A EU project supporting users in collaborative work.

inContext will develop a novel scientific approach focused on a new blend of human collaboration and service-oriented systems that explores two basic research strands:

1. efficient and effective support for human interactions and collaboration in various teams through dynamically aggregated software services;
2. use of human-to-human or human-to-service interactions in applying intelligent mining and learning algorithms that can detect interaction patterns for pro-active service aggregation.

It has both science and application, look at this awesome presentation video of the project on youtube:


whoa, I wish there was such a video for tabulator or nepomuk.

Thomas Roth-Berghofer, our colleague, is workshop chair at the KI2008, here is the call for workshop submissions. Artificial Intelligence people: go for it! :-)

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KI 2008 -- 31st German Conference on Artificial Intelligence
23 - 26 September 2008, Kaiserslautern, Germany
https://ki2008.dfki.uni-kl.de

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KI 2008 is the 31st edition of the German Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, which traditionally brings together academic and
industrial researchers from all areas of AI. The technical programme
of KI 2008 will comprise paper and poster presentations and a
variety of workshops and tutorials.

We invite proposals for workshops to be held at the beginning of
the conference. Eligible topics include all subareas of Artificial
Intelligence, as well as their foundations and applications.

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How to Propose a Workshop

Proposals should be about two (2) pages in length. They should be
prepared in PDF or plain ASCII and sent by email to the KI 2008
Workshop Chair Thomas Roth-Berghofer (trb@dfki.uni-kl.de).

The proposals should be written in English and must arrive by
January 25, 2008. Each workshop proposal should contain the
following:

- A description of the workshop topic. This description should
briefly discuss why the suggested topic is of particular
interest at this time.

- A brief description of the workshop format, regarding the mix
of events such as paper presentation, invited talks, panels,
demonstrations, and general discussion.

- An indication as to whether the workshop should be considered
for a half-day or one-day meeting.

- The names and full contact information (email and postal
addresses, fax and telephone numbers) of the organising
committee (three or four people knowledgeable in the field)
and short descriptions of their relevant expertise. (Please
specify the main contact.) Strong proposals include organisers
who bring differing perspectives to the workshop topic and who
are actively connected to the communities of potential
participants.

- A list of potential attendees.

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Workshop organisers will be responsible for:

- Producing a call for participation. The call is due February 20,
2008. This call will be posted on the KI 2008 website. Organisers
are responsible for additional publicity such as distributing the
call to relevant newsgroups and electronic mailing lists, and
especially to potential audiences from outside the KI conference
community. Organisers are encouraged to maintain their own web
site with updated information about the workshop.

- Coordinating the production of the workshop notes. The KI 2008
Workshop Chair coordinates the collection, production, and
distribution of the working notes for the workshops. Workshop
papers and abstracts must be received by the KI 2008 Workshop
Chair no later than August 17, 2008, and volumes are limited to
a total of 200 pages.

The KI 2008 conference organisers will provide logistic support,
and meeting places for the workshops, and will determine the
dates and times of the workshops. The KI 2008 conference
organisers reserves the right to drop any workshop if the
organisers miss the above deadlines. All workshop participants
must register for the KI 2008 conference.

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Important Dates

Proposal deadline: January 25, 2008
Notification of acceptance: February 4, 2008
CFP for the workshops due: February 20, 2008
Proceedings due for printing: August 17, 2008
Workshop: September 23, 2008

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KI 2008 - Workshop Chair
Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer (trb@dfki.uni-kl.de)

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People with a good memory (who aren't hooked on semantic systems like me) may remember that I started roughly a year ago to blog about my PhD. In Step 1 I described the general idea around Semantic Desktop and PIMO, in Step 2 I described my struggle for a research question and the actual scientific goal. Now, that was a year ago and something should have happened in the meantime...

Doing a PhD is a permanent struggle against yourself, god, life as such. If not true, this is at least a view that excuses a student to feel overwhelmed by the task, sit back, open (a can of beer|a bottle of wine) and yearn for life before and after the PhD. In the last year, I did struggling, being overwhelmed, and working on the PhD. I did entagle myself being involved in a lot of other things (such as aperture, nepomuk, burning man decompression, sweo, sesame, my 30th birthday) , which somehow ended up being a lot of things and some of them suffering from diminuished attention. Overwhelmed, we come back to the better reaction than the alcoholic beverage: finishing the PhD by writing it, then improve quality in the other tasks.

The core of the problem is that writing a PhD involves the task of writing. In general, a student can write one page of quality work per work-day. Given the fact that I was involved in a gazillion of things, this drops to one page a week. Oh, a 150 page PhD will then be written in three years. But as I started last year and want to get finished SOON, things had to speed up.

If you do the math for your own work, you can easily finish a PhD by cutting down the pagecount to a reasonable length (less than 100 pages would be excellent). But this means that the pages have to be really good. If you are really good, try writing a PhD in 82 pages like the web-shaking Human Computation by Luis von Ahn. He was able to say the following in his abstract (in my eyes a ticket to finish the PhD right after the first page and get graduated)
In addition, I introduce CAPTCHAs, automated tests that humans can pass but computer programs cannot. CAPTCHAs take advantage of human processing power in order to differentiate humans from computers, an ability that has important applications in practice.
The results of this thesis are currently in use by hundredszillions of Web sites and companies around the world, and some of the games presented here have been played by over 100,000 people. (strikethrough and correction of numbers by me)
Basically, this translates to: my work is pure innovation, or shorter: I rule.

So, not witty enough, I aimed for doing a larger 150 page thesis with the typical parts

• introduction: state of the art (web, knowledge management, ontologies, semantic desktop), problem
• my idea (PIMO + Semantic Desktop for PIM)
• my implementation and algorithms and ontologies
• evaluation
• conclusion: this work is pure innovation, may I rule?

The main parts of the work have been published before in other papers I did on my own and with others, see my publication list for a glimpse of what I refer to.
I took the argumentation, the citations, and the key results from this work and integrated it into one view.
Before, I had a time of "writing it from scratch" and "planning the layout in sections", I even made a MindManager mindmap of the whole structure.
I ended up having a 200 page document which I called "PhD draft", but which was actually a copy/pasted frankenstein of my papers, croaking "Pease kill me, Every moment I live is agony!".
So instead of finishing early, this approach made it actually a bit longer.

The real tricky part was "finishing something", I then started by finishing the introduction. I wrote it, improved it, printed it, thought about it, sent it to my mother (who has a phd in International Business plus a degree in english translation) to check the english (Mom, thank you so much and I am really lucky to have you!), check it by my colleague Thomas Roth-Berghofer and then by my Professor Andreas Dengel.
And alas, everyone was ok with it. Away frankenstein, welcome results. I was motivated to continue.

This was in August and knowing that I am on the right track, the rest was easy ... sort of.
I plowed through section after section, improving the content, adding missing bits, removing redundancy. Today I have a 250 page version that contains most of the things that must be in, missing are a few parts I wanted to do on literature and software engineering lessons learned.
From time to time I talked with my Buddy Sven Schwarz, who is on a similar quest as me, exchanging our status and talking helped to get organized.

So, the next sections can go into review, looking forward to get it done ... soon. A good motivation to speed up is the fact that Gunnar has also reached the equilibrium of "its done, only minor changes now".

category: random problems with Java. Mainly interesting for google searchers that have similar problems.

Developing for Eclipse WTP (perhaps using Eclipse 3.2) and you feel that the code you program, the servlets and JSPs are actually never synchronized with the web application and the running code is different from the development version?

I experience this sometimes. Then, I don't know exactly what to do, but deleting the temp-files of the server seems a good way to go.
The temp files are in:
%lt;your workspace folder>\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp

Actually, this broke the server, so I deleted the server and created it again (to to the J2EE perspective, servers in the package explorer, delete your server, and run the web application again on a new server)

Today at quarter to 6, it was again flashmob time in Kaiserslautern. I enjoy the sparse breakouts of the town's normality, especially on a mobile clubbing. Bring your own favorite music, shake freely. It was the best clubbing in town ever, seldomly I have seen so many happy people dancing in one place. No wonder, given the great music. I added some of my own to the soundtrack, bystanders heard nothing and wondered. Pics tomorrow.



thx and kudos to Katja, our flashmob queen.

but alas, I wish I would live in London, where they have really impressive mobile clubbings, like this one: (hey, theres a poidancer in it)

When constructing ontologies, labels are needed for properties. This is a crucial part of the work, the names will form the XML namespace and are visible as labels in the user interface.

We had a discussion at work about names for predicates. To illustrate it, a bad example (in N3):
:isKnowingperson a rdf:Property; rdfs:Range :Person.

The name is too long, contains a verb ("is"), has a mixed uppercasing (the "p" should be uppercase to ease reading) and contains too much information (Person can be removed, its also in the range.

The practical community preferes nouns (part, location,
topic, related) there is a slight one-sentence reco towards using nouns in the swap primer.

The popular ontology (=foaf) use nouns for literal properties and a verb for knows. Similar relations can be modelled: loves, hates.
SKOS [2], also uses isXOf for inverse that were hard to define, as is
rdfs:isDefinedBy.

It seems that the trend is toward shorter forms, gerunds, verbs or nouns.
My summary is: as I want to define inverses, I will try to use nouns
without verb-prepositions whenever possible. When this does not capture
the semantics in a satisfying way, I will use "isXof" and "hasX" or
search for a gerund. In practice the guideline is: use "name" instead of
"hasName".

For NEPOMUK's PIMO ontology, this would result in:

• part - partOf
• location - locationOf
• related
• topic - topicOf

I would appreciate feedback based on published guidelines on building
ontologies or on other ontologies that had similar problems.