Archive for 2009
LCS & GBML Central: Community resource is now Online
27 March 2009LCSweb was designed to allow researchers and those seeking to use Learning Classifier Systems within applications access to material on LCS and discussion between members of the LCS community. The site served this community since its was started by Alwyn Barry in 1997. Enhanced and maintained later by Jan Drugowitsch, LCSweb became a valuable community resource. The site was completely community-driven and allowed members to contribute to the content of the site and keeping it up to date. Later on in 2005, I started “LCS and other GBML” Blog to cover a gap providing information information regarding the International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems (IWLCS), the collection of LCS Books available, and GBML related news.Some of you may have realized that after Jan’s move to Rochester and Alwyn’s retirement from research activities, LCSweb has vanished. Will Browne took on himself to take LCSweb to Reading, but technical circumstances have made that move rocky despite his best efforts. Jan and Will however still have a local copy of LCSweb contents. After talking to Jan and Will, I proposed to merge LCSweb with the LCS and other GBML blog, and host the new site at NCSA where dedicated resources has been made available. Jan and Will agreed with the idea. The current progress merging both sites can be summarized as follows:Done:
- Resources for hosting are available at NCSA
- LCS and other GBML blog has been moved to NCSA (the old one will still be there for historic reasons and no updates will be made to it)
- A new name for the new merged site has been proposed (LCS & GBML Central)
In progress:
- Jan has taken upon himself to start slowly migrating the old content into the new site (be patient, he is doing that manually for which we should be very thank full)
Besides, we have added two extra features to the site
- Automatic aggregation of feeds (some of you may know this as you may have seen in so call planet sites). I just did a quick list of feeds that I knew and added them to the aggregator. Unfortunately, few of the sites of our community provided feeds, so I would encourage everybody to think about it. Why may this be important? The updates of those feeds go straight into LCS & GBML Central. That would make possible to create one stop place for information in the LCS and GBML community, and still maintain each separate member’s identity (you will see that when you click on an aggregated entry, you will be directed to the originators site)
- Added forums to complement the LCS and GBML mailing list. Not to sure how useful will be, but at least it may help to jump in and ask questions (moderators volunteers more than welcome).
As mentioned above, the site is still on the building steps. LCSweb relevant content will be migrated slowly, but the main place holders are already there for your evaluation. Since this is a site for the community, we would love to hear about your feedback and ideas. As soon as new steps are conquered, we will keep you posted. Also, if you would like to help with the site, content transition, or know about related feeds that should be aggregated please drop us an email, and make this community your community.LCS & GBML Central can be reach at
Best,Jan, Will, and Xavier