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).

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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