Planet Kiwi

Yesterday and today I had the pleasure to follow Katharina‘s and Elena‘s follow-up invitation to the KiWi meeting in Prague, and was participating as a guest at the INSEMTIVES project meeting in Innsbruck to present the KiWi project and discuss possible opportunities for collaboration. Besides the usual KiWi presentation and demonstration, I also presented Peter‘s [...]

As you may know, my research area is “Semantic Social Software”, trying to combine social software ideas with Semantic Web technologies – for me a very promising approach that could bring the Semantic Web into practical applications and help to improve social software at the same time (see also my publications, e.g. ). During the [...]

From 5th to 11th of July, I participated of the 7th edition of Summer School on Ontological Engineering and Semantic Web in Cercedilla, Spain. We were 50 students (mostly in the 1st year of our PhD) confined in a residence surrounded by spectacular nature.

Every morning we had talks from the tutors and famed invited speakers such as Prof Stefan Decker and Peter Mika. After each talk, we had hands-on session to put in practice what we had learnt from early “lessons”. The quality of the tutors, head by Prof Enrico Motta, contributed a lot for the success of the school.

We experienced one week of intense work from 8 am to 8 pm and some time for relaxing during the sleep . On the first day, we had a poster session to present our ongoing PhD work. It is amazing how KiWi is famous at the Semantic Web community: at least 40% of the students knew something about it or have met on of the kiwi members in conferences. In particular, I have met 5-8 students from previous conferences.

On the 3rd day, we formed groups to run a mini project and create a video exploring any issue of semantic web. Each group was supervised by a particular tutor responsible for helping us to elaborate our presentation according to the school requirements. My group proposed a plug-in for enriching HTML pages using RDFa without giving any extra work for end users. The solution was quite prized, however, did not win the “best project award”. However, we won the “best video award”.

Although extremely tired after one week of intense work and concentration, I am quite glad for this wonderful experience. For PhD colleagues who had not attended any summer school yet, I strongly suggest to attend this school in particular, given the quality and inspiration of the tutors.

Fred Durao
(fred@cs.aau.dk)

Last week we had for the second time our KiWi meeting in Prague at the Sun Microsystems offices – almost a tradition by now.:-) The main goals of the meeting were to kick off the implementation of the enabling technologies and the integration and implementation in the use cases. Also, for the first time, we [...]