Open Radio Access Networks (RAN) aim to bring a paradigm shift to telecommunications industry, by enabling an open, intelligent, virtualized, and multi-vendor interoperable RAN ecosystem. At the center of this movement, O-RAN ALLIANCE defines the O-RAN architecture and standards, so that companies around the globe can use these specifications to create innovative and interoperable solutions. To accelerate the adoption of O-RAN products, rigorous testing of O-RAN Radio Unit (O-RU) and other O-RAN products plays a key role. O-RAN ALLIANCE has approved around 20 Open Testing and Integration Centres (OTICs) globally. OTICs serve as vendor-neutral platforms for providing the testing and integration services, with the vision that an O-RAN product certified in any OTIC is accepted in other parts of the world. To demonstrate the viability of such a certified-once-and-use-everywhere approach, one theme in the O-RAN Global PlugFest Spring 2024 is to demonstrate consistent and repeatable testing for the open fronthaul interface across multiple labs. Towards this, Japan OTIC and Asia Pacific OTIC in Singapore have teamed up together with an O-RU vendor and Keysight Technology. Our international team successfully completed all test cases defined by O-RAN ALLIANCE for O-RU conformance testing. In this paper, we share our journey in achieving this outcome, focusing on the challenges we have overcome and the lessons we have learned through this process.

The semantic annotation of textual content is important for the success of many information integration systems. In this paper, we present a method for generating semantic annotations about transfer in football news. Semantic web technologies are applied to extend the knowledge base of KIM platform so that named entities in this specific domain could be recognized. We study and define language models to recognize the semantic relation for football transfers. At the same time, we propose a pronoun recognition method using extraction rules to improve the relation recognition process. The experiment showed promising results on the data set built from Sky Sports news [27]. The precisions achieved in both cases, with and without integration of the pronoun recognition method, are both over 80%. In particular, the latter helps increase the recall value to around 10%.