/worldwide, and the TechBlog is actually the first blog to run on the new “WordPress MU”:http://mu.wordpress.org installation. Sort of “eating our own dog food”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_one%27s_own_dog_food, I suppose. Much of the pre-launch work (beyond the obvious theme tweaking, etc) was in evaluating which WordPress-based multi-user blog product was more appropriate: “Lyceum”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyceum_%28software%29 or “WordPress MU”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress_MU.

Read More…

Summer of Code Projects

Nathan Yergler, April 12th, 2007

We’re very happy to have five students working on Creative Commons and Science Commons projects in conjunction with this year’s Google “Summer of Code”:http://code.google.com/soc. Briefly, they are:

* Cassio de Albuquerque Melo, working on a plug-in for OpenOffice.org to “support CC licensing”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/OpenOfficeOrg_Addin
* Jason Kivlighn, working on adding licensing support to “Tracker”:http://www.gnome.org/projects/tracker/
* Alan Kelon Oliveira de Moraes, working on making “Nutch”:http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/ “RDFa”:http://rdfa.info aware
* Taylor R. Campbell, working on RDF Tools in Scheme (Science Commons, they’ll have to explain)
* Matthias Samwald, working on, well, something Science-y and Semantic Web-y… again, they’ll have to explain

Congratulations to the students selected, and thanks to everyone who submitted applications. There were lots of really good applications, which is incredibly encouraging. I’m really excited to see where the projects go this summer, and we hope to have the students blogging about their progress here.