Planet Kiwi

The 25th ACM SAC conference was held in Sierre, Swiztherland, a very privileged area surrounded by the stunning Swiss Alps. Comparing to my previous attendance, it seems the number of attendees has decreased (maybe just an impression). On the other hand, the quality of works and the level of plenary discussion seem to be improved. Because the conference is multi-track, I could attend sessions of related areas to my current work such as data mining and semantic web.

Our talk took place in the traditional IAR track (Information and Retrieval) involving researchers and practitioners from other fields such as artificial intelligence and data mining. I presented the paper entitled “Extending a Hybrid Tag-Based Recommender System with Personalization”, authored by Fred Durao and Peter Dolog, where we describe how semantic similarities between tags can improve the precision of a tag-based recommender system. The talk was okay and triggered two questions from the audience: one about constraining the queries to a given domain and the other about adding a learning model to the recommendation model. The answer to the first was to constraint the search to specific domain ontologies and rewrites the Sparql queries regarding the roles of concepts for the chosen ontologies. This however reduces considerably the reusability of the approach. The answer to the second question was to maintain a knowledge base containing the set of successful semantic similarities but aware to the cost needed to provide such maintenance.

The 26th ACM SAC 2011 will be held in Taiwan, China.
 

Fred Durao.

March is time for KiWi annual meetings. This year’s meeting took place from 10th-12th March in Mattsee close to Salzburg, again at a very nice location. The Annual Meeting was focussing primarily on the use cases (which are supposed to start with evaluation now) and the dissemination and exploitation activities (which now go into the last phase). Here is a short summary of the meeting:

Core KiWi System

As usual, the annual meeting began with a presentation of the current state of the core KiWi system. Rolf presented the novel implementation of Semantic Forms (based on RDFa) in KiWi. KiWi’s Semantic Forms can be used as alternative editors for a content item and directly update the RDF metadata inside the KiWi system. Planned improvements of Semantic Forms are the support of RDFa object properties and the automatic generation of Semantic Forms out of types specified in an ontology.

Thomas then briefly presented the latest version of the TagIT implementation on top of KiWi. TagIT is accessible at http://tagit2.salzburgresearch.at and will go into a productive use by end of March (accessible under http://tagit2.salzburgresearch.at). Arpad concluded the Salzburg Reseach part with a presentation of the new vocabulary management tool for KiWi, which is at the same time a first experiment for using GWT (Google Web Toolkit) in conjunction with KiWi.

Peter Dolog summarised the various personalisation features that have been implemented in KiWi. Personalisation is available at several levels in KiWi: it can recommend related content to the currently displayed page based on the user’s preferences, it can recommend content interesting to the user based on his activities in the system, and it can be used for personalising the ranking of search results in KiWis search interface (so-called personalised search). In all cases, it is a prerequisite that there is sufficient data for the personalisation from previous (tagging-) activities of users.

Klara then presented the latest progress in using the query language KWQL in KiWi. Beyond ordinary search, KWQL is capable of issuing structured queries to the documents contained in the KiWi system. KWQL is available as part of the core KiWi system for some time already and can be used as an alternative to the default search mechanism.

Jakub showed the new explanation service for the reasoner in the KiWi system. The explanation service allows developers to inspect the justifications why the reasoner has inferred a triple in a graphical manner. It can also be used to show explanations to the user for certain kinds of behaviour (currently inferred types and incoming/outgoing relations).

Marek concluded the presentation of the KiWi core system with a demonstration of the various information extraction functionalities in the KiWi system. Currently, information extraction is used for tag recommendation. He is currently also working on using it for automatically recommending RDFa annotations for the textual content of a document.

Sun Use Case (Software Knowledge Management)

KiWi’s Sun Use Case is concerned with knowledge management in the SunSpace intranet of Sun Microsystems, now part of Oracle. Josef Holy and Peter Reiser started with presenting the three storylines they aim to evaluate as part of the use case: concept model management (i.e. how to manage the company’s internal thesaurus using KiWi and PoolParty), Text Extraction and Tag Recommendation (both, based on the company thesaurus and using free tags), and Searching and Browsing through the SunSpace intranet using KiWis Semantic Search functionality.

Sebastian and Mihai continued with a presentation of a reimplementation of the Community Equity system in KiWi. The new implementation uses a much simplified implementation as compared to the currently used system and gives at the same time more flexibility to admins and developers. Still unclear is how well the system scales in the presence of huge activity logs.

Further steps concerning the implementation and evaluation of the Sun use case are the connection of Confluence with KiWi using a plugin to “augment” Confluence with KiWi’s semantic technologies, the connection of KiWi and PoolParty, as well as the migration of content, particularly activity logs, from SunSpace into the KiWi system to preseed the system for evaluation.

Logica Use Case (Project Knowledge Management)

Daniel Grohlin, Karsten Jahn and Peter Axel Nielsen presented the implementation and scenarios of the Logica Use Case, which is concerned with managing project knowledge. The evaluation will cover the scenarios “project planning”, “project monitoring”, “development or project work”, and “process design”. All four scenarios will be evaluated using a combination of the KiWi system and the proprietary Logica application that complements and accesses KiWi using web services. The use case will be evaluated using an “agile evaluation” that refines the tests and implementation in several evaluation cycles (probably three). Particularly noteworthy is the feature matrix developed as part of the test plan that will be extended by the other partners and used for the Sun Use Case as well as as input for the dissemination and exploitation activities. The feature matrix is also useful to verify to which extent the KiWi technologies are covered by which of the scenarios.

Dissemination and Exploitation

The last of the very important topics of the KiWi Annual Meeting was the discussion on dissemination and exploitation. While dissemination was quite successful in the first two years running with only little resources, the project now moves on into the third phase where it is important to increase the resources spent on making the project known and “selling” its results to the outside world. To this aim, John started with presenting a timeline for the next year, highlighting the most important milestones of the dissemination and exploitation activities. As a major step, KiWi will relaunch its websites and split them into a “research project page” targeted primarily at researchers (as it is now), a “system page” targeted primarily at decision makers as well as a “community page” targeted at developers that want to make use of the KiWi technologies. Further steps in the dissemination area are still confidential, but stay tuned on updates! And don’t miss the KiWi release party for version 1.0 – it will probably take place in September!

The Vienna-based company punkt. netServices is just about to release a demo version of their PoolParty service, a SKOS-based thesaurus management tool with linked data capabilities. I had the chance to pre-read a white paper and test their service. Here is a brief overview. You can also try a demo.

Purpose

Poolparty was conceived to facilitate various applications like

• Semantic search engines
• Recommender systems (similarity search)
• Corporate bookmarking
• Annotation- & tag recommender systems
• Autocomplete services and facetted browsing.

These use cases can be either achieved by using PoolParty stand-alone or by integrating it with existing Enterprise Search Engines and Document Management Systems or Enterprise Wikis.

Thesaurus Management

PoolParty is aiming to be easy to use for people without a strong Semantic Web background or special technical skills. The GUI is entirely web-based and utilizes AJAX so the user can e.g. quickly merge two concepts via drag & drop. An overview over the thesaurus can be gained with a tree or a graph view on the concepts.

PoolParty also helps to semi-automatically add concepts to a thesaurus as it can be used to analyse documents (e.g. web pages or PDF files) relevant to a thesaurus’ domain in order to glean candidate terms. This is done by the key-phrase extractor of KEA. The extracted terms can be selected by the user, thereby becoming “free concepts” which later can be integrated into the thesaurus, turning them into “approved concepts”.

Documents can be searched in various ways – either by keyword search in the full text, by searching for their tags or by semantic search and similarity search. The latter takes not only a concept’s preferred label into account, but also its synonyms and the labels of its related concepts are considered in the search. The user might manually remove query terms used in semantic search. Boost values for the various relations considered in semantic search may also be adjusted. In the same way the recommendation mechanism for document similarity calculation works.

PoolParty by default also publishes a Semantic Wiki version of its thesauri, which provides an alternative way to browse and edit concepts. Through this feature anyone can get read access to a thesaurus, and optionally also edit, add or delete labels of concepts. Search and autocomplete functions are available here as well. The Wiki’s XHTML source is also enriched with RDFa, thereby exposing all RDF metadata associated with a concept to be picked up by RDF search engines and crawlers. (See two examples: Cocktail thesaurus &  Standard Thesaurus for Economics)

PoolParty also supports the import of thesauri in SKOS (including several consistency checks) or Zthes format. Those functionalities can also be consumed as stand-alone web services via PoolParty SKOS Services. Additionaly, lists of concepts and their labels can also be imported via CSV files.

Linked (Open) Data

PoolParty not only publishes its thesauri as Linked Open Data (in addition to a SPARQL endpoint), but it also consumes LOD in order to expand thesauri with information from LOD sources.

Concepts in the thesaurus can be linked to e.g. DBpedia  via a service like Georgi Kobilarov’s DBpedia lookup service, which takes the label of a concept and returns possible matching candidates. The system suggests relevant resources from DBpedia and the user can select the one that matches the concept from his thesaurus, thereby creating a skos:exactMatch relation between the concept URI in PoolParty and the DBpedia URI. The same approach can be used to link to other SKOS thesauri available as Linked Data.

Other triples can also be retrieved from the target data source, e.g. the DBpedia abstract can become a skos:definition and geographical coordinates can be imported and be used to display the location of a concept on the map, where appropriate. The DBpedia category information may also be used to retrieve additional concepts of that category as siblings of the concept in focus, in order to populate the thesaurus.

PoolParty is capable of importing a SKOS thesaurus from a Linked Data server, and may also receive updates to thesauri imported this way. This feature has been implemented in the course of the KiWi  project funded by the European Commission. KiWi also contains SKOS thesauri and exposes them as LOD. Both systems can read a thesaurus via the other’s LOD interfaces and may write it to their own store. This is facilitated by special Linked Data URIs that return e.g. all the top-concepts of a thesaurus, with pointers to the URIs of their narrower concepts, which allow other systems to retrieve a complete thesaurus through iterative dereferencing of concept URIs.

Additionally KiWi and PoolParty publish lists of concepts created, modified, merged or deleted within user specified time-frames. With this information the systems can learn about updates to one of their thesauri in an external system. They then can compare the versions of concepts in both stores and may write according updates to their own store.

This means each system decides autonomously which data it accepts and there is no risk of a system pushing data that might lead to inconsistencies into an external store. Data transfer and communication are achieved using REST/HTTP, no other protocols or middleware are necessary. Also no rights management for each external systems is needed, which otherwise would have to be configured separately for each source.

Technology

The software is written in Java and utilizes the SAIL API, so it can be used with various triple stores. The thesaurus management itself (viewing, creating and editing SKOS concepts and their relationships) can be done in an AJAX Frontend based on Yahoo User Interface (YUI). Editing of labels can alternatively be done in a Wiki style HTML frontend. For key-phrase extraction from documents PoolParty uses a modified version of the KEA 5 API, which is extended for the use of controlled vocabularies stored in a SAIL Repository (this module is available under GNU GPL). The analysed documents can be stored and indexed in Lucene/Solr or any other (enterprise) search system along with extracted and semantically related concepts.

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 Nilay Coskun and 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…

FB

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