Planet Kiwi

Yesterday night from 16:41 to 24:00 we had the big event we prepared for in the last weeks and even months: the “Lange Nacht der Forschung” (“Researchers Night Austria”), an Austria-wide event where research institutions try to bring science and research closer to the public. Of course, KiWi was present at this event, as foundation of the TagIT system we are developing together with the local newspaper, Salzburger Nachrichten. The political highlight from a KiWi perspective was of course the presentation of the system I gave to the deputy prime minister of the State of Salzburg, Landeshauptmann Stv. Dr. Wilfried Haslauer:

Dr. Haslauer showed a high interest in TagIT and was very impressed by what we are doing, which in itself is an important appreciation of our work.

At least as important as the “political” part was the “public” part, where the KiWi Team in Salzburg (particularly Thomas and Rolf) gave numerous presentations to interested people from all over the state and neighouring regions and answered many questions, some of which were of quite high technical depth. At Salzburg Research, we counted around 700 visitors at the end of the event. I believe that this kind of experience is very important to get feedback about the things we are doing from people that are outside our own community and thus not part of a certain “group think”. Overall, a huge amount of work for the preparation, but also a huge success for us! Here you have a picture of the Salzburg Research team after the event (at around 00:15):

A big thanks to Thomas, Rolf, and Steffi for preparing the KiWi demonstrations and Lego Mindstorms station, to the rest of the KiWi team for hanging out and helping answering questions, to the rest of my nice colleagues for the team spirit that we demonstrated at this event not only at the TagIT station, and particularly to Julia who is the best organizer in the world.:-)

On 30th November, we had the follow-up event of the first KiWi/INSEMTIVES collaboration meeting we had in July. This time, KiWi was represented by Peter Reiser from Sun and myself, and INSEMTIVES was represented by Katharina from Innsbruck and Roberta from Trento. The goal of the meeting was to discuss the Community Equity system we are further developing in KiWi and – since the topic is very closely related to what INSEMTIVES is doing – how both projects can profit from a collaboration, INSEMTIVES from an already-deployed value system with many users, and KiWi from scientific feedback in the area of incentive mechanisms, which are not the main focus of the KiWi research itself. Katharina started with briefly summarising the current state and overall goals of INSEMTIVES. This was followed by a longer presentation and demonstration of the Community Equity system given by Peter. We had a very lively discussion on collaboration – the outcome is that INSEMTIVES aims to evaluate Community Equity in one of their use cases. Also, we aim to together describe the Community Equity system (which is so far only implemented and not really documented) in a scientific article to open it to a wider (scientific) audience. Overall, I am very happy that EU projects can indeed collaborate beyond institutional boundaries. And I would very much like to thank Katharina for organizing the meeting (again – next time it’s our turn!), and for thinking the same way I do about research… .:-)

The INSEMTIVES team has also blogged about this here and here!

Web Application Engineering is a new book where I participated as a co-author. The book provides an overview over various aspects of web application engineering such as the introduction to web technologies, processes, requirements, design, implementation, maintanace and evolution, adaptation, quality assessment, and web 2.0 and semantic web. The book provides a good basis for advanced but also basic course on web engineering but serves also as a reference point to the literature on web engineering area. You can find the book at:

• springer.com
• amazon.com
• amazon.co.uk
• amazon.de

Peter D. (dolog@cs.aau.dk)

New article on social web and knowledge management is out. Sebastian and I participated in joind research vision together with our colleagues from EU FP7 IP Active as a joined collaboration between the KIWI project and ACTIVE. Article discusses the difficulties with adopting web 2.0 and social web technologies from open web in enterprise knowledge management. It sketches various research directions such as personalization, reasoning, enterprise 2.0 integration, information extraction, and incemtives as computing research topics which could help in progressing the enterprise adoption of social web and semantic web technologies. You can find the article at springer link as part of the book: Weaving Services and People on the World Wide Web edited by Irwin King and Ricardo Baeza-Yates.

Peter D. (dolog@cs.aau.dk)

As you might have heard, the KiWi group in Salzburg is participating in a programme called “Generation Innovation” where we take students from technical schools over their summer vacation as interns so that they get to know what research is and what we do. For KiWi, we had 3 interns, and I would say it was a huge success: not only where they astonishingly good in programming and development, they also had very good ideas that they could contribute to the project. Their first job was to look over the KiWi user interface and collect all things they considered being bad and make suggestions on how to improve them. After that, we basically gave them the choice to do anything they want on top of the KiWi platform. As a result, we now have two interns working on Flash applications (one on graph visualisation for RDF, and one on displaying clusters in TagIT) and one intern working on a iPhone application – completely unexpected.

Our work with the students also resulted in a news article and video published by the local newspaper, Salzburger Nachrichten. You can see the video below if you click on “more” (starts automatically):

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 slides on Community Equity.

As INSEMTIVES is concerned with – among other issues – motivation mechanisms and reputation systems, Community Equity was of course of high interest to the partners. Since we will tightly integrate Community Equity with KiWi in the next months, I see a very high potential for collaboration between the projects at this topic. Also, as we are not really investigating reputation systems in KiWi and just employing existing technology, the outcomes of INSEMTIVES might be very valuable to us. Since we couldn’t discuss all issues in sufficient detail, we agreed to have a follow-up meeting in Innsbruck in autumn. I am really looking forward to it!

Other issues we discussed were primarily at the level of dissemination activities. With KiWi, we will try to submit contributions to the Special Issue on Incentives for Semantic Content Creation, edited by Elena and Katharina. We also planned to organise a joint workshop on the topic of Social Computing. A suggestion was to co-locate this workshop with the COOP 2001 conference.

Overall, it was a very interesting and fruitful meeting, and I am really looking forward in working together with INSEMTIVES. And I’d like to thank again Katharina and Elena for the invitation! And last but not least: the INSEMTIVES-KiWi-Collaboration-Group-Picture with (from left to right) Elena, Sebastian, KiWi and Katharina.:-)

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. Semantic Social Software: Semantically Enabled Social Software or Socially Enabled Semantic Web? (380)). During the discussion of our new group strategy, I tried to clarify the topic a bit more, which resulted in the following illustration, which I’ll try to describe in the following:

Currently, there are several trends on the Internet, which I’ll in the following call “Linked People”, “Linked Content”, and “Linked Data”:

• Linked Content is the most simple to explain; it describes basically the current state of the Web where content can be linked using hyperlinks. It is important to note that this content is meant primarily for human consumption, i.e. human-readable text, images, or other media files.
• Linked Data in contrast describes linking of data that is designed for machine consumption. At the base of Linked Data lies RDF as data exchange format. The people working on Linked Data are organised on the Linked Data website.
• Linked People now is the connection of individuals through the Internet using social networking platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn or Xing. “Linked People” is one of the most exciting developments of the last years and one of the pillars of the ongoing revolution that changes our society.

Many applications follow one of these strands: most traditional Websites are “Linked Content”, most social networking platforms “Linked People”, and there are quite some interesting applications emerging based on “Linked Data”. There are even some applications that combine two of these lines (e.g. Facebook combines Linked People with Linked Content).

What is mostly missing though is a connection of all three strands in one application. Such an application would allow people to connect with each other and share content, but would also expose its data in structured form to the Linked Data cloud (Linked Data Server) to be used by other applications and consume data from the Linked Data cloud (Linked Data Client) to enrich the user experience of the application itself. Our project KiWi with its flexible platform for Semantic Social Software does the first steps into this direction. Henry Story’s FOAF+SSL is also an interesting approach in this area, if combined with social software applications. I believe that in the future we might see many more such applications – at least this is the direction that we will most likely be heading …

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 organized the meeting as an “open space” without long Powerpoint presentation but instead with long and lively discussions.

KiWi Core System and Collaboration with INSEMTIVES

On Thursday morning, we started with a general presentation of the current state of the KiWi system, mainly showing the demonstration given in Heraklion at ESWC09 (which won us the ESWC Best Demo Award) and in Luxemburg at the KiWi Review. Furthermore, Marek showed the prototype for information extraction and annotation, and Klara a prototypical visual editor for her rule-based query language.

Besides the KiWi core system, Tobias Bürger from STI Innsbruck presented the ideas behind the FP7 INSEMTIVES project to the KiWi consortium as a first step towards collaboration between INSEMTIVES and KiWi (he also blogged about it). We see possibilities for collaboration at several levels: dissemination (i.e. joint organisation of events, joint publications), research (INSEMTIVES results could improve Community Equity) and technology (KiWi platform could be used in INSEMTIVES). We will further investigate a possible collaboration at the INSEMTIVES meeting in Innsbruck next week, where we are invited to present KiWi in turn.

Enabling Technologies

On Thursday afternoon, we took a look at the four KiWi enabling technologies and how they integrate with the rest of the KiWi system. Jakub started with presenting ideas for a rule-based language capable of reasoning over tags and RDF structures (after Klara already presented her work in the morning). We had a lively discussion on the different aspects of the rule languages, how they might be unified and fit together, and how they might serve the other parts of the KiWi system. We decided that what we would need as a first step would be a simple rule-language with forward chaining based on RDF, on top of which more complex ideas would be evaluated.

Next came a discussion on information extraction, based on what Marek presented in the morning. It was agreed that information extraction would be used (1) in the editor to support the user in semi-automatic annotation, and (2) in the importing functionality to automatically extract metadata and perform annotations. The information extraction component works by incremental training with positive and negative examples.

We concluded the afternoon session with a discussion on personalisation. Personalisation in KiWi means primarily recommendations, and secondarily user interface customisation. Peter introduced us into the multifactor recommendation algorithm the group in Aalboarg has been working on in the last year, and we discussed the different factors that might be used, including Sun’s Community Equity. We also discussed where recommendations might be useful.

Logica Use Case

Friday morning started with a presentation of the current state of the Logica use case by Karsten. Karsten introduced into a “formalisation cycle” that moved from collaboratively created unstructured text in the KiWi system to structured data in the Logica Risk Management system and from there back to unstructured text in KiWi. What is currently already implemented is the export from the Logica system to KiWi using a custom templating mechanism. We discussed that we should try to replace this templating mechanism by RDFa only and that we should also investigate RDFa for forms (e.g. RDForms). The connection between unstructured text and forms will then be realised using the RDFa annotation mechanism implemented by Marek.

SunSpace Use Case

The second half of Friday was dedicated to discussing the Sun Use Case, and the technologies and services we would need to integrate there to support the already existing SunSpace intranet. We agreed that it was unreasonable and unrealistic to expect that Sun would replace the existing Confluence installation in favor of KiWi, because the aim of KiWi cannot be to create yet another Wiki engine that competes with what is already there. Instead, in the SunSpace use case, the KiWi system will be more like an intelligent index that integrates content and data from already existing sources and offers additional value in the form of advanced services (e.g. search, tagging, …) and widgets that can be included on the user interface level (e.g. recommendations, tagging, metadata, …). The data integration will make use of existing technologies like Linked (Open) Data. We decided that we would contribute particularly to the update mechanism of Linked Data since this seems to be an issue that is yet not resolved.

A second major point of discussion was the integration of Sun’s Community Equity (CE) with KiWi. We decided that we would head for a rather tight integration at the EJB level rather than at the Web Service level, because then we will be able to use CE more easily for e.g. recommendation and search. This integration will take place until end of August.

Finally, we briefly discussed single sign on for KiWi and correspondingly, Henry’s suggestion for FOAF+SSL, which Steffi has already mostly implemented in KiWi. Also, an issue still to be solved for the SunSpace Use Case is how to handle permission management in KiWi.

We closed the meeting on Friday afternoon. Most said it was the most productive KiWi meeting we had yet and that we have moved much forward. I just hope that we can also hold the pace.:-)

Note: I will upload figures and pictures as soon as I have them.

KiWi has now joined the Future Internet Initiative, which is a European effort to investigate the various aspects of the Internet of tomorrow. KiWi’s contribution to it is both, as a Social Media project and as a Semantic Web project, so we expect that our part can be really valuable. And we will definately take part at this year’s Future Internet Assembly in Stockholm to get in touch with other projects and plan joint activities as part of KiWi’s dissemination efforts.