"I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything..." (Richard Feynman)
This morning I visited the Harbin Institute of Technology. It is a city of it's own within Harbin. HIT financed the express road to the airport, there are two 4 Star hotels on the University ground....
Well, I arrived in Harbin on October 18th and the weather was, let's say as a normal January in Hamburg and I was stupidly dressed with a linen jacket and mocassins - just out of Rome. January in Harbin could be worse. Wikipedia says - 13 C is the medium High Temperature, they call it also Ice -City in China.
Harbin is known for it's pollution problems and the picture below, taken from my Hotel room might confirm this.
Arrived in Harbin this evening and had Dinner with Burley and two of his friends. We went to a traditional popular Harbin Restaurant.
The title of the selection was "Killing the pig" and the single dishes were
- blood sausages
- boiled pig head meat
- A soup with cabbage and bacon
- small intestine with green peppers
- mushrooms and eggs
- Fried sticks of Cornbread
From October 18 to 27 I am on a trip to China and Malaysia with two main goals:
a) to find a partner in China to develop with us a reading assistant for quick automatic translations from Chinese to English/French/Spanish and from English to Chinese.
b) to meet MIMOS representatives in Kuala Lumpur and to establish a formal collaboration on the hosting and further development of the AGROVOC conceptserver.
After quite some time johannes.keizer.com is online again. (Grazie Antonella!!). I was telling in my offline message that the side had been hacked. Well, this was exaggerated. First I had discovered that links behing pictures had been changed, then I found strange words in my vocabularies. I opened the site as "anonymous user" and found that all public posts could not only be viewed, but also be edited. I was horror-stricken and thought about a severe hacking. I put the site offline. I did not find the reason for what happened. Antonella did.
The International Conference on Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web is an Initiative to bring together two communities: those who are working on semantic web technology and those who managing big digital libraries. Too often the work on Digital Library Systems is poor in Semantic Technology; too often also the work on Semantic tools is not aware of the issues when working with large real world data sets.
From September 6-7 ICRISAT in Hyderabad hosted a workshop on OpenAccess publishing in Indian Agriculture. I was invited as a speaker. My presentation is attached. There are many open Archives in India, but no up to now in Agricultural research.
I am normally boycotting Chinese Restaurants outside China. Most of them are simply terrible. I neither like the high end elegant versions as "Green Tea" in Rome.
