An innovation grant from iNowIT enables netage.nl in cooperation with AG5 to support the safety regions Haaglanden and Gelderland-Zuid in The Netherlands with the processing of employee data, based on the principle ‘one-time registration, multiple use.’

Within a safety region employee data is stored in many different systems. For example there are personnel and salary systems and the central telephone index, but also systems supporting personnel, skills, various facility processes, automation and many others. Today, all these sub-departments keep the personnel data and mutations in their own systems. The chance of errors and divergence is considerable. It is desired to orchestrate data, systems and processes in such a way that only the authoritative source data will be changed, and (authorized) consumer applications can use it.

The solution will be based on Linked Data technologies, which is an area of expertise of netage.nl. In 2013, a proof of concept will be implemented to show benefits of implementing the core registration through Linked Data. The basis for this will be part of the foundation which is being developed by Netage.nl within the iNowIT project.

Op 3 Oktober 2013 zal Bart van Leeuwen spreken tijden de Second MakoLab Semantic Day in Parijs. De MakoLab Semantic Day is mede georganiseerd door MakoLab SA (Łódź, Polen), Mondeca (Parijs, Frankrijk), Department of Information Systems (Poznań University of Economics, Polen) en het Polish Academy of Sciences – Scientific Center in Parijs.

De rode draad van de Second MakoLab Semantic Day is de wisselwerking tussen ideeën en de theorie van het Semantic Web en haar praktische toepassingen. De twee fundamentele doelstellingen zijn: te blijven opleiden over deze nieuwe kijk op het web en deskundigen uit verschillende vakgebieden te verzamelen en hun zeer pragmatische toepassingen demonstreren. Ook Bart zal tijdens zijn presentatie deze dag iets vertellen over zijn praktische toepassingen van het Semantic Web bij de brandweer.

On October 31^st Bart van Leeuwen will give a guest lecture about firefighting with the Semantic Web at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. Bart is invited by David Wild who will run a new elective course this autumn entitled ‘Informatics in Disasters and Emergency Response.’

On November 6th 2013 Bart van Leeuwen will present at IBM Information On Demand 2013, IBM’s largest EXPO to experience products, services and solutions in action.

The IBM DB2 NoSQL Graph Store development team requested if we could tell something about our use case for the IBM DB2 NoSQL Graph Store. The session will be about the why and how netage.nl is building a platform with several fire departments to collect and classify information for firefighters. The platform combines enterprise robustness with cutting-edge technology to help firefighters stay information aware.

The Session will be about:

• Why Fire Fighters need to be information aware
• The choice for linked data technology
• Where the IBM DB2 NoSQL Graph Store fits in
• Some general considerations for using the IBM DB2 NoSQL Graph Store

More information about the session can be found here

Recently, we discovered a bug in Geronimo application server, which is also visible in all dependent products such as IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition. Our work is documented in GERONIMO-6138. IBM announced an updated release of their application server for the end of June 2013.

We discovered the problem while migrating our triple store from Jena TDB to IBM DB2. The IBM DB2 triple store is fully compatible with the Jena API and uses ordinary database connections to talk to DB2. However, it requires support of JDBC 4.

The initial release of Geronimo 3 stated full Java EE 6 support, which includes support of JDBC 4. The JDBC support is provided by the third party library tranql. However, the included version was only compatible with JDBC 3. Our fix updated the dependency on tranql to the right version and adapted Geronimo to API changes in the new tranql version.

Contributing this fix reflects our dedication to contribute to community projects

Op 5 juni zullen Bart van Leeuwen en Moritz Hoffmann namens netage.nl spreken op de Semantic Technology & Business Conferentie in San Francisco, Verenigde Staten.

Ze zullen hier een presentatie geven over hun gebruik van semantische technologieën bij de brandweer. netage.nl heeft hiermee de afgelopen 2,5 jaar veel aandacht gekregen in zowel de semantische als de brandweer wereld. Zij vertellen in de presentatie hun verhaal, van het prille begin tot het huidige gebruik en de ideeën voor de toekomst.

On February 8th 2013 we deployed the first RESC.Info monitor installation in Switzerland. The Murten fire department in the Canton of Fribourg will be using our system within the BREF MissionFusion project for the coming 3 years to gain experience with our new approach of information management for emergency responders. The Murten fire department is really enthusiastic since they are a regional support point they have to go to incidents up 35km away. Local knowledge is practically non existing at those locations so the RESC.Info monitor gives them a good first hint on where to go.

This installation was made possible through the support of the BREF MissionFusion project. Together with the Bern University of Applied Sciences and netlabs.org. netage.nl acts as the specialists in the emergency response field where our practical experience has shown its great value. The BFH will provide the infrastructure and contacts to the various government agencies. netlabs.org will provide the various government agencies with tools to generate and publish linked open data.

While installing the first screens at the Murten fire station it was great to see the various fire fighter  coming in and being enthusiastic at the first glimpse of the screen. Together with Adrian Gschwend of netlabs.org we had lively discussion about where we could get more data for the system.
We were able to guide the discussions based on our long running practical experience with both emergency response and information management.

The conclusion for all parties was clear, this is going to be a interesting and long running partnership to make the work of fire fighters in Murten safer.