PUBLIC MARKS with search assets

Application Programming Interface, a phrase that has a number of different meanings to the people build and use APIs, and virtually no meaning at all to those that don't. I like to think of an API as a bridge - one which allows information to flow from one piece of software to another. In the case of the Guardian's Content API, the bridge allows us to send requests to and receive information from the Guardian's huge database of articles, images, and other assets.

Washington Mutual, with $307 billion in assets, is by far the biggest bank failure in history, eclipsing the 1984 failure of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust in Chicago, an event that presaged the savings and loan crisis. IndyMac, which was seized by regulators in July, was one-tenth the size of WaMu.

It doesn't seem significantly different from the limited interoperability achieved between OpenSim and Second Life last month (there's still no transfer of assets and inventory items), but it's another step towards promoting larger interoperability between Second Life and other virtual worlds.

Perceptual Edge We are overwhelmed by information, not because there is too much, but because we don't know how to tame it. Information lies stagnant in rapidly expanding pools as our ability to collect and warehouse it increases, but our ability to make sense of and communicate it remains inert, largely without notice. Computers speed the process of information handling, but they don't tell us what the information means or how to communicate its meaning to decision makers. These skills are not intuitive; they rely largely on analysis and presentation skills that must be learned. Perceptual Edge focuses on the tools and techniques of visual business intelligence to help you make better use of your valuable information assets.

Many applications that process multimedia assets make use of some form of metadata that describe the multimedia content. The goals of this document are to explain the advantages of using Semantic Web languages and technologies for the creation, storage, manipulation, interchange and processing of image metadata. In addition, it provides guidelines for Semantic Web-based image annotation, illustrated by use cases. Relevant RDF and OWL vocabularies are discussed, along with a short overview of publicly available tools.