Sebastian Schaffert

Many of you frequently ask me why it is that I am so fast in programming. Some of it is of course extensive background and experience, but I think that most of the reason is that I try to apply certain code patterns that help to avoid errors even during writing the code, before they can occur in practice. Because later, it always costs you more time to find and fix the bug than it costs you to add a few more standard lines while writing.

I tried to assemble these patterns in 7 rules (now called the “KiWi Coding Patterns”, you may of course also call them “Sebastians stupid misconceptions on programming”). Each of these rules is really easy to adopt and doesn’t take much time and planning from you (just minor changes in your programming style), so they should be really easy to adopt and put into practice. The rules are - with examples - written down below.

What you find below are therefore not really big issues. Each of the rules only takes a small amount of time to realise, which pays off later 100 times. You should adapt each of the rules as a general pattern that you always apply without even thinking about it.
Continue Reading »

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

We finally managed to relaunch the public KiWi website (particular thanks to Julia & Jana for taking all the effort!). The website is for the moment based on Joomla, but we’ll switch again when we have a running KiWi system.:-) The old IkeWiki system continues to live as our internal & community workspace, which we will use for software documentation, deliverable & meeting planning, etc.

I’d like to particularly point you to the fact that the first KiWi deliverables are now also publicly available, and most of them I consider really well written. As a starting point, I would recommend that you have a look into the KiWi Vision. If you are interested in the four research lines (we call them “Enabling Technologies”), then you might want to look into the state-of-the-art summaries on Reasoning, Reason Maintenance, Information Extraction, and Personalisation.

There are also deliverables on the requirements of the two use cases, but they are currently not publicly available due to privacy reasons. We aim to clarify whether we can make at least parts of them public, as they are very interesting as well.

I finally managed to upload the presentation of the KiWi Vision I gave in Venice to Slideshare. Feel free to look into it, or use it for your own KiWi presentation. If you’d like to use parts of it for a non-KiWi presentation, please ask me or just cite properly (CC attribution).