Siegfried Reich

Innovative Companies and Institutions in Salzburg

Pleon Publico published a book on innovative companies and institutions in Salzburg. See the (German only) press release at www.pleon-publico.at. The book itself can be downloaded as PDF.

Add comment January 18th, 2007

1st Call COMET

December 1st was the first deadline for Austria’s new competence centre programme: COMET. Apparently, there is a high oversubscription, see http://www.ffg.at/content.php?cid=435&sid=58 (in German) for further details.

For instance, there were 7 applications for the highest category, K2, but only three are planned to be funded.

This is bad news for both, the applicants and the funding agency. It means that either an immense lobbying process will start and the decision will (mainly) be political; or, it means that 4 applicants have invested tremendous efforts in unsuccessful applications. They will tend to re-submit, perhaps they’ll be encouraged to try a “K1″ which is the next (lower) category, again with oversubscription. Finally, it may well be that via a political decision one puts in more money … (but then we need a government first to decide on that).

Add comment December 12th, 2006

100 + Million Web Sites

Netcraft just reported that there are more than 100 Million web-sites available. The exact figure for end of November 2006 is 101,435,253. Amazing!

The current population of the earth is estimated at 6667075382 (that is what the Java applet displays on Nov. 24 2006, 22:11:02). That is one site for about 65 people. The question is whether No. of people or No. of sites will be growing more quickly …

See http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/11/01/november_2006_web_server_survey.html. Particularely interesting is the graph that visualises the growth (i.e., the steepness of the curve in recent years): see
((c) news.netcraft.com)

Add comment November 24th, 2006

Internet Wayback machine

… something I knew that it exists, however, from time to time you have to revisit sites again in order to really remember what they are about.

The Internet Archive – Wayback machine is a pretty cool thing. Here are some images of the Salzburg Research home page (except for some Java classes most entries still seem to work properly).

12 – Dec 1998	11 – Nov 1999	9 – Oct 2000
27 – Nov 2001	29 – Nov 2002	Current

Interesting to see that in 1998 we were recommending Netscape 3, something one would not do these days. Also, URL forwarding has the implication that some of the features do not work as expected (because one is rerouted to the current address). Application level protocols would need to have the “typical” parameters of information spaces incorporated, i.e., subject, place and time (WHAT do I want to see based on WHERE and WHEN).

Add comment November 16th, 2006

“Innovation Centres in Salzburg”

The image on the left provides an overview of innovation centres in Salzburg.

Among them are the competence centres “Salzburg NewMediaLab” and “ANET-Salzburg” (eTourism), the “Business Creation Centre Salzburg” (BCCS), Salzburg Research and others.

Add comment November 3rd, 2006

Kick-Off “Salzburg NewMediaLab”

We had the kick-off for the competence centre on digitial media (it is coordinated by Salzburg Research). The centre is called NewMediaLab.

Partners of the centre are

• Salzburg Research
• X-ART ProDivision
• conova communications
• Education Highway
• mediamid digital services
• mercatis consulting
• punkt. netServices
• Salzburger Nachrichten
• uma information technology
• FH Salzburg
• Joanneum Research
• University of Salzburg

The main theme for this phase (2006-2009) of the centre is concepts and tools for social multimedia software/content systems. The initial phase was concerned with digital content engineering (2003-2006).

Add comment November 3rd, 2006

How to integrate Wikimapia into your blog

Wikimapia is a sort of combination of wikipedia and google earth. The general idea is to have space as one (important) criterion for organising information.

How to use it/see examples? There are good descriptions available at

• http://wikimapia.mattjonesblog.com/2006/09/15/how-to-1-adding-a-new-place/,
• http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2006/08/google-maps-on-your-site-in-60-seconds.html and
• http://wikimapia.mattjonesblog.com/2006/09/20/how-to-2-upcoming-places/.

Also: see the FAQ, http://www.wikimapia.org/faq.htm

Basically the way it works is as follows:

• Start www.wikimapia.org
• Select the place you want to mark/highlight (via menu entry in the right top corner “WikiMapia” -> “Add New Place”)
• Wait until others (your friends?) have voted for this location/object with “yes”. There is a toggle “upcoming places”. These are the criteria that need to be true for a place to be a “real place” (i.e., to change from upcoming to granted).
  • must be at least 24 hours old;
  • must have more than 2 positive votes (yes) and 0 negative (no);
  • with 1 negative vote, it needs at least 8 positive;
  • places with only 2 positive votes and 0 negative will be automatically approved after one week.
• Enjoy …

The frame below shows “Salzburg Research” at the technoloy centre Salzburg. You also see the domain registry “nic.at” in close distance.

Add comment October 3rd, 2006

An Expedition to European DCH, part II

Here is some feedback on Session 4 Communication and Collaboration, chaired by Werner Haas, of the Institute of Information Systems & Information Management at Joanneum Research.

The speakers and presentations were

• Susan Hazan: What happens to memory institutions with Web 2.0, Flickr, etc.? Can museums pass on their responsibility to the public?
  What I take from that lecture is that museums/libraries/archives have the advantage of being highly “trusted”. See the slides of the presentation with a reference to the study that argues for trust http://www.digital-heritage.org/salzburg/.
• Otmar Moritsch of the technical museum in Vienna presented medien.welten as an interactive virtual exhibition with the possibilities to build one’s personal experience, interact, etc.
• Hans Petschar of ONB, presented the ideas and background of the European Digital Library.
• Patrick Pfeiffer of Creative Commons, Luxembourg gave a good overview talk of CC (including a practial example). Currently there are already 130 Million linkbacks to CC, 200 Millionen to be expected by the end of this year (2006). Also, he announced Creative Commons 3.0 to be announced early July 2006, with increased compatibilty with other open content licenses. And: Microsoft announced a free plugin for creative commons today.
• Ulrich Leisinger of the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum presented the Digital Mozart Edition (DME).

In the afternoon, Andrea Mulrenin of Salzburg Research chaired the final Session 6: Preserving our Cultural Heritage 2 (Long-term preservation)

• Günter Mühlberger presented a survey on digital preservation in Europe, see also the reUSE project; the whole study is available online and in my opinion is an excellent source for quantitative data on the current state (in Europe) on digital preservation.
• Rudolf Gschwind, of the image and media lab of the University of Basel: He argued that there is no digital data as such, there are only “logical constructs” that are stored. He mentioned two projects: (1) dist.ar.net as a research project that follows the approach of automated migration of digital contents (for the purpose of long-term preservation); (2) PEVIAR – permanent visual archive an approach of analog storage of digital media (using microfiche). Gschwind talks about “eternal media” (> 100 years, 500 years possible).
• Namir Anani, from the Canadian Heritage Information Network talked about sustainability and heritage. His main argument was to harness collective synergies.
• Seamus Ross of the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATI) in Glasgow was supposed to provide a summary but presented more his personal view on preservation.
• Then, Andi Rauber from Technical University of Vienna sneaked in and announced the formation of a working group of the Österreichische Computer Gesellschaft (OCG) to the theme “Digitale Langzeitarchivierung”.
• Finally, Reinhold Hohengartner from the Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Culture presented some goodies in his farewell statement.
  He started with “Es war sehr schön, es hat mich sehr gefreut” (it was very nice, I liked it) which is attributed to Kaiser Franz Joseph I (apparently you can listen to it in the “Mediathek” – I had a look online, found an entry but was not able to play it). He argued that oral history was a way of backup (“Tratsch als Backup”, gossip as a means of backup) and also a way of data transmission and that we must not loose that. Also in this line of argumentation was his statement that the original is always associated with a myth and that the digital artefact will always (only) be a copy. He mentioned the theft of the Saliera as an example (where we did have digital copies but still missed the original).

Add comment June 22nd, 2006

An Expedition to European Digital Cultural Heritage, Salzburg 2006

These days I participate in an international conference An Expedition to European Digital Cultural Heritage, Collecting, Connecting – and Conserving? organised by Salzburg Research for the Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Culture.

I want to reflect on Session 3: Connecting chaired by Alexander Wahler of Hanival Internet Services.

• Hamish Cunningham argued in his presentation that there will be multiple Semantic Webs, we will not be able to achieve what AI did not achieve
• Wernher Behrendt argued for a paradigmatic shift vs. (paradigmatic) hype. We dreamed about autonomous cars in the sixties and they are not around yet. But: we are able to that on a smaller scale in the Grand Challenge and it worked (for 200 km). So, if we have a technology that helps us build connections, then we should look into it.
• Eero Hyvänen: argues that the real benefit comes when people start thinking beyond their own organisation. E.g., if your (digital) artefacts can be re-used and integrated by others (and vice versa), then you can save lots of efforts.
• Ross King presented the Bricks architecture and argued that we can more quickly come to usable deployable systems, more flexible systems by using service-oriented architecture
• Rainer Hubert argued that there are existing technical solutions available but that we need infrastructures and resources to be able to do the necessary digitisation. Everyday work is important as well.

My personal impression was that there are (too) few showcases that demonstrate how the promise of “machine processable content” becomes reality, i.e., how to make use of (software) agents in a better way.

Wernher answered to that question that he believes in personal agents (as slaves) that do simple work. flickr could be a first example where you can annotate and also classify (the “low road”). The “high road” will take longer, would be more sophisticated. We should not think in terms of 17-inch-screen-and-browser: future systems (and interfaces) will be different, more unobtrusive.

According to Hamish the key promise is re-usability (also expressed argued by Eero) and according to him this is already achieved to a good degree: there are many mechanisms already out that allow people to re-use contents.

Add comment June 21st, 2006

Kick-Off “Heritage Alive”

Today I joined the kick-off of one of our new projects entitled “heritage alive!”. Partners are

• Salzburg Research as coordinator
• Historical City Centre Preservation (HPPC) of the city of Salzburg
• Administrative District of Gorlice, Poland
• Commune di Urbino, Italy
• Municipality of Hollokö, Hungary
• The region of the Ionian Islands, Greece
• Centre for Economic and Social Analyses and Strategies, Bulgaria (The sacred city of Perperikon)
• Municipality of Kardkali, Bulgaria
• Mioritics Association, Romania

HeritageAlive! aims at bringing together World Heritage Sites. The list of partners is interesting due to its diversity: most of them are WH sites already (and Perperikon tries to get the status in 2007); there are small ones like Hollokö in Hungary which only has about 4000 inhabitants; and big(ger) ones, well established (such as Salzburg or Urbino); some face the problems of funding (such as Sigishoara), some face the problem of how to maintain their traditions (it’s not just a question of funding and buildings/monuments but also often how to keep the tradition in people’s heads alive).

More specifically, thre project addresses the issues of “awareness for CH sites”, “sustainable use” of these sites and finally, inclusion (and awareness) of the local people. See www.heritagealive.eu for further details.

Add comment May 29th, 2006