Finally I'm back home at the HPI in Potsdam. Yesterday (Sunday) was my last day at this year's CeBIT computer fair and there were a lot of interesting things going on...
First, by chance I met HBS-fellow Jan Schmidt. Together with Oliver Gassner and Reinhard Karger as host he was talking about the use of networking platforms such as second life, their use, the hype, and social spam (read more about it in Jan's blog).
Another very interesting talk was scheduled afterwards: Carsten Waldeck, founder of iverse was talking about liquidfile - a file browsing application based on liquid browsing. Liquid browsing offers the possibility to arrange and manage a huge number of data items (e.g. documents) in a rather efficient way by a smart 2d-visualization. This principle is now applied to file system management on your local computer. There is an implementation for the mac and I will test it asap to give you a report.
In addition Carsten Waldek and host Reinhard Karger were talking about the plan of installing a social networking platform for archiving intellectual content (not in the sense of intelectual property). But, you should be able to express an idea, to upload your idea in any form of document, and to receive an official timestamp. Of course maintaining a database of 'ideas' will be rather difficult. Thus, all those ideas have to be translated into 'logic' (means with the help of ontology and rule representation languages). Then, if you have a new idea, you can check, if anyone else has already thought about it and if there are some people with similar interest. The other way around, you will be able justify that you have a claim in some idea because you have registered it previously. The trouble is....translate a natural language document into logic representation...you know that this - if done completely automatically - will fail (at least too often....). Thus, we will have to wait, until the semantic web will come.
On the other hand....we have been thinking and thinking again about possible killer applications for the semantic web. This(!) could be one....
BTW, I also met another HBS-fellow Andreas Scheper after the talk (read more about the CeBIT future talks and see some videos in Andreas sein Blog). We decided to meet again at re:publica in berlin, where als the HBS has a so called plugin that will be filled with some fruitful discussion...
So, CeBIT is over for me now... If you want to stay informed about ongoing CeBIT work and CeBIT after hours, keep on reading Miss Marple's Blog.
