Planet Kiwi

KIWI project consortium met in Prague between June 25 and June 27. Several advancements have been discussed in Prague such as requirements of use case partners for KIWI system, tag models, information extraction ideas, and reasoning about inconsistencies. Data model for the core system was discussed as well. The meeting was a success showing a convergence of ideas along the tagging, mesh up for integration with other enterprise information systems, as well as widget idea. Besides that, Sun was a very good host so the atmosphere created at the meeting also helped to progress. Our team presented the mesh-up idea as well as state of the art in requirements in Logica. Picture shows Sebastian Schaffert opening the meeting.
 

Last week was KiWi meeting week at the Sun Microsystems offices in beautiful Prague. Our KiWi team from Salzburg consisted of Julia, Rolf, Szaby, and myself (the “Salzburg KiWis”), and we started with our company car in Salzburg on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after Szaby finished his last university exam. Since there were so many (other) [...]

Semantic technology isn’t about technology: It’s noble concern is to make the life and work of people easier. Yesterday, Marek Schmidt and Petr Knoth, both working on PhD project within Natural Language Processing (NLP) at Brno University, introduced their vision of how Information Extraction could be integrated into the KiWi-System.
First off: What is Information [...]

In the next session, Rolf Sint gave us insights into his approach to the combination of closed and open data classification mechanisms, which is informed by his findings in his master’s thesis. The probably most widely used retrieval method for digital content is full-text search; Google and Yahoo’s indexing methods, for instance, rely on full-text [...]

The Kiwi team is meeting at the Prague Sun offices for the next few days to discuss the roadmap of this cutest of all semantic wikis. I completely empathize with Jana Hervig, when she writes

An IT project is like herding cats, they say – in our case, we’ll be herding kiwis, and if we can enjoy it only half as much as these guys, I’ll be fine:-)

And illustrates it with this video:

Clearly I must be one of the cat like kiwis, because I am still in France. Last month’s conferences in California have exhausted me. And I have been speaking so much about the Address Book, that I really need to sit down, roll up my sleeves, and just work on it. I did try to write something on topic yesterday, relating the semantic web and NetBeans – since Prague is the center of NetBeans development. I hope that excuses me somewhat.

A list of on the spot updates to this meeting can be found on kiwi planet.

Between June 18 and June 21, I attended International Workshop on Distributed Learning and Collaboration (DLAC): Participation and personalization: The main factors of social software hosted by one of the Leibniz Insititutes: Knowledge Media Research Center in Tübingen, Germany, a very nice and historic university town with a very good climate and atmosphere. The workshop brought together experts from various research fields related to social (web) software such as sociology, cognitive sciences, learning sciences, learning technology, and computer science. I also gave an invited talk on Personalization and User Modelling for Distributed Learning and Collaboration in Professional Context where I summarized my research on personalized access to learning networks as well as personalized learning design. I also sketched various research challanges IWIS group deal with in 2 new EU research projects KIWI and idSpace such as personalized support in knowledge management and learning in software development and creativity. Besides other things, we have visited a nearby Daimler Benz museum in Stuttgart. I wish I had a car like the one at the picture

I have participated in ESWC 2008 conference in Tenerife. The location was well chosen. Tenerife has very pleasent climate and the accomodation and session rooms in the conference hotel are also excellent. The only disadvantage was the long flight and not really good internet connection. But we have survived

I have coorganized the semantic wiki tutorial (tutorial 6) where I was also one of the speakers together with Sebastian Schaffert (Salzburg Research) and Denny Vrandecic (University of Karlsruhe). In addition to that, I gave an invited talk at the semantic wiki workshop on requirements challanges in the KIWI project. Both, semantic web tutorial and workshop event are supported by FP7/EU KIWI project.

Both, tutorial and workshops, were well received. The KIWI project attracted an interest in the community and people expressed their interest to follow news on new KIWI developments in all scientific areas as well as demonstrators to be built.

The ESWC conference also featured interesting invited and contributed talks. All invited talks presented interesting challenges to be solved and I found them also very relevant to the current research in the IWIS group.

The second day of ESWC08 (Monday) featured the 3rd Semantic Wiki Workshop, supported by the projects KiWi and NEPOMUK. The workshop was organised by Hala, Max, Christoph, and myself (see photos below), and started with a keynote by Peter Dolog about the recently gathered KiWi requirements for Semantic Wikis.
We then had a number of very [...]

The KiWi project was very present at the5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC08) on Tenerife, Spain. It started with a joint KiWi/ACTIVE tutorial on Semantic Wikis on Sunday, 1st June. Peter Dolog began with a general introduction into Semantic Wikis (slides), describing rationale and ideas. Denny Vrandecic then followed with a detailed introduction into Semantic [...]