IBM Brings Tomorrow's Software Technology to Today's Developers and Students

Market Wire, May, 2005

IBM today launched new online resources to put emerging software technology and skills into the hands of developers, computer science faculty and students.

IBM unveiled new research topics and new technology that offer developers, ISVs, students and faculty first-hand previews of development trends, technologies and concepts from IBM's research and development labs. Available on alphaWorks, IBM's emerging technologies Web site, developers, students and faculty at higher education institutions will now be able to gain insight and expertise on emerging trends and gain competitive advantage around emerging technology trends including visualization and semantics.

Additionally, IBM launched new resources on developerWorks, IBM's skills-building resource for developers. These include new customizable Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds that allow developers to customize and tailor the way they receive the resources and skills-building information they are most interested in, and new collaboration tools that allow developers to share knowledge with other developers.

"IBM is leveraging its investment in research and ties to the development community to bring emerging technologies to fruition," said Gina Poole, vice president of Developer Relations, IBM. "By working with developers, business partners, academia and our customers, we can help define future trends in development and bring the latest to more than 4.5 million registered users through our developerWorks and alphaWorks communities."

Bringing Research to Today's Developers and Academics

With the new alphaWorks resources, IBM is focusing on research concepts that can enhance, simplify and create new uses of technology, while driving innovation in development. IBM is offering a collection of resources including technology downloads, demonstrations, articles and researcher profiles to help developers and academia learn about these new technologies and trends.

The first two research topics focus on visualization -- using visual systems in development to help application users better perceive and process information -- and semantics -- using knowledge and reasoning to make software more intelligent, adaptive and efficient. New research topics will be launched throughout the year to help build awareness and understanding around software development trends.

Visualization helps people understand complex data and processes. By presenting large amounts of data in a visual form, such as meteorology, healthcare information or the execution of complex computing systems, developers can build applications that transform large amounts of data into comprehensible visual representations that can help organizations solve complex business problems. Visualization technologies available on alphaWorks include:

--  IBM Web Services Navigator -- An Eclipse-based, IBM Rational Application
    Developer plug-in for interactive visualization of Web service
    transactions. The tool addresses the complexity of understanding and
    debugging complex collections of Web services, such as those found in
    Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications, by visualizing the
    actual execution of Web service transactions.

--  History Flow Visualization Application -- A tool for visualizing dynamic,
    evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors.
    History flow provides a clear view of complex records of contributions and
    collaboration.

--  Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM) -- A tool for modeling
    infectious agents across the United States. STEM is designed to make it
    easy for developers and researchers to plug in their own models.
    

Semantics helps developers use domain knowledge, knowledge about multiple applications or systems that can be shared, to make software more intelligent, adaptive, and efficient. By using knowledge specific to applications, developers can enhance the functionality and optimize performance of their projects. Semantics technologies available on alphaWorks include:

--  Unstructured Information Management Architecture SDK -- A Java software
    development kit (SDK) that supports the implementation, composition, and
    deployment of applications working with unstructured information.

--  Web Metadata Extractor -- A tool for extracting relevant information from
    Web pages by using semi-automatically generated templates. For example, in
    Web content aggregation or recasting systems, Web Metadata Extractor
    converts scattered, unstructured information into a structured format.

--  IBM Ontology Management System and IBM Integrated Ontology Development
    Toolkit -- A framework for loading ontologies, terms and concepts used to
    describe and represent an area of knowledge, from files and through the
    Internet and for locally creating, modifying, querying and storing
    ontologies.

--  Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval Engine (MARVEL) -- An automated desktop
    indexing and search system for digital images.