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

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).

After a successful Triple-I conference in Graz, we almost immediately (after one night at home) continued on to the nice island of San Servolo in Venice, where the 4th ReasoningWeb Summer School is currently taking place. (Late) breakfast at home, lunch in Cortina d’Ampezzo and dinner in Venice.:-)

The idea of the ReasoningWeb summer school was born in the REWERSE project, which is now over, and is now continuing with the support of a number of other projects, KiWi among them (though only content-wise and not financial for the moment). The summer school is mainly concerned with reasoning on the Semantic Web. It started yesterday (Sunday) with a poster session by the attending PhD students, followed by my presentation of KiWi, which was supposed to give students some insight about what makes up a good project. My primary goal was to (1) tell the theory people that there also has to be a practical side to reasoning, and (2) tell the practical people that there also has to be a theoretical side to Semantic Wikis. I think this worked quite well. My presentation (slides) was follows by a similar presentation by Andreas Bartho about the MOST project.

The “real” lectures have started today with the foundations of rules, reasoning, and ontologies by Thomas Eiter (Vienna) and Axel Polleres (Galway). This afternoon, Norbert Fuchs will present “Attemto Controlled English”. Tomorrow we’ll learn more about reasoning with uncertainty (Umberto Straccia) and Semantic Web in Biology (Paolo Romano). Wednesday is closer to KiWi, as it is concerned with Multimedia Semantics (Steffen Staab) and Social Networks (Stefan Decker). Finally, Thursday will close the Summer School with “Semantic Web Services” by Jorge Cardoso.

And then … I am really looking forward to two more days in Venice with my family.:-)