Planet Kiwi

Social Web and Knowledge Management 2008: the first international workshop took place on April 22, 2008 in Beijing. The event was collocated with major conference in World Wide Web research: WWW2008. The workshop was a great success. It attracted 85 registered participants. Workshop was introduced by Denny Vrandecic and me where we explained the aim of the workshop and its relevance to enterprise knowledge web research in general and to Active and KIWI project in particular. Workshop featured 6 regular presentations on topics such as identifying trust from social network, costs behind hyperstructure maintenance in wikis, generation of user profiles from ontologies, structured linked data in styleId and tagpedia, as well as cultural heritage. The workshop concluded with a lively discussion on topics relevant to the area as well as presentation. The discussion clearly identified importance of trust but also the differences in knowledge management for public domains such as wikipedia on the one hand and enterprise knowledge management on the other hand. Important contacts and ideas for future research has been established as well. I am looking forward to the next editions of the workshop. Please refer to SWKM2008 page at IWIS or SWKM workshop web site.

The topics of SWKM 2008 were also present in several tracks and sessions of the WWW conference. It seems that the World Wide Web research community is looking into them and are interesting for quite many people.

Last month I attended the European Union KiWi project startup meeting in Salzburg, to which Sun Microsystems Prague is contributing some key use cases.

KiWi is a project to build an Open Source Semantic Wiki. It is based on the IkeWiki [don't follow this link if you have Safari 3.1] Java wiki, which uses the Jena Semantic Web frameworks, the Dojo toolkit for the Web 2.0 functionality, and any one of the Databases Jena can connect to, such as PostgreSQL. KiWi is in many ways similar to Freebase in its hefty use of JavaScript, and its emphasis on structured data. But instead of being a closed source platform, KiWi is open source, and builds upon the Semantic Web standards. In my opinion it currently overuses JavaScript features, to the extent that all clicks lead to dynamic page rewrites that do not change the URL of the browser page. This I feel unRESTful, and the permalink link in the socialise toolbar to the right does not completely remove my qualms. Hopefully this can be fixed in this project. It would be great also if KIWI could participate fully in the Linked Data movement.

The meeting was very well organized by Sebastian Schaffert and his team. It was 4 long days of meetings that made sure that everyone was on the same page, understood the rules of the EU game, and most of all got to know each other. (see kiwiknows tagged pictures on flickr ). You can follow the evolution of the project on the Planet Kiwi page.

Anyway, here is a video that shows the resourceful kiwi mascot in action: