Finally....we've made it. Another semester is over .. well, lat's say is almost over. At least no more lectures this summer. The semester was concluded by a two days seminar on the "Semantic Web".
All seminar talks have been recorded and will be available soon on our website. Well, not really all talks. One student was concerned about having his video being available on the internet so everybody would see him. Thus, his talk - on "Ontology Merging" - which by the way was a rather interesting and very well done talk, unfortunately was only savoured by the participating audience.
We decided to offer a complete lecture on "Semantic Web" in the upcoming winter semester including a lab course. The purpose of course is to attract some potential candidates for semester and diploma theses, because we have a lot of work to do in thal field and thus, various interesting topics to work on.
Well..the semester did not really end now, but there still are the exams (for the web technology lecture)....starting on monday. We have a lot of students from bio-informatics (even more than computer science majors) and I hope they will be well prepared. Hey (listen!)....it's rather simple to be well prepared. Even if you didn't visit all the lectures..yes, they are all recorded and still available on our website. And if you don't have a stable broadband connection to the internet (or don't want to 'waste' your online time) your have the possibility to get all the lectures (including all lecture material and links) on dvd (just write me an email). So...the main topics for the exams will be web caching, web programming (rpc,rmi,corba,j2ee,servlets,jsp,...), search engines, web 2.0, web services, and semantic web.
BTW, last week I attended a rather interesting workshop "Social Software in der Wertschöpfung" (could be translated as "added valued of social software") in Stuttgart. I was giving a talk on "Collaborative Tagging Systems and the Emergence of new Social Networks". Thus, the most interesting talks for me of course have been the other talks about collaborative tagging services and recommender systems. Andreas Hotho from the University of Kassel presented their "bibsonomy" service, an alternative to the well known del.icio.us including a tagged database of bibtex records (what makes it really interesting for researchers and scientists). To attract new users, you can easily import all your local bookmarks as well as your del.icio.us bookmarks. Also you can upload entire bibtex libraries and tag each entry , e.g., with a reference to the papers were it was used as a bibliographic reference or with the name of a specific conference. The nice thing about bibsonomy is - at least as Andreas has anounced it - that its data is supposed to be open source / public domain. This means that after making user names anonymous you can access all tags and resources for testing new methods of ontology learning, doing researched on social networks being induced by tag usage or resource sharing and many more.
The other fortunate coincidence there was meeting a former student from Trier, who is now doing on his PhD and is well known for being a rather ambitious blogger.
