CATEGORICAL DESIGN SOLUTIONS

CDS in Red Herring Top 50 Innovators

fmagnan — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:41:58 +0000

Tonight CDS won an award for RedHerring Top 50 Innovators. Always nice to get some kind of recognition. This post is sent live from my iPhone. Please excuse it’s brevity.

Yahoo Opens its search platform to the Semantic Web

fmagnan — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:57:32 +0000

Yahoo announced their Open search initiative code named SearchMonkey. This will open Yahoo search engine and enable third party applications to feed it structured data with some precise semantics. This is a very big step towards Web 3.0 realization. A beta program is starting. Look at the Techcrunch review of this announcement here.

Catch the Semantic Wave of Web 3.0

fmagnan — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 14:13:52 +0000

An industry roadmap for Web 3.0 implementation is available from Project10X. Although the report is quite expensive, there is an interesting executive summary you can download for free at the following link: Semantic Wave 2008 Report: Executive Summary. It gives a nice introduction to the Semantic Web, explains some technology trends and market trends. It also lists companies working with semantic technologies at a level or another.Also watch for the 2008 Semantic Technology Conference which covers those topics. The conference is held from may 18-22 2008 in San Jose CA.

Red Herring Canada 2008 - Introductory Cocktail

fmagnan — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 02:10:58 +0000

Tonight there was an introductory cocktail in Montreal to present the Red Herring Canada 2008 event. The event was supposed to happen in may but it is postponed to june. The specific dates were not mentioned. One huge opportunity for us here is that there will be a specific section of the conference dedicated to Web 3.0.

November 26th, Blue Beanie Day 2007

admin — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:40:38 +0000

Categorical Design Solutions like many other Standardistas (people who support web standards!) support the Blue Beanie Day. Building for accessible, standards compliant and semantic web content it’s the center piece of CDS.

I2LOR07 - Building Knowledge Ecosystems in Web 3.0

ghabel — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:11:28 +0000

CDS has participated in the LORNET annual conference (i2LOR2007). We have shared our ideas about how the advent of the Semantic Web brings new instruments to help build dynamic Knowledge Ecosystems on the Web. We have presented how they enable the Crowdsourcing of Knowledge and Wisdom by looking at some experimental applications prototypes. Here is our small article on the subject: article Official site All Conference.com

MSLUG October Meeting

fmagnan — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 03:54:13 +0000

Last night the Montreal Scheme & Lisp user group (MSLUG) monthly meeting happened at a special session following the first OOPSLA conference day. The OOPSLA conference is going on in Montreal this year and it features a special section on dynamic languages.I booked a room at UQAM for the event since the conference participants were close to my building on the corner of St-Urbain and Sherbrooke. The room was almost full. It was certainly the biggest MSLUG meeting ever held. I never saw such a large concentration of Scheemers and Lispers.The meeting featured two speakers: Manuel Serrano (INRIA Sophia-Antipolis), the maker of Bigloo scheme compiler and Pascal Costanza (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) creator of Gilgul, Lava and JMangler.The night started with Manuel Serrano who presented the HOP web application development language. The main strength of HOP is to offer a unique language in which you can develop both the client and server side in a transparent way. Since HOP was first implemented over Bigloo, its syntax is mainly Scheme syntax (Lisp S-Expressions) but with two additional syntactic constructs “~” which evaluates the next S-Expression in the client (by compiling the HOP code inside to Javascript) and the “$” construct does the opposite: the expression following it will be evaluated on the server.Professor Serrano was very convincing when he showed some nice examples where he could demonstrate that his system could be used to develop very interactive web applications and avoid the Tower of Babel of Web programming (HTML, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, Json, PHP, SVG, MathML…).I am convinced that the HOP system is very powerful but the proof of concept could be enhanced by using it to develop applications that are unique and that would be very difficult to implement using the usual web technologies (PHP, Ruby, …). This talk was very interesting to us since web are using a very similar strategy at Categorical Design. We wrote our own web services server (like in HOP) and we program our web applications using S-Expressions (in SXML in fact). I was hesitating to implement that Scheme to Javascript compiler that HOP features. Manuel Serrano clearly convinced me of the benefits of doing this.

The second talk was from Pascal Costanza was also very interesting since it was promoting a new programming paradigm called Context Oriented Programming. He presented an extension of CLOS called ContextL that lets the programmer declare the behavior of classes, methods, and slots according to the context. He defines the notion of context as “Any computationally accessible thing.” which seems very general. Examples of a context could be: location, bandwidth, device, temperature, mood, …).Professor Costanza showed simple examples that he was typing in front of us in a common lisp environment. His examples were good enough to express most features of ContextL but showing a more elaborate example would have been much more convincing to me. He mentioned that the work was at an early stage. There was also a missing link in the talk: how is the context captured by the program.It was a very inspiring evening. Thank you Dominique Boucher for organizing this MSLUG event.Other links :Bill Clementson’s Blog PLNews

Semantic Web at E-Learn 2007

ghabel — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 03:00:24 +0000

We were pleased to attend E-Learn 2007 conference in Quebec city and having the opportunity to share our passion and latest developments in Semantic Web with onsite attendees. Meeting people that are interested in overcoming actual elearning problems in including Web 3.0 solutions, made that congress a fresh way to think about elearning differently.

Red Herring Canada 2007 - The First Day

fmagnan — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:56:36 +0000

It was our fist day at the Red Herring event, we met a lot of people and learned some nice things on the landscape of technology startups.

There was some very nice presentations, the most interesting for us were:

Top Ten Qualities for Success
(M) Alex Vieux, Publisher & CEO, Red Herring
Jennifer Fonstad, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Ted Anderson, Managing General Director, Ventures West
Mark de Groot, President & CEO, MSBi Capital

which was a panel of VC telling what they are looking for in the business they wish to invest in.

But certainly the most interesting part was: “Meet the Money: A Jury of VCs Evaluates Canadian Startups”. Four startup founders pitched their product idea to three VC investors and the speaker has 10 minutes to convince the VC’s to invest or not in their company. The VC commented the presentations and decided on the spot if they will invest or not in the company.

Very good pointers for us to refine our speech of tomorrow.

Red Herring Canada 2007 - Cocktail

fmagnan — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 03:34:03 +0000

Tonight, Red Herring is in town and I went at Complexe Desjardins to join the other participants at a nice cocktail. Staring at a nice view of Place des Arts from an hanging terasse above St-Catherine street, I listened to a short opening form Red Herring CEO Alex Vieux and to inspiring introduction by a sucessful Canadian entrepreneur: Leonard Brody.

I also met with George Favvas from SmartHippo which kindly gave me nice words about his bad experience searching for venture capital. They had to bootstrap to get it going and it seems that this was a great way for them to become profitable and grow.

I also learned a very important lesson. Investors managing large funds don’t have much time to hear your story. We must be able to tell the story in one punchy sentence. Then, we can go deeper if we have a catch…

We will present at Red Herring!

fmagnan — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 02:07:49 +0000

Our talk proposal at Red Herring Canada 2007 was accepted! Wow, what an opportunity for us. We will have the opportunity to meet with the Angels, VC’s, Governments and potential Partners. It clearly gives us clear objectives that we must cover in 12 minutes…Knowledge Ecosystem Wikipedia Knowledge Ecosystem W3C

Categorical Design Solutions INC

fmagnan — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 02:12:26 +0000

We made it official. We are now legally 3 partners holding the shares of a new entity: Categorical Design Solutions incorporated. For the law, our journey starts here.

Last evening we filled the forms to incorporate the company with a federal charter. We were suprised by the simplicity of the process. When I woke up this morning I had an email contaning the approval and incorporation certificate… Wow, I was surprised by the efficiency!

Red Herring Canada 2007

fmagnan — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 01:55:53 +0000

We found out reading the excellent Technocité blog that Red Herring were organizing an event in Canada in early september.

This is a big thing for Montreal Technology Community. As a fresh startup full of ideas, we decided to try our chance and submit for a talk. Here is the website of the event.

DemoCamp Montreal 4

fmagnan — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 03:17:07 +0000

Tonight we were at DemoCamp Montreal 4. We prensented very quickly two products: Semantic Referencer and BrainCuts. It was a nice experience. This was the first time we had to present without slides. Explaining the Semantic Web in 2 minutes without slides was some challenge. We learned some lessons from it. Here are some blogs commenting the event: Montreal Tech Watch, YashLabs and PodBean. heri has even put together a small video of our presentation:

DemocampMontreal4 - BrainCuts
Uploaded by montrealtechwatch