The Open Source Initiative SMILA Continues to Gain Momentum Globally

Attensity and living-e – Two Powerful Partners Join SMILA

The Open Source Initiative, SMILA “SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture”, was mutually launched at the end of 2007 by brox IT Solutions GmbH, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and empolis to create a standardized infrastructure for information management. The “eclipse Foundation” was chosen as a platform for the initiative. The eclipse community consists of more than 180 companies and research institutions, as well as countless private users worldwide, which all have the common objective of developing open and standardized platforms. Since June 2008, SMILA attained the status of an official eclipse project http://www.eclipse.org/smila/ and is co-funded through the THESEUS project by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi).

Retroactive to January 1, 2009, the initiative gains two significant semantic technology partners on the occasion of the Open Source Meets Business Congress (27. – 29. January 2009, Nuremberg, Germany) with Attensity, Inc., from Palo Alto, California and living-e AG from Karlsruhe, Germany. Both companies will continue development of their products based on the SMILA open architecture and infrastructure standard – Attensity with semantic text analytics technologies and living-e with its self-learning solutions for automated, intelligent responses to e-mails, SMS, faxes and letters.

“Collaborative software development provides an outstanding opportunity to combine competencies and capitalize on strengths provided by the partners, ” Vukasin Toroman, living-e’s CTO said, “participating in this initiative enables living-e to be a part of innovation and helps us to participate in and drive important shared technologies”.

“Increased demands for lower costs and shorter innovation cycles result in growing challenges faced by development and business applications,” stated Dr. David Bean, Attensity’s CTO. “By joining the SMILA initiative, we will be in a better position to handle these challenges and ultimately bring a more innovative and cost effective solution to market”.

Today software solution providers must implement increasingly complex solutions in order to meet growing customer demands, such as exponential data volume growth and increasing technology complexity resulting from the use and analysis of multiple data sources. Only a small percentage of these solutions, however, effectively represent new differentiated capabilities for customers and the developing company. The larger percentage relates to standard features that are practically undistinguishable from the competition, but need to be developed by each provider individually, e.g. access to data sources, operation and monitoring, rights management, authentication, etc.

Practically every international company has implemented any number of proprietary software and enterprise search solutions to access decision-relevant information. SMILA provides the key infrastructure for all solutions to be combined in a single platform. Locating and managing extremely large volumes of structured and unstructured information is facilitated and accelerated, costs are reduced and innovation is shared across providers. With SMILA, development and market entry expenses for innovative solutions targeted at obtaining meaningful business process information or extracting relevancy out of business processes, are shared across vendors so that they can focus on new, innovative solutions to meet market needs, improving business efficiency and reducing the overall costs of application development.

“We are delighted to welcome these two industry leaders to the initiative. Their expertise and technologies represent a great benefit for the initiative in developing a single, international standard for information logistics,” said Dr. Mario Lenz, empolis’ CTO.

brox IT-Solutions GmbH was founded in 1998 and is a well-known provider of consulting, software and services for enterprise-wide information management and data governance in Germany. The Founder and General Manager of brox is Hans-Christian Brockmann.

brox has redefined the market space “information excellence” by being the first to combine excellence in data quality with excellence in information access. brox leadership role is underlined by its long standing partnerships with customers like Audi, VW, Bosch, Credit Suisse, Continental, MAN and Deutsche Telekom.

brox is a strategic member of Eclipse Foundation where it is a key driver behind the SMILA initiative. SMILA aims to establish an open architecture standard for handling structured and unstructured information.

Helge Brzoska
Director Marketing/PR

brox IT-Solutions GmbH
Meisenweg 35
70771 Leinfelden-Echterdingen (Stuttgart)
Germany

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Mail: presse@brox.de
Blog: eccenca.broxblogs.de

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This release was published on openPR.