Sebastian Schaffert

Being invited to speak at the IFRA conference on “The Future of News Publishing” on “Semantic Search in Online News”, I spent Thursday and Friday last week in Rome to present my ideas about how the Internet allows for new means of information organisation, how this applies to online news, and how we implemented “semantic search” together with Salzburger Nachrichten and towards which kinds of information integration we are heading with KiWi and with the projects that build on top of it. This event was a very interesting experience for me, as this was one of the few times I was able to speak at a conference that is outside my own domain (i.e. Computer Science), and as this was the first time I actually tried to consequently apply the Presentation Zen approach to my presentations (well, nothing to loose ). I think I managed both to my satisfaction, and the presentation zen approach is definately something I will try to base more presentations on.

Beyond my own talk (which I’ll maybe upload later), the other presentations were also very interesting, at least for me. It is interesting to witness and actively accompany the process of a whole industry and in consequence the whole society changing and adopting to the new forms of communication. Particularly, I was amazed by the fact that many news distributers actually gain all their profit from their online presence, whereas the print-based distribution is currently hardly self-sustaining. Also, the relevance of personalisation and of communities has been very nicely demonstrated. To me, this shows that we are right on track with our projects, particularly with KiWi.

My tutorial lecture at this year’s European Semantic Web Conference has been recorded on video and is now available on the Internet (click image on the left). Well, I am not sure whether I am happy about it (because my presentation style obviously needs improvement for video lectures ), but it is a noteworthy event nonetheless.

And BTW, Peter gets his share of video space as well (click image on the right). His count of “ehms” is much less than mine.:-)

Semantic Wikis - IkeWiki - A Semantic Wiki for Collaborative Knowledge Management

Semantic Wikis - Introduction to semantic wikis

Today is the submission deadline of the SemWiki2006 workshop I am chairing together with Max Völkel. There have been more than 40 abstract submissions, and I hope that more or less all who submitted an abstract will also submit a paper. I am really looking forward to the workshop!