Planet Kiwi

Zwanzig Wissenschaftler treffen sich, um Forschungsperspektive im Bereich der sozialen Medien zu besprechen. Da ein gemeinsamer Bericht erzielt wird und die Zusammenarbeit nach dem Treffen fortgesetzt werden soll, fragen sie sich zuerst, welche Werkzeuge sie verwenden werden. Sie einigen sich über ein Wiki, der sofort errichtet wird.

Nach ein paar Tagen schlägt einer vor, für die Fortsetzung der gemeinsamen Arbeit nach dem Treffen an Stelle des Wikis Google docs  zu verwenden. Als Begründung sagt er: “Mit Google docs kann man gleichzeitig schreiben, ohne Konflikte verwalten zu müssen.” Er richtet sofort ein Dokument unter Google ein und verschickt Einladungen.

Dann werden die verschiedenen Teile des gemeinsamen Dokuments auf die Teilnehmer verteilt, damit jeder zuerst allein an seinem Teil arbeiten kann. Ein Termin für die gemeinsame Besprechung der von Einzelnen verfassten Teile wird festgelegt.

Der Verfechter von Google docs leitet übrigens ein Forschungsprojekt über … ein Wiki!

FB

Social Media are one of the revolutionary trends of our time. Up till now, they have been largely driven by practitioners. Research on the field has been either computer science or social sciences and is mainly observing the trend without taking really part. One could argue that this is a good thing, but as a researcher I am of course convinced of the opposite. Last week, we therefore had a “perspectives workshop” at Dagstuhl Castle near Saarbrücken in Germany where we discussed what research can actively do to accompany the social media revolution, “smoothening” its negative effects and emphasising its positive effects on society and economy, and helping in educating currently unaware parts of society, economy, and science. The workshop was organised by Clemens Cap (Rostock University), François Bry (Munich University), Julia Maintz (Microsoft, now freelancer), and myself (Salzburg Research).

Dagstuhl Castle in a nice winter night

While a Dagstuhl workshop in itself is a special thing that you only get granted a few times in a researcher lifetime, a perspectives workshop is even more so, because it is aimed to “kickstart” a research topic, and there are only 5 such workshops overall in a year. Outcome of this workshop will be a manifesto that is distributed to decision and policy makers in politics, research, economy and media. Particularly interesting and noteworthy was the interdisciplinary nature of the workshop with participants from computer science, social sciences, and industry.

The Digital Social Networks Manifesto

In the following, I will briefly sketch the draft outcome of this workshop, a result of countless hours of discussions and a joint work of all participants of the workshop. Since the real manifesto is still to come (I’ll keep you updated), I’ll only summarise what is alreafy there without going into too much details.

What are Social Media?

In the group, we found a common definition of what we believe to be the central aspects of social media:

“Digital social media use information and communication technologies (such as the Internet, Web-based technologies, and/or specific software systems) for users and (possibly emerging) communities to collaboratively generate and exchange content and, more generally, to interact. They ease and strengthen social interactions by overcoming physical limitations in communication (like distance and synchronicity) and alleviating human limitations like in the number of people with whom one can maintain relationships. Digital social media thus offer opportunities for social interactions that would not be possible without them. Digital social media build and/or rely upon social networks which can even be the primary purpose of the media.

Examples of online social media are digital social networks (like facebook, LinkedIn and Xing), blogs, content sharing site (like flikr and YouTube), wikis (like used in the wikipedia encyclopedic project), backchannels (like twitter) and innovation markets (like InnoCentive).

Digital social media have appeared during the last decade and have spread extremely rapidly. Some are very successful at building up and keeping users communities. For some users, digital social media have become as common as, or have even replaced, telephone and email.”

Why are they important?

Social media are a revolutionary trend in our society and economy. They change the way we communicate to an extent similar to the invention of the printing press, and accommodate for the communication needs in a world of increased mobility, urbanisation, and globalisation. With the revolutionary character comes a dramatic change in society where existing business models, professions, and societal structures are replaced by new ones that have yet to emerge. At the same time, social media have the potential to offer huge benefits to society in many fields, e.g. the democratic process.

Challenges and Opportunities

We identified challenges and opportunities in the following areas:

• Socio-cultural Challenges: improving media literacy, smoothen negative and strengthen positive effects, importance of relationships, personal identity, trust and privacy
• Political Challenges: e-participation, e-democracy, e-Europe, Internet laws and policies
• Economic Challenges: new business models, integration of social media in enterprises
• Technological Challenges: usability, trust and privacy, decentralised social networks, media integration, personalisation, …

The challenges will be described in detail in the manifesto, scheduled for end of March.

Research Issues

The topic of digital social networks is a truly interdisciplinary field where researchers from several different fields can (and need to) participate. Since the majority of the participants of the seminar where from the computer science area, most research issues we identified have a computer science focus, but this does not mean that other research issues are less important. We structured research issues along the following themes:

• Society and Economy
• Architecture and Infrastructure
• Services and Applications
• Trust, Privacy and Security

Barriers and Enablers

There are a number of barriers and enablers that could either hinder that we benefit of social media or support the process. Since this is a delicate topic, I do not want to go into too much detail here until we have decided on the correct phrasing. Just a few examples:

• an important barrier is lack of media literacy throughout many parts of society, especially with decision makers and those in the educational sector
• important enablers are the technological development in itself, and the fact that the technology satisfies an apparent communication need in a society with increased mobility, urbanisation and globalisation

The final version of the manifesto is scheduled for end of March. I will publish it then on my website for everyone to read it (and comment on it). In the meantime, feel free to comment and add to what I have written above.

Acknowledgements

I would like to again say “thank you” to all participants (and all those who wanted to come but could not) for their important contribution. I conclude this blog post with the “group picture” taken before the hike we took as social event on Wednesday:

The Dagstuhl working group on Digital Social Networks

Development activity in the last months has been so active that we didn’t manage to issue a KiWi release of acceptable stability. Now we are very proud to announce the availability of the next prototype prerelease! The changes and new features are too abundant to name them all (you can get a list of fixed issues in the Jira Changelog for version 0.7). Here are the highlights:

• Reasoning. This is the first release to include KiWi’s rule-based reasoner. The reasoner applies rules to triples in the triple store and allows to infer new triples based on this information. Rules can currently only be specified by developers (in a file called rules.txt), but we intend to open this to advanced users of the KiWi system. Evaluation is currently forward chaining with reason maintenance. Reason maintenance can also be used to “explain” to the user why certain triples have been inferred. This is for example visible in the “References” widget of the wiki when hovering the mouse over an inferred relation. The reasoning component has been implemented by Jakub Kotowski at the University of Munich.
• Querying. The 0.7 KiWi release also for the first time features the new and innovative querying component called “KWQL”. KWQL is an advanced query language that can be used as a replacement for the normal KiWi semantic search. It allows advanced query constructs for querying the structure of KiWi content in a simple-to-use language. KWQL also offers a visual query editor for composing queries. KWQL can be accessed by issuing an ordinary search and then clicking on “KWQL” besides the search input field. KWQL has been implemented by Klara Weiand and Steffen Hausmann at the University of Munich.
• Information Extraction. The 0.7 release of KiWi has also included a variety of different information extraction technologies (and more to come!) based on GATE and Semantic Vectors. For the moment, information extraction can be used for tag recommendation and recommendation of related articles. Using GATE, English or German texts can be analyzed and more precise tag recommendations can be made. Information extraction has been integrated by Marek Schmidt at the Technical University of Brno.
• Personalized Search. KiWi also now includes an option to personalize the search results based on the previous tagging activity of the user and the tags associated with the search results. To access personalized search, simply click on the “personalized search” checkbox in the search interface. Note that personalized search requires that you already have some information in your user profile (primarily  tagging behavious). Personalized Search has been implemented by Fred Durao at the University of Aalborg.
• Community Equity. Release 0.7 is also the first KiWi version to have Sun’s Community Equity algorithm integrated in the system. Community Equity is an algorithm that tries to determin the “social value” of information in a collaborative system by tracking how much interest is generated about a certain item. Community Equity is pretty sophisticated, featuring also an aging algorithm that avoids reputation being built up ad infinitum. Community Equity has been implemented by the Community Equity team at Sun (Josef, Dimitri, Max) and integrated by Mihai Radulescu at Salzburg Research.
• Optimistic Locking. KiWi 0.7 switched the data and transaction model to more error-proof optimistic locking; this also makes the system more reliable in concurrent situations, i.e. if two users change the same content. Optimistic Locking has been implemented by Stephanie Stroka at Salzburg Research.
• Simplified Setup. When starting for the first time, users are now guided through a semi-automatic setup process that makes configuring KiWi much simpler than it used to be. The setup process has been implemented by myself, and Mihai is now working on making it even more simpler, allowing users also to configure database and path settings via the Web-based interface.
• TagIT2. The TagIT application has been completely reimplemented and is scheduled for beta-testing starting January. New features are a completely new user interface, the possibility to display users in addition to news and blog posts, and many usability improvements. TagIT2 has mostly been implemented by Thomas Kurz at Salzburg Research.

There have been many smaller enhancements that I cannot mention here in detail (Exhbit support, Facebook integration, FOAF+SSL integration, …) and even more bug fixes. Thanks a lot to all project members for their participation!

Availability

As usual, the KiWi release is available at the following locations:

• binary download (bundled with JBoss, ready-to-run): http://kenai.com/projects/kiwi/downloads/download/kiwi-jboss-0.7.zip (250 MB)
• source download: please use the KiWi Subversion repository at https://svn.salzburgresearch.at/svn/kiwi/KiWi/trunk (latest revision) or https://svn.salzburgresearch.at/svn/kiwi/KiWi/tags/0.7 (0.7 release)
• showcase/demo: the latest KiWi version can also be tried out at our showcase installation at http://showcase.kiwi-project.eu/KiWi/ ; be aware that the showcase is erased regularly and we don’t have much content in it currently (note: the showcase has been shut down over Christmas because vandals are misusing it for distributing their spam links and I don’t have the nerve to look at it over Christmas!)
• issue tracking: please use the KiWi Jira at http://wiki.kiwi-project.eu/atlassian-jira/browse/KIWI to report any issues you encounter
• help: please use either the KiWi developer mailinglist (kiwi-devel@kiwi-project.eu) or the issue tracking for the moment; we are currently also in the process of setting up a wiki for the project

Road Map

Undoubtedly, version 0.7 still contains many bugs. In the weeks after Christmas, we will therefore likely release minor updates improving the stability and reliability of the system. These will be numbered 0.7.x.

Version 0.8 of KiWi is scheduled for end of February 2010. It will have improved Community Equity support, first draft of permission management, and Semantic Forms support. Version 0.9 is scheduled for end of May and will feature an improved user interface and widget support based on SmartGWT. Version 1.0 (final) is scheduled for end of August, with one month of testing.

A KiWi handbook will be written starting September 2010. It will contain not only instructions on how to use the KiWi system but also practical examples and best practices on how it can be used.

After the KiWi Meeting, Georg and I participated for the first time at the Future Internet Assembly, as representatives of the KiWi project and of our company. The conference took place in Kista Science City at the premises of Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH), which are very nice buildings indeed. The first day started with introductions by several “politicians” and an overview/keynote over the different perspectives of those who started the Future Internet topic. And here comes my first criticism: not only were the presentations really bad and the speakers very untalented (never seen this before in an opening), what is worse is that the selection of topics is heavily influenced by the in my opinion very narrow viewpoint of people from the networking infrastructure community. New topics, like those in the Social Media and Smart Content area we are investigating, have a pretty tough standing in this community.

The day continued with several sessions on cross-cutting concerns of the Future Internet. I participated in “Different architectures for different business models”, “What does Future Internet mean for smart cities?”, and “What does Future Internet mean for enterprise”. I very much liked the session on smart cities, but the other two were a bit frustrating: in the architectures, the message of the speakers / organisers was basically: take our architecture, we know it better anyways. And in the enterprise session, while I found the “knowledge café” idea pretty good, I was very unhappy with the moderation because all discussions were very superficial and as soon as we wanted to go into more details it was cut off.

The second day was dedicated to thematic sessions. I participated in the “Future Content Networks” session, though the “Software and Services” session would have been fitting as well. The first presentation was by Spanish Television and described there vision on New Media applications of the future. I found this talk very inspiring. But the rest of the session was basically wasted time.

What is frustrating me very much in the Future Internet community is that everything is superficial, and almost noone talks about what concretely the Future Internet will bring us, what applications can be envisioned, and how this all would benefit the user. Everything is just about infrastructure. How can we even discuss what it means for the enterprise when we cannot present them a vision on how it looks like?

The final talk was given by the CTO of Ericsson. First shocking message was that Ericsson moves its headquarters to Silicon Valley (to “profit from the innovative spirit there”). WTF? A European technology company moves its headquarters to the US? Thanks, Ericsson, I’ll never buy again from you. Second shocking message was that “Internet is too cheap” – the monthly fee for Internet is as low as going out for a Pizza but should be much more valuable. So what? I consider Internet access a public infrastructure that needs to be as cheap as possible; and in this case it is even the market regulating it, so please stop complaining. Scribes also had to abadon their business model when the printing press was invented…

Summary: some interesting talks, many boring presentations, and a shocking keynote at the end. But a good opportunity to meet people, see other perspectives and raise one’s voice. Still not sure whether we should go to Valencia, thoguh.

Im Artikel “Scaling Up at the Tetherless World Constellation in 2009” seines Blogs The Tetherless World Weblog berichte Jesse Weaver von einer “embarrassingly parallel” Berechnung von Milliarden von RDF-Tripeln. Damit wurde neulich der Billion Triples Challenge (BTC) gewonnen.

Was bedeutet wohl eine “peinliche parallele Berechnung”? Eigentlich eine Sache, die momentan in Datenbank- und Web-Kreise viele beschäftigt. Was bedeutet es denn? Ich verrate es nicht! Bitte den Blogpost lesen!

Offen zugestanden hätte ich nicht erwartet, bei RDF eine solche Peinlichkeit zu finden…

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Roughly every 4 months, we organise a full project meeting where members of all KiWi institutions participate to discuss the current state and next steps. The November 2009 KiWi meeting took place, a bit unusually since there is no partner there, in Stockholm. The reasons for this choice of location were that Stockholm is a fair destination for everyone (everyone has to travel roughly the same time and flights are not too expensive), the Future Internet Assembly was taking place a few days later – allowing us to participate there as well, and that Inka managed to organise free meeting rooms at Stockholm’s Sun Offices.

Use Cases

The focus of the meeting was the planning of the use case evaluation that is supposed to start in December with working out the test scenarios and settings and going into real testing in March. For the Logica Use Case, Daniel proposed a scenario where a project is audited internally by an auditor and the right documents and forms need to be assembled by the project manager. The knowledge that needs to be managed in this use case is project documentation on the one hand and quality management material on the other hand. The interesting aspect in this scenario is moving back and forth between unstructured content (project documentation) and structured content (quality management material).

For the Sun Use Case, Josef described a scenario in the SunSpace intranet of Sun where a user wants to find appropriate knowledge based on different criteria. In the centre of this use case is the Community Equity implementation developed by Sun as part of the KiWi project. Community Equity adds a very interesting aspect to search: not only gives it rise to ranking of search results based on social interactions with the content, it also allows to implement a “expert finder” where a user can search for experts on a certain topic. Expertise is calculated based on the equity of contributions a person has made. Mihai presented the current state of the integration of community equity with KiWi. The backend parts work very well, and now we are starting to port the user interface parts.

In both use cases, Josef and Daniel will come up with concrete scenario descriptions in the coming weeks. I am really looking forward to it!

State of the Project

The second part (actually taking place inbetween the use cases) was the presentation of the current state of the project. Thomas started with presenting the TagIT and InterEdu applications that build on top of the KiWi platform and that are great examples for inspiration in the use cases. Klara then presented the KWQL search and query language and demonstrated its implementation inside KiWi. KWQL offers many new search options currently not available in ordinary search engines, e.g. searching for certain paragraphs or tags. Marek presented the information extraction capabilities of the system that are based on the GATE framework. On the one hand, this is used for tag recommendations, and on the other hand it is the foundation for semi-automatic annotation of content using RDFa. Jakub continued with a demonstration of the current reasoner as it is implemented inside the KiWi system and a first implementation of reason maintenance. There are still some issues to be solved, but the progress is nice. Finally, Szaby and Steffi gave short demonstrations on new features like the integration of Exhibit and of FOAF+SSL.

In summary, it is very nice to see how the different research and development strands in KiWi are now converging. Everything described above is contained in a single system and available to all applications building on top. This should not hide the fact that there is still a lot to do, however.

Dissemination

The last part of the meeting was dedicated to discussing the dissemination strategy. Inka moderated the session and split the team into two groups that were supposed to do brainstorming on academic and on public dissemination ideas. I think it worked out rather well, results forthcoming soon.:-)

Finally, Mihai gave a brief workshop on how to set up the KiWi system, particularly in combination with the new community equity implementation.

Altogether, a successful meeting from my perspective, and a great project and team to work with! Just a pity that neither Julia nor John could participate in the meeting, and that some of the other institutions were also missing.

Immer mehr Unternehmen stellen sich der Herausforderung, sich einer sich sehr ändernden Umgebung anzupassen. Dafür erweisen sich die alten hierarschichen Arbeitformen in der Regel ungeeignet. So versuchen viele Unternehmen de neuen sozialen Meiden unternehmensintern einzusetzen.

Der Artikel “Wikis in the workplace: a practical introduction” von ars technica berichtet über Erfolge und Schwierigkeiten beim Einsatz von Wikis in Unternehmen.

Als Bestätigung empfinde ich die Betonung von der Konsensbildung in der beruflichen Nutzung von Wikis, die Kollegen und ich im Forschungsprojekt KiWi als Kernaspekt einer neuen Art von Wikis definiert haben.

FB

Yesterday night from 16:41 to 24:00 we had the big event we prepared for in the last weeks and even months: the “Lange Nacht der Forschung” (“Researchers Night Austria”), an Austria-wide event where research institutions try to bring science and research closer to the public. Of course, KiWi was present at this event, as foundation of the TagIT system we are developing together with the local newspaper, Salzburger Nachrichten. The political highlight from a KiWi perspective was of course the presentation of the system I gave to the deputy prime minister of the State of Salzburg, Landeshauptmann Stv. Dr. Wilfried Haslauer:

Dr. Haslauer showed a high interest in TagIT and was very impressed by what we are doing, which in itself is an important appreciation of our work.

At least as important as the “political” part was the “public” part, where the KiWi Team in Salzburg (particularly Thomas and Rolf) gave numerous presentations to interested people from all over the state and neighouring regions and answered many questions, some of which were of quite high technical depth. At Salzburg Research, we counted around 700 visitors at the end of the event. I believe that this kind of experience is very important to get feedback about the things we are doing from people that are outside our own community and thus not part of a certain “group think”. Overall, a huge amount of work for the preparation, but also a huge success for us! Here you have a picture of the Salzburg Research team after the event (at around 00:15):

A big thanks to Thomas, Rolf, and Steffi for preparing the KiWi demonstrations and Lego Mindstorms station, to the rest of the KiWi team for hanging out and helping answering questions, to the rest of my nice colleagues for the team spirit that we demonstrated at this event not only at the TagIT station, and particularly to Julia who is the best organizer in the world.:-)

On 30th November, we had the follow-up event of the first KiWi/INSEMTIVES collaboration meeting we had in July. This time, KiWi was represented by Peter Reiser from Sun and myself, and INSEMTIVES was represented by Katharina from Innsbruck and Roberta from Trento. The goal of the meeting was to discuss the Community Equity system we are further developing in KiWi and – since the topic is very closely related to what INSEMTIVES is doing – how both projects can profit from a collaboration, INSEMTIVES from an already-deployed value system with many users, and KiWi from scientific feedback in the area of incentive mechanisms, which are not the main focus of the KiWi research itself. Katharina started with briefly summarising the current state and overall goals of INSEMTIVES. This was followed by a longer presentation and demonstration of the Community Equity system given by Peter. We had a very lively discussion on collaboration – the outcome is that INSEMTIVES aims to evaluate Community Equity in one of their use cases. Also, we aim to together describe the Community Equity system (which is so far only implemented and not really documented) in a scientific article to open it to a wider (scientific) audience. Overall, I am very happy that EU projects can indeed collaborate beyond institutional boundaries. And I would very much like to thank Katharina for organizing the meeting (again – next time it’s our turn!), and for thinking the same way I do about research… .:-)

The INSEMTIVES team has also blogged about this here and here!

Web Application Engineering is a new book where I participated as a co-author. The book provides an overview over various aspects of web application engineering such as the introduction to web technologies, processes, requirements, design, implementation, maintanace and evolution, adaptation, quality assessment, and web 2.0 and semantic web. The book provides a good basis for advanced but also basic course on web engineering but serves also as a reference point to the literature on web engineering area. You can find the book at:

• springer.com
• amazon.com
• amazon.co.uk
• amazon.de

Peter D. (dolog@cs.aau.dk)