The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
No. 105 - 1 October 2013
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In This Issue
Cutter Summit Discount Coupon
Temkin Group IT Vendor Scorecard
OMG Meeting Highlights
Text-to-Speech Documentary
Super WiFi Pilot
Seen Recently
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Cutter Summit: Save $750 on Registration
We are pleased to offer readers of the KIT a discount to attend the Cutter Summit in Cambridge, Mass., on Nov. 4-6. Please register and use the coupon code "Baudoin" to get the reduced rate.
IT Vendor Scorecard
Attention IT sourcing departments: the Temkin Group has rated 54 IT product or service suppliers, based on input from 802 respondents from large ($500M+ revenue) companies, who were asked to rate the suppliers in eight categories: product features, product quality, product flexibility, technical support, account team support, cost of ownership, innovation, and ease of use.
The report may seem a bit expensive, starting at $495 for just one reader, but medium-to-large clients may find it worthwhile.
OMG Meeting Highlights
The Object Management Group held its quarterly technical meetings last week in New Jersey. Major highlights:
  • The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) working group, chaired by Dell Computer, issued a Request for Information (RFI) about the "SDN Application Ecosystem." The responses will help shape the roadmap for the group's future standards activities. Please contact us if you would like a copy of the RFI.
  • Ontologies and terminologies are still a big topic, serving as a foundation for any modeling or data interchange standards that require precise semantics. The Finance Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) is itself a standard vocabulary, while the Healthcare Common Terminology Services rel. 2 (CTS2) is not the terminology itself, but an API for the query, exchange and update of terminological content.
  • A standard Decision Model and Notation (DMN) is being proposed. It will complete a set of business modeling and interchange standards that include the Business Motivation Model (BMM), the better-known Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), the recently adopted Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) and the Value Delivery Modeling Language (VDML), which is still work in progress.
  • There was a day-long conference on the "Internet of Things" (IoT) and the implications of very large numbers of connected devices for communication protocols, security, and system assurance.

The next set of meetings will be on Dec. 9-13 in Santa Clara, Calif. Please contact us if you are interested in attending. 

How Siri Found Her (Its?) Voice
This documentary explains how voice-over actors and actresses record all the speech fragments that are then deconstructed and dynamically re-assembled by text-to-speech software to produce computer voices (such as that of Siri, the automated assistant on Apple mobile devices).
Super WiFi Coming to a Library Near You
Government Computer News (GCN) reports on a pilot of a WiFi-like system, the Gigabit Libraries Network (GLN), which uses an abandoned range of the TV frequency spectrum. The low frequency means less throughput, but a longer range than traditional 802.11 signals, and would provide free Internet access to large, underserved rural areas using access points located in public libraries.
Seen Recently...

"On average, mobile now represents more than 20% of overall traffic to Web sites."

-- Forrester Research, see here 

 

"Innovations are powered by confidence."

-- David Sengeh (MIT Media Lab) in a Huffington Post interview