I am still at KI2008 conference (which is located on the ground floor of the building where I work, so not attending the conference is hard :-) and will go to ESTC2008 tonight.

As blogged before, I will be speaking at ESTC2008, on 25th September 2008 around 16:45 in the Rittersaal room.

The topics of my talk will be circling around Semantic Desktop, personalized Semantic Web, and how this is used or can be used in company settings

• Why is Semantic Web needed on the desktop?
• How does data fusion work on the desktop?
• What is a personal information model?
• How do existing user interfaces and user experience change?
• Which projects are active and what are their results?

A nice interface I stumbled upon: the JabRef editor for smart groups:



an interface for a complex task. To explain the outcome, it generates a description of how the software now behaves. nice!

Wo finden sich Benutzer die mit viel Information zu tun haben, Kunden, Projekten, Themen? In den Printmedien.

In meiner Umgebung ist der Digitaldruck der Wahl bei www.direktprint.de. Die Frage ist, wie in so einem Unternehmen mit Information umgegangen wird. Nun, ich habe den Geschäftsführer kennen gelernt und kann mal in seine Prozesse gucken.

Der Prozess an sich ist faszinierend, Digitaldruck, Großformatdruck, Dissertationen (ah!), Masterarbeiten (oh, meine Studenten), und alles Online. Das interessante ist der sweet spot wo man ein Produkt anbieten kann, also von der Massenware abgehoben. Direktprint sieht zwar im Büro sehr "überlagert" aus (well, es geht um Papier und das stapelt sich hier meterhoch), die Qualität der Ergebnisse sieht aber nett aus.

Gut, nun will ich in den nächsten wochen mal rausfinden, wie hier so die emails und dateien durch die gegend fließen, und ob die Leute hier den Semantic Desktop brauchen.

A truly impressive and visionary speech, summing up why we do web 2.0. Must see Clay Shirky explaining what TV has grabbed for the last 50 years: our cognitive surplus. (of course, you all have already seen it, its from April 2008)

watch:
https://blip.tv/file/855937/

Excellent quotes (some literally, some only overlap in meaning, wasn't quick enough to type everything)
(telling a story he experienced)...
TV Reporter: Where do people find all the time to do wikipedia?
Clay Shirky: No one who works in TV gets to ask that question.
You know where the times comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you have been masking for the last 50 years.


Warcraft: grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.
At least they are doing something.

... the amount spent watching TV worldwide equals to creating 10.000 wikipedia projects each year...
a four year old daughter jumps up while watching a dvd.
She looks behind the TV fumbling through the cables, and we wondered... she said she is "looking for the mouse"
A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.

many thanks to Gunnar Grimnes for sharing

Last week the NEPOMUK Social Semantic Desktop Summer School happened. A short summary.

First and most interesting, much material of the summer school is available in the wiki. Second, I uploaded a lot of pictures, and there are more on flickr tagged with nepomuksummerschool2008.



The students were great, and very capable. We had people from all over the world, to randomly pick three: Samur from Rio, Rigel from Chicago, Bernhard from Austria. Of course, as usual I had problems keeping the names and backgrounds :-/



After three days of teaching and hands-on sessions, the students had to do their own projects. Two projects were winning, Chatomuk, a semantified chat-client with tag-cloud and other niceties, and a project showing user interface designs. Both are missing some documentation on the wiki, but Gunnar and Bernhard are working to make Chatomuk downloadable.

It was tricky to present the material in a short time and also involve the students in learning, we tried out different teaching methods (frontal presentation, pen&paper creation of ontologies, hands-on code, directing the students to google quickly for the right info), I hope it was a good mix for everyone.

The school also had a social event, and we organized opportunities for socialising every evening.


A very nice social event was hacking the mini projects on thursday night:


I talked to many people about the idea to create a product from nepomuk that could be so good that people will pay for it and it was interesting to see the possibilities and ideas how to do that.
Well, there were so many coffee breaks, chats, discussions, I can't write much more but say:

thanks for all the participants for attending - blog it (and ping me)!

We just had a laugh when programming Lucene indexing for LuceneSail.

Tomasz was reading this code....

... for ... HitIterator ...


and was shocked because the first impression was Hitlerator. OMG, if there was a class Hitlerating everything... this would be an implementation of Godwin's law.

one of my nephews wobbling down stairs with a snake-like ability. happened years ago, happily provided by my brother, but not uploaded due to excessive lazyness.

I will be speaking at ESTC2008, on 25th September 2008 around 16:45 in the Rittersaal room.

The topics of my talk will be circling around Semantic Desktop, personalized Semantic Web, and how this is used or can be used in company settings

• Why is Semantic Web needed on the desktop?
• How does data fusion work on the desktop?
• What is a personal information model?
• How do existing user interfaces and user experience change?
• Which projects are active and what are their results?