Wastl’s Weblog

Der Sommer ist schön, und so hatte mein Bruder zum Nachfeiern seines Geburtstags zusammen mit Steffen auf eine Hütte eingeladen - mit Sau am Grill und Kälbern auf den (Alm-)Wiesen. Eins der Kälber wollte ich Euch nicht vorenthalten:

Und dann wär’ da natürlich noch die Sau:

Fehlt nur noch ein ordentliches Bier:

Mit anderen Worten: ein zünftiges bayrisches Wochenende.:-)

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) things to do for most of us in the weeks before the meeting, we continued our preparation in the car until the Laptop batteries were finished - at which time we reached the city of Pilsen, where we - of course - had a beer and a small dinner. We arrived in Prague late that night and quickly went to bed (after another beer ).

Our expectations for the meeting were to learn the requirements that have been gathered so far in the use cases, to settle more concretely on the functionalities of the KiWi-system-to-be, and to discuss the overall dissemination strategy as a preparation of the dissemination plan. Quite a lot for three days of meeting!

Wednesday was the first meeting day. I started with a look back to the activities of the last quarter, and Peter Axel, Josef, and Peter continued with their reports about the requirements analysis at Logica and Sun (Jana has already blogged about this). In the afternoon, we had a pretty lively discussion about the “usage model” of the system and the user interface. We concluded the day with a nice traditional dinner downtown.

Me presenting our usage model ideas.

Salzburg KiWis in the meeting.

Thursday morning, we continued the discussion with presentations by François, Petr and Marek, and Jakub. In the end, I think that while we didn’t find a complete agreement, our ideas have at least converged considerably.

Thursday afternoon, Inka and Josef gave us a very interesting tour through the Sun premises. A particular highlight was that we were given the opportunity to observe a usability study of Netbeans in Sun’s usability lab.

The Sun KiWis after the tour through the Sun premises in Prague.

The afternoon session continued with two tracks. The main track was concerned with aligning the use cases to the KiWi system, while Julia, Jana, Inka and myself discussed the dissemination strategy. At around 17:30 we joined again and were given a very interesting presentation by Josef about a new Sun product (Zembly) that we might use in KiWi for providing users means to create custom Widgets and Layouts in the “Advanced Visualisations and Editors” task. After that, we went downtown, where Josef gave us a city tour through lovely and beatiful Prague!

The “Salzburg KiWis” in Prague: Rolf, myself, Julia, and Szaby.

Prague Castle with Dome.

KiWis on the way to the castle.

The way back from the castle was actually probably one of the most productive parts of the meeting, as we (= the Salzburg KiWis) developed ideas for a truly amazing showcase for the KiWi system - and being so excited we continued sketching our ideas until about 1:30 in the morning at the hotel bar. If it turns out to be feasible, we will certainly report about this later.:-) I think this shows the importance of the social and relaxing part of such meetings!

Friday was our last day. Being a bit tired, the discussions were still lively but not as tough as the days before. Rolf and I introduced our ideas for a system architecture and core data model. We received many interesting and valuable comments that we’ll need to think about and include during the next weeks. The morning concluded with a 5-minutes-turning-out-to-be-45-minutes presentation by Julia about the next steps in the dissemination activity. We had a long lunch after that together with Peter Reiser, Josef, and Inka from Sun, where we learned a lot about the “Community Equity” ideas that are currently implemented at Sun. You can read about it at Peter’s Weblog. We agreed that we should strive for including these ideas also in the KiWi system if possible.

And finally: thanks especially to Inka and Josef from Sun for organising this meeting.

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 interesting presentations by the authors whose papers had been accepted to the workshop. Particularly noteworthy was the presentation given by Alexandre Passant, “Towards an Interlinked Semantic Wiki Farm”, which also received our “best paper award” (he received the symbolic price of 4 Kiwi fruits).

The afternoon was primarily dedicated to a poster and demo session, where everyone could present his systems and other ideas in a rather free and creative environment. The workshop concluded with the real “workshop” part, where participants were expected to collectively think about the future of Semantic Wikis and there importance in different areas (results upcoming).

For KiWi, the workshop also resulted in several promising contacts of participants who were interested in the forthcoming KiWi results.

Peter giving the KiWi keynote.

Participants working together in the “workshop” session.

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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 MediaWiki (slides), and I concluded with KiWi/IkeWiki (slides).

The tutorial was very well received and had many attendees (I later heard that it was the best of the tutorials at ESWC). Many interesting questions were raised, which will likely influence the work carried out in KiWi. Originally, we also planned for a hands-on session, but since the interest was already so high during our presentations, we had to shorten this part considerably. Nonetheless, we think the tutorial was a real success.

Peter started with presenting the general Semantic Wiki idea.

Denny followed with the Semantic MediaWiki tutorial.

The tutorial was attended by many participants.

Eine Woche nach der letzten Skitour der Saison ging es am Pfingstmontag nun zur ersten Bergtour des Sommers! Nachdem oben noch einiges an Schnee liegt, und als “Auftakt” für die Kinder, haben wir uns zunächst zum Grünstein aufgemacht. Der Grünstein ist ein kleiner dem Watzmann (Fotos von der letzten Tour ins Watzmannkar) unmittelbar vorgelagerter Berg oberhalb des Königsees und der Schönau. Für Familien ein tolles Ausflugziel (mit bewirtschafteter Hütte oben). Nachdem wir alle noch viel Kraft übrig hatten sind wir dann den längeren Weg über das Schappach-Tal im Nationalpark abgestiegen.