In telecommunications and data communication systems, an errored second is an interval of a second during which any error whatsoever has occurred, regardless of whether that error was a single bit error or a complete loss of communication for that entire second. The type of error is not important for the purpose of counting errored seconds. In communication systems with very low uncorrected bit error rates, such as modern fiber-optic transmission systems, or systems with higher low-level error rates that are corrected using large amounts of forward error correction, errored seconds are often a better measure of the effective user-visible error rate than the raw bit error rate. For many modern packet-switched communication systems, even a single uncorrected bit error is enough to cause the loss of a data packet by causing its CRC check to fail; whether that packet loss was caused by a single bit error or a hundred-bit-long error burst is irrelevant. For systems using large amounts of forward error correction, the reverse applies; a single low-level bit error will almost never occur, since any small errors will almost always be corrected, but any error sufficiently large to cause the forward error correction to fail will almost always result in a large burst error. More specialist and precise definitions of errored seconds exist in standards such as the T1 and DS1 transport systems.
Cloud-based integration
Cloud-based integration is a form of systems integration business delivered as a cloud computing service that addresses data, process, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and application integration. == Description == Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is a suite of cloud services enabling customers to develop, execute and govern integration flows between disparate applications. Under the cloud-based iPaaS integration model, customers drive the development and deployment of integrations without installing or managing any hardware or middleware. The iPaaS model allows businesses to achieve integration without big investment into skills or licensed middleware software. iPaaS used to be regarded primarily as an integration tool for cloud-based software applications, used mainly by small to mid-sized business. Over time, a hybrid type of iPaaS—hybrid-IT iPaaS—that connects cloud to on-premises, is becoming increasingly popular. Additionally, large enterprises are exploring new ways of integrating iPaaS into their existing IT infrastructures. Cloud integration was created to break down the data silos, improve connectivity and optimize the business process. Cloud integration has increased in popularity as the usage of Software as a Service solutions has grown. Prior to the emergence of cloud computing in the early 2000s, integration could be categorized as either internal or business to business (B2B). Internal integration requirements were serviced through an on-premises middleware platform and typically utilized a service bus to manage exchange of data between systems. B2B integration was serviced through EDI gateways or value-added network (VAN). The advent of SaaS applications created a new kind of demand which was met through cloud-based integration. Since their emergence, many such services have also developed the capability to integrate legacy or on-premises applications, as well as function as EDI gateways. The following essential features were proposed by one marketing company: Deployed on a multi-tenant, elastic cloud infrastructure Subscription model pricing (operating expense, not capital expenditure) No software development (required connectors should already be available) Users do not perform deployment or manage the platform itself Presence of integration management and monitoring features The emergence of this sector led to new cloud-based business process management tools that do not need to build integration layers - since those are now a separate service. Drivers of growth include the need to integrate mobile app capabilities with proliferating API publishing resources and the growth in demand for the Internet of things functionalities as more 'things' connect to the Internet.
RightsCon
RightsCon is an annual conference on digital rights hosted by Access Now. It convenes international leaders and organizations to discuss global problems including internet censorship, the regulation of algorithms, electronic surveillance, the ethics of technology, online hate speech, content moderation, cyberwarfare, and more. == History == The conference was first convened by Access (today, Access Now) in Silicon Valley in 2011, with the intention of gathering civil society to discuss impacts of the growing tech industry on digital rights and human rights. It sought the participation of leaders from both industry (including companies such as Twitter, Google, Mozilla, and Comcast) and civil society organizations (such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and New America). Keynote speakers included the then-Assistant Secretary of State, Michael Posner; Egyptian blogger and political prisoner, Alaa Abd El-Fattah; and then-director of public policy at Google, Bob Boorstin. RightsCon organizers have sought to ensure the event is accessible to attendees from across the globe, particularly global majority countries, informing the decision to hold the conference in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. === Online convenings === In 2020, RightsCon was to be held in San José, Costa Rica, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting took place in an online format. In 2021, the 10th edition of RightsCon was again held online from Monday, June 7 to Friday, June 11, 2021, due to the continued global COVID-19 pandemic which altered several digital rights physical meetings. The topics for RightsCon2021 included: Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, data protection and user control, digital futures, democracy, elections, new business models, content control, peacebuilding, censorship, internet shutdowns, freedom of the media and many others were discussed by several digital rights organizations and individuals. === 2026 cancellation === The 14th RightsCon was scheduled to be held in Zambia from May 5 to 8, 2026. On April 29, 2026, the Zambian government abruptly postponed the conference, writing in a statement that the postponement was "necessitated by the need for comprehensive disclosure […] relating to key thematic issues proposed for discussion during the Summit." In May 2026, the conference was cancelled due to pressure from the Chinese government. In a statement the same day, Access Now wrote that it was "told that diplomats from the People's Republic of China (PRC) were putting pressure on the Government of Zambia because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to join us in person." == List of conferences == Past RightsCon conferences include:
Semantic network
A semantic network, or frame network is a knowledge base that represents semantic relations between concepts in a network. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, which represent concepts, and edges, which represent semantic relations between concepts, mapping or connecting semantic fields. A semantic network may be instantiated as, for example, a graph database or a concept map. Typical standardized semantic networks are expressed as semantic triples. Semantic networks are used in natural language processing applications such as semantic parsing and word-sense disambiguation. Semantic networks can also be used as a method to analyze large texts and identify the main themes and topics (e.g., of social media posts), to reveal biases (e.g., in news coverage), or even to map an entire research field. == History == Examples of the use of semantic networks in logic, directed acyclic graphs as a mnemonic tool, dates back centuries. The earliest documented use being the Greek philosopher Porphyry's commentary on Aristotle's categories in the third century AD. In computing history, "Semantic Nets" for the propositional calculus were first implemented for computers by Richard H. Richens of the Cambridge Language Research Unit in 1956 as an "interlingua" for machine translation of natural languages. Although the importance of this work and the CLRU was only belatedly realized. Semantic networks were also independently implemented by Robert F. Simmons and Sheldon Klein, using the first order predicate calculus as a base, after being inspired by a demonstration of Victor Yngve. The "line of research was originated by the first President of the Association [Association for Computational Linguistics], Victor Yngve, who in 1960 had published descriptions of algorithms for using a phrase structure grammar to generate syntactically well-formed nonsense sentences. Sheldon Klein and I about 1962-1964 were fascinated by the technique and generalized it to a method for controlling the sense of what was generated by respecting the semantic dependencies of words as they occurred in text." Other researchers, most notably M. Ross Quillian and others at System Development Corporation helped contribute to their work in the early 1960s as part of the SYNTHEX project. It's from these publications at SDC that most modern derivatives of the term "semantic network" cite as their background. Later prominent works were done by Allan M. Collins and Quillian (e.g., Collins and Quillian; Collins and Loftus Quillian). Still later in 2006, Hermann Helbig fully described MultiNet. In the late 1980s, two Netherlands universities, Groningen and Twente, jointly began a project called Knowledge Graphs, which are semantic networks but with the added constraint that edges are restricted to be from a limited set of possible relations, to facilitate algebras on the graph. In the subsequent decades, the distinction between semantic networks and knowledge graphs was blurred. In 2012, Google gave their knowledge graph the name Knowledge Graph. The Semantic Link Network was systematically studied as a social semantics networking method. Its basic model consists of semantic nodes, semantic links between nodes, and a semantic space that defines the semantics of nodes and links and reasoning rules on semantic links. The systematic theory and model was published in 2004. This research direction can trace to the definition of inheritance rules for efficient model retrieval in 1998 and the Active Document Framework ADF. Since 2003, research has developed toward social semantic networking. This work is a systematic innovation at the age of the World Wide Web and global social networking rather than an application or simple extension of the Semantic Net (Network). Its purpose and scope are different from that of the Semantic Net (or network). The rules for reasoning and evolution and automatic discovery of implicit links play an important role in the Semantic Link Network. Recently it has been developed to support Cyber-Physical-Social Intelligence. It was used for creating a general summarization method. The self-organised Semantic Link Network was integrated with a multi-dimensional category space to form a semantic space to support advanced applications with multi-dimensional abstractions and self-organised semantic links It has been verified that Semantic Link Network play an important role in understanding and representation through text summarisation applications. Semantic Link Network has been extended from cyberspace to cyber-physical-social space. Competition relation and symbiosis relation as well as their roles in evolving society were studied in the emerging topic: Cyber-Physical-Social Intelligence More specialized forms of semantic networks has been created for specific use. For example, in 2008, Fawsy Bendeck's PhD thesis formalized the Semantic Similarity Network (SSN) that contains specialized relationships and propagation algorithms to simplify the semantic similarity representation and calculations. == Basics of semantic networks == A semantic network is used when one has knowledge that is best understood as a set of concepts that are related to one another. Most semantic networks are cognitively based. They also consist of arcs and nodes which can be organized into a taxonomic hierarchy. Semantic networks contributed ideas of spreading activation, inheritance, and nodes as proto-objects. == Examples == === In Lisp === The following code shows an example of a semantic network in the Lisp programming language using an association list. To extract all the information about the "canary" type, one would use the assoc function with a key of "canary". === WordNet === An example of a semantic network is WordNet, a lexical database of English. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets. Some of the most common semantic relations defined are meronymy (A is a meronym of B if A is part of B), holonymy (B is a holonym of A if B contains A), hyponymy (or troponymy) (A is subordinate of B; A is kind of B), hypernymy (A is superordinate of B), synonymy (A denotes the same as B) and antonymy (A denotes the opposite of B). WordNet properties have been studied from a network theory perspective and compared to other semantic networks created from Roget's Thesaurus and word association tasks. From this perspective the three of them are a small world structure. === Other examples === It is also possible to represent logical descriptions using semantic networks such as the existential graphs of Charles Sanders Peirce or the related conceptual graphs of John F. Sowa. These have expressive power equal to or exceeding standard first-order predicate logic. Unlike WordNet or other lexical or browsing networks, semantic networks using these representations can be used for reliable automated logical deduction. Some automated reasoners exploit the graph-theoretic features of the networks during processing. Other examples of semantic networks are Gellish models. Gellish English with its Gellish English dictionary, is a formal language that is defined as a network of relations between concepts and names of concepts. Gellish English is a formal subset of natural English, just as Gellish Dutch is a formal subset of Dutch, whereas multiple languages share the same concepts. Other Gellish networks consist of knowledge models and information models that are expressed in the Gellish language. A Gellish network is a network of (binary) relations between things. Each relation in the network is an expression of a fact that is classified by a relation type. Each relation type itself is a concept that is defined in the Gellish language dictionary. Each related thing is either a concept or an individual thing that is classified by a concept. The definitions of concepts are created in the form of definition models (definition networks) that together form a Gellish Dictionary. A Gellish network can be documented in a Gellish database and is computer interpretable. SciCrunch is a collaboratively edited knowledge base for scientific resources. It provides unambiguous identifiers (Research Resource IDentifiers or RRIDs) for software, lab tools etc. and it also provides options to create links between RRIDs and from communities. Another example of semantic networks, based on category theory, is ologs. Here each type is an object, representing a set of things, and each arrow is a morphism, representing a function. Commutative diagrams also are prescribed to constrain the semantics. In the social sciences people sometimes use the term semantic network to refer to co-occurrence networks. == Software tools == There are also elaborate types of semantic networks connected with corresponding sets of software tools used for
OpenCog
OpenCog is a project that aims to build an open source artificial intelligence framework. OpenCog Prime is an architecture for robot and virtual embodied cognition that defines a set of interacting components designed to give rise to human-equivalent artificial general intelligence (AGI) as an emergent phenomenon of the whole system. OpenCog Prime's design is primarily the work of Ben Goertzel while the OpenCog framework is intended as a generic framework for broad-based AGI research. Research utilizing OpenCog has been published in journals and presented at conferences and workshops including the annual Conference on Artificial General Intelligence. OpenCog is released under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License. OpenCog is in use by more than 50 companies, including Huawei and Cisco. == Origin == OpenCog was originally based on the release in 2008 of the source code of the proprietary "Novamente Cognition Engine" (NCE) of Novamente LLC. The original NCE code is discussed in the PLN book (ref below). Ongoing development of OpenCog is supported by Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute (AGIRI), the Google Summer of Code project, Hanson Robotics, SingularityNET and others. == Components == OpenCog consists of: A graph database, dubbed the AtomSpace, that holds "atoms" (that is, terms, atomic formulas, sentences and relationships) together with their "values" (valuations or interpretations, which can be thought of as per-atom key-value databases). An example of a value would be a truth value. Atoms are globally unique, immutable and are indexed (searchable); values are fleeting and changeable. A collection of pre-defined atoms, termed Atomese, used for generic knowledge representation, such as conceptual graphs and semantic networks, as well as to represent and store the rules (in the sense of term rewriting) needed to manipulate such graphs. A collection of pre-defined atoms that encode a type subsystem, including type constructors and function types. These are used to specify the types of variables, terms and expressions, and are used to specify the structure of generic graphs containing variables. A collection of pre-defined atoms that encode both functional and imperative programming styles. These include the lambda abstraction for binding free variables into bound variables, as well as for performing beta reduction. A collection of pre-defined atoms that encode a satisfiability modulo theories solver, built in as a part of a generic graph query engine, for performing graph and hypergraph pattern matching (isomorphic subgraph discovery). This generalizes the idea of a structured query language (SQL) to the domain of generic graphical queries; it is an extended form of a graph query language. A generic rule engine, including a forward chainer and a backward chainer, that is able to chain together rules. The rules are exactly the graph queries of the graph query subsystem, and so the rule engine vaguely resembles a query planner. It is designed so as to allow different kinds of inference engines and reasoning systems to be implemented, such as Bayesian inference or fuzzy logic, or practical tasks, such as constraint solvers or motion planners. An attention allocation subsystem based on economic theory, termed ECAN. This subsystem is used to control the combinatorial explosion of search possibilities that are met during inference and chaining. An implementation of a probabilistic reasoning engine based on probabilistic logic networks. The current implementation uses the rule engine to chain together specific rules of logical inference (such as modus ponens), together with some very specific mathematical formulas assigning a probability and a confidence to each deduction. This subsystem can be thought of as a certain kind of proof assistant that works with a modified form of Bayesian inference. A probabilistic genetic program evolver called Meta-Optimizing Semantic Evolutionary Search, or MOSES. This is used to discover collections of short Atomese programs that accomplish tasks; these can be thought of as performing a kind of decision tree learning, resulting in a kind of decision forest, or rather, a generalization thereof. A natural language input system consisting of Link Grammar, and partly inspired by both Meaning-Text Theory as well as Dick Hudson's Word Grammar, which encodes semantic and syntactic relations in Atomese. A natural language generation system. An implementation of Psi-Theory for handling emotional states, drives and urges, dubbed OpenPsi. Interfaces to Hanson Robotics robots, including emotion modelling via OpenPsi. This includes the Loving AI project, used to demonstrate meditation techniques. == Organization and funding == In 2008, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), formerly called Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), sponsored several researchers and engineers. Many contributions from the open source community have been made since OpenCog's involvement in the Google Summer of Code in 2008 and 2009. Currently MIRI no longer supports OpenCog. OpenCog has received funding and support from several sources, including the Hong Kong government, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation and Hanson Robotics. In 2013, OpenCog began providing AI solutions to Hanson Robotics, and in 2017, OpenCog became a founding member of SingularityNET. == Applications == Similar to other cognitive architectures, the main purpose is to create virtual humans, which are three dimensional avatar characters. The goal is to mimic behaviors like emotions, gestures and learning. For example, the emotion module in the software was only programmed because humans have emotions. Artificial General Intelligence can be realized if it simulates intelligence of humans. The self-description of the OpenCog project provides additional possible applications which are going into the direction of natural language processing and the simulation of a dog.
WS-SecurityPolicy
WS-Security Policy is a web services specification, created by IBM and 12 co-authors, that has become an OASIS standard as of version 1.2. It extends the fundamental security protocols specified by the WS-Security, WS-Trust and WS-Secure Conversation by offering mechanisms to represent the capabilities and requirements of web services as policies. Security policy assertions are based on the WS-Policy framework. Policy assertions can be used to require more generic security attributes like transport layer security
SERVQUAL
SERVQUAL is a research tool that measures customer perception of service quality by comparing what customers expect from a service to their assessment of the service actually delivered. The instrument was developed in the United States in the mid-1980s by researchers A. Parasuraman, Valarie Zeithaml, and Leonard L. Berry, and is designed for use in after-service evaluation processes. It assesses service quality across five dimensions: reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy, and responsiveness. SERVQUAL has been applied in sectors including healthcare, banking, education, and libraries. == Overview == The SERVQUAL questionnaire consists of matched pairs of items, 22 expectation items and 22 perception items, organized into five dimensions that correspond to the consumer's mental framework for evaluating service quality. Each item is part of a pair: one question asks what excellent organizations in a given industry should offer (expectation), and the other asks how the specific organization being evaluated performs (perception). == The model of service quality == The model of service quality, referred to as the gaps model, was developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry during a systematic research program conducted in the 1980s. The model identifies five gaps that may cause customers to experience poor service quality. In this framework, gap 5 is the service quality gap, which represents the difference between customer expectations and their perceptions of the service. This is the only gap that can be directly measured, and the SERVQUAL instrument was designed specifically to capture it. Gaps 1 through 4 have diagnostic value and point to probable causes of service failures. == Development of the instrument == Development of the model of service quality began in 1983 and, after iterative refinements, led to the publication of the SERVQUAL instrument in 1988. The research team conducted in-depth interviews and focus groups in four service sectors: retail banking, credit card services, securities brokerage, and product repair and maintenance. The questionnaire was tested across multiple samples to verify its reliability, validity, and factor structure. == Adaptations and variants == SERVQUAL has been adapted for specific industries and contexts. Well‑known derivatives include: LibQUAL+ – a library service quality survey developed by the Association of Research Libraries. EDUQUAL – an instrument tailored for the evaluation of service quality in educational institutions. HEALTHQUAL – adapted for measuring patient perceptions of healthcare service quality. ARTSQUAL – used to evaluate visitor perceptions of quality in museums and performing arts venues. == Criticisms == Researchers have raised several concerns about SERVQUAL. Critics argue that the instrument's definition of expectations is ambiguous and that it does not adequately account for the dynamic nature of customer expectations over time. Other scholars question whether the five‑dimension structure is universally applicable across all service contexts, and whether a generic instrument can capture the unique attributes of specific industries without modification.