Is Software Innovation only a matter of money?

In the Project Daily blog Ty Kiisel talks about "If the Largest Software Vendors Won’t Fund Innovation, Who Will?".

I think software innovation is not just a matter of how much you spend on your projects. It is more a matter of imagination and creativity, which might only be slightly related to the money you spend. On the other hand it's true that need some or a lot of money to push your product into the market. But that's not innovation.

Does SW make you healthy?

Unfortunately not. But it can help health care in various ways.

Stakeholders spend more and more money for Health Information Systems with Personal Health Records, Telemedicine and other types of SW that enables advanced information and knowledge management for better life.

In a recent interview Bill Crounse, MD Senior Director, Worldwide Health, has talked about the not-so-far future of health SW, see the video here.

At SIRM, we made first steps into health software for Thailand last year and we will continue to work in this field.

MS-Word for Ontologies?

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the release of a novel add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 that enables the incorporation and annotation of texts with an ontology. This sounds revolutionary and if it works as expected it may ease our efforts to find useful knowledge in the Web. Just that.

Microsoft's announcement

How it works

Where you get it

And sorry, it's only available for Word 2007.

Who drives software innovation?

Bruce Richardson has an interesting point to make - more than one, actually - about who will continue to drive software innovation. In his blog, he analyzes the smaller/faster vs. the bigger/more influential organizations.

The question remains somewhat open to markets like Thailand, where a lot of localized SW versions are implemented that are not merely versions of smaller/faster or bigger/more influential drivers but new solutions on its own.

One result of this local kind of driving force is a novel ontology on lunisolar calendar data, which is populated with the help of a astronomical algorithm. With this ontology it should be easy to provide a basis for different applications, e.g. the data preparation of log files in societies with lunisolar calendars. One could easily discard data from holidays derived from lunar phases etc.

Interesting information about lunar calculations can be found on Andy Hoerstemeiers instructive site.

Importing PDFs to Mediawiki

We at SIRM work with a wiki system based on Mediawiki now as noted earlier. This brings up the problem of porting the information in a PDF file into the wiki system. As far as we know, there are no one-click freeware applications available to manage this task hassle-free. Zamzar seems to work in many cases, though with some delay and needs some editing as well.

At least, we can use one of the multi-step solutions mentioned in the Appropedia-Blog.

Education in Thailand

Naresuan University is still a public institution, although has strived to go private. For an overview of the Thai education system, our big sister, Mahidol University, Bangkok, has collected valuable information, besides that you can also see the related Wikipedia article, of course.

To the right an impression of the campus of Naresuan University.

SIRM Wiki

At SIRM, we have established a private Wiki for sharing ideas, papers and organizational stuff among the team members.

Unfortunately, this Wiki can only be private. But we will summarize the most important parts here in our blog, so that you can comment on them or keep in touch with us.

SIRM FKA KINDHEART Research

Hi there

we are back under a new name (the old one was too long) and logo but with the same people working plus some more.

So, expect new exciting stuff about our software projects and related ideas for
* knowledge based systems,
* the Web 2.0,
* the Semantic Web,
* intelligent systems,
* ontology engineering,
* natural language processing,

amongst others.

The old blog will be closed, so just subscribe to this new one.