15 June 2007

CANARIE sings

CANARIE has recently received $120 m. in new funding from the federal government (announced officially on 31 May). This is good news for those working in the Internet research space, as well as anyone interested in the Science and Technology (S&T) strategy recently announced by the federal government.

CANARIE is holding a workshop to discuss possible funding approaches and projects, which will set the tone and direction for the next few years of research on advanced networks. The focus on the development of middleware will be of interest to any Canadian researcher who is investigating how to leverage Internet technologies to enable remote and real time interaction with disparate databases.

Adding value to these transactional information flows is a key area of expansion for Canada. We need to move from a resource extraction economy to one that adds value at the point of production (think Ikea). Promoting the development of middleware is akin to building things with the trees we pull out of the ground and exporting these value added projects. Sure we can export the raw materials (i.e. data, databases), but giving value added access to data through innovative middleware applications will spur further innovation in web n+1 technologies that are already changing the way we interact, with each other, and with our data infrastructures.

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