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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]