Dan on eScience & Technical Computing @ Microsoft : Open Source

MSR Open Tools to Enhance Scientific Research Efforts Building on Science Commons Ontologies

Dan Fay — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:50:46 GMT

At ETech 2009 today, the announcement went out that Science Commons in conjunction with MSR External Research released the source code to two Word 2007 add-ins to allow scientists to markup terms and phrases in their documents/papers with ontologies, such as the ones at http://neurocommons.org. Some of this is based on previous collaboration with Phil Bourne from UCSD.

“Microsoft’s openness in working with the Science Commons has significant implications for the scientific research community because it will make it easy for authors to link their documents straight into the semantic Web of science — making that research, data and material easier to find and use,” said Philip E. Bourne, Ph.D.

You can seem more about the add-ins at Pablo’s Blog - Ontology Add-in for Word 2007

Microsoft Releases Open Tools to Enhance Scientific Research Efforts Building on Science Commons Ontologies

REDMOND, Wash., and SAN JOSE, Calif. — March 11, 2009 — The nuggets of information necessary for science to progress are often hard to find, submerged deep within the Web, or within databases that can’t be easily accessed or integrated. As a result, many scientists today work in relative isolation, follow blind alleys and unnecessarily duplicate existing research.

Addressing this critical challenge for researchers, Microsoft Corp. and Creative Commons announced today, before an industry panel at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech 2009, http://en.oreilly.com/et2009 ), the release of the Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 that will enable authors to easily add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies, to their documents and research papers. Ontologies are shared vocabularies created and maintained by different academic domains to model their fields of study.

This Add-in will make it easier for scientists to link their documents to the Web in a meaningful way. Deployed on a wide scale, ontology-enabled scientific publishing will provide a Web boost to scientific discovery.

Science Commons, a division of Creative Commons, is incubating the adoption of semantic scientific publishing through creation of a robust database of ontologies (http://neurocommons.org) and development of supporting technical standards and code. Microsoft Research has built a technology bridge to enable the link between Microsoft Office Word 2007 and these ontologies.

[more]

Microsoft Releases Open Tools to Enhance Scientific Research Efforts Building on Science Commons Ontologies: Breakthrough collaboration helps researchers make easier connections on the Web.

SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP - Released

Dan Fay — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:42:54 GMT

PHP developers can now integrate data from SQL Server now that the driver is available for download. Also glad to see that it works with SQL Server Express edition.

It is my pleasure to announce that version 1.0 of the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP has released! This release marks another step in Microsoft’s continued commitment to interoperability. To keep up with our announcements and customer feedback, please check out our team blog.

SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP Team Blog

DeepEarth - VE and Silverlight Deep Zoom

Dan Fay — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:09:17 GMT

Just ran across he DeepEarth OpenSource community project on CodePlex - bringing SilverLight 2 Deep Zoom to Virtual Earth - it pans and zooms really smooth. Test it out or check out the video

PHP Support in Expression Web 2

Dan Fay — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:27:01 GMT

Passing this note about PHP support in Expression Web 2....

PHP Support in Expression Web 2

For those who might wonder about how open Microsoft is to third-party development tools and/or languages, here's one answer:

In response to feedback from Expression Web 1 users, we’ve added a rich set of features for PHP development in Expression Web version 2. There are the expected productivity features such as code-coloring, snippets and IntelliSense™, but it doesn’t stop there. The product now ships with a PHP development server that lets you test your PHP pages without any other external web server dependencies (e.g. IIS or Apache). Essentially, PHP is now a first-class citizen in Expression Web 2, and will continue to be in upcoming versions of the product.
[Thanks .net DEvHammer]

Open Source at Microsoft

Dan Fay — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:53:28 GMT

The Open Source at Microsoft site is a really good location for information, resources, and links on open source activities. I found the Spikesource tidbit very beneficial -

Spikesource is proud to offer the first open source PHP applications tested and validated for Windows Server 2008. Learn more...

OSI Approves Microsoft Licenses

On October 16, 2007, OSI approved two Microsoft Shared Source licenses—the Microsoft Public License (Ms-Pl) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-Rl). Jon Rosenberg has more on Port 25 regarding these licenses, the approval process, and the continued excitement of Microsoft about participating in the open source community.