Opening of the German/Austrian W3C-Office / Teaching the Web at FH Potsdam

Today, I'm visiting the Opening of the German/Austrian W3C-Office at FH Potsdam (only 20 minutes away from HPI with public transportation), which is entitled "Teaching the Web".

Short Opening address by Prof. Johannes Vielhaber, rector of FH Potsdam and by Felix Sasaki, followed by the first speaker.
Klaus Birkenbihl on "W3C and W3C Offices - an Overview", who gives some general information about W3C and some overview about the worldwide W3C offices and their duties. Today, there are 18 W3C offices and on of their main tasks is the recruiting of local stakeholders to become W3C (paying) members. But also have to be mentioned better synergies with local hosts for community building, acquisition of local projects, and fostering new cooperations.

Andrew Vande Moere from the University of Sidney on "Visualization for the Web", author of the information aesthetics blog. He starts with giving an overview on visualization technology ranging from simple data graphs to information art (e.g. the Web2DNA website for visualizing your website as DNA-Sequence...). The main message....ok, open up your data and make your data publicly available (that's my point! Go one step further and make it Linked Open Data!). Then, there are lots of new possibilities for intelligent data mashups (as e.g. the 'the city is the future web'), making use of the data in a completely new way. Two interesting examples for web online visualizations are Google's visualization API and IBM's Many Eyes ('the youtube of visualization'), not to forget tha ultimate data mining &visualization application on your personal data (only for 'the data addicted'), http://your.flowingdata.com/.

Malgorzata Machol from FU Berlin (instead of the announced Prof. Tolksdorf...) on "Why Semantic Web " and the "Semantic Technology Institute". Sorry, but I can't stand those web2.0/3.0/xxx timelines any more. I've seen better motivations for the Semantic Web (at least with better/newer examples). Unfortunately, in this talk the Semantic web is motivated with a rather coarse conception of 'semantics' and (human/machine) 'understanding'. There is too much of human perception (and complex human understanding) mixed up with formal semantics and technology working on formal semantics (and what can be achieved with it w.r.t where are its limits). Please try to achieve more and better differentiation. The second part of the talk is about the STI in Germany and its activities around the semantic web.

After the lunch break, the event continues with Lambert Heller from TIB/UB Hannover on 'Library 2.0 – how the web has (and is) changing education of librarians?'. Today, the library catalogue is nothing but highly structured data, but the problem of uniquely identifying strings (symbols) with subjects (catalogue entries) is only solved on the surface and in a superficial way. There are commonly used (and elaborated) data sources such as the 'Schlagwortnormdatei' or the 'Personennormdatei' that contain reliable structured information about persons (authors) or keywords. But, today these datasets are not publicly available (while it is also not certain, who really owns the copyright, and what kind of copyright at all...). Let's get all these data, triplify it and make it Linked Open Data!!!
Finally, come and visit 3rd BibCamp in Hannover in May 2010:


Patrick H. Lauke from (web evangelist at) Opera Software on 'Standards education - what students need to know about web standards and accessibility'. It', about telling the big picture to the students. Not really the complete design specification or code implementation. ('Standards are Code....and Designers don't care about code') Make clear why...not necessarely how. On the other hand, there's accessibility. Web accessibility is more than blind users and screen readers. accessibility doesn't have to be hard. In fact, a lot of accessibility is just usability! Opera accordingly is invoved in outreach and educational activities on 'Teaching the Web' (Opera: We want to make the Web a better place!).

Petra Rauschenbach from Bundesarchiv on 'Conversion, Digitisation and Internet Gateways. Strategies and their implementation at the Federal Archives of Germany'. Starting with an overview on overview of their stocks and a lot of German archival vocabulary, which I cannot translate into English. Unfortunately, Mrs. Rauschenbach is 'reading' the talk and not talking freely...Also the term 'Findbuch' (i.e. concordance, index) sounds somehow very 'retro' for computer scientiest like me. But anyhow, the content of the Bundesarchiv (Federal Archive) is available on the web....why not make it Linked Open Data??

Henry S. Thompson from University of Edinburgh on 'Teaching Web Architecture'.
students:WWW::fish:water i.e. the relationship between students and the WWW is similar to the relationship of fish and water. So, why teaching a fish about the water? Learn to think about something which usually is invisible (i.e. the technology we are using everyday). So how should we teach web standards? Basic didactic principles like 'Analysis' (decomposing concepts), Contradiction (to something taken for granted), Analogies (being offered for confounding expectations) are presented. I like the last one: E.g. 'Standards come from official standards bodies', but consider the following: IEEE (semi-private bodies) / IETF (bunch of volunteers, left-overs of a hippie community) / W3C (2 private Universities, one semi-private body and companies paying some fee)...all of them have NO legal authority. More on this can also be here: 'Identity, URIs and Semantic Web'.
Conclusion: Teaching needs to draw on theatre as well as educational theory, 'Keeping people engaged is the core of education.'

Jens Meiert from Google Inc. on 'Modern Web development – a view on the future of HTML, CSS and development practices'. As expected, we are starting in the past, 1990 HTML 1.0 by Tim Berners-Lee. What about development practices? Problems in the past ranged from technological limitations, support limitations over low output quality up to bad user experience. In the Present, more and more we are facing a separation between behavior, structure, and presentation.

Erik Wilde from School of Information, UC Berkeley on 'Information Engineering' (BTW, my very first on lecture on web technology back at FSU Jena was based on Erik Wilde's book, this was before I had written my own ;-). He's using Google sidewiki for his lecture handouts and presentations, which can be annotated by the students simply by installing the Google toolbar in your browser.
Information Engineering is bigger than the web. It includes high level skills such as information and service modelling, or knowledge about complementary architectures. The Web of Things is nothing but applied Information Engineering. Engineering can be defined as constrained-based design and implementation.

[to be continued]

Corporate Semantic Web Workshop in Berlin, 15.09.2009

Heute findet im Rahmen der XInnovations 2009 der Corporate Semantic Web Workshop an der HU Berlin statt, der heute abend im 3. Semantic Web Meetup seinen Abschluss finden wird.

9 Uhr morgens, noch ist alles ruhig. Kaffee allerdings scheint am morgen ein Fremdwort zu sein. Zumindest reicht es 30 Minuten vor Beginn der Veranstaltung lediglich für ein anscheinend vom Vorabend "geplündertes" Buffet mit zwei leeren Thermoskannen und ein Paar verlorener und zum Teil gebrauchter Kaffeetassen. Da lob ich mir doch Graz und die I-Semantics, bei der wir vor gut einer Woche rund um die Uhr mit leckerem illy-Kaffee (Ja! ich würde mich über eine Product-Placement-Vergütung sehr freuen...:) und Espresso versorgt wurden....

Prof. Adrian Paschke von der FU Berlin eröffnet den Corporate Semantic Web Workshop mit einer kurzen vorstellung der 'Vision' des Corporate Semantic Web Projekts, das vom BMBF seit 2008 gefördert wird. Für mich natürlich interessant der Unterpunkt und Forschungsbereich 'Corporate Semantic Search', also bin ich auf den später geplanten Vortrag zum Thema gespannt.

Gökhan Coskun aus Adrian Paschkes Forschungsgruppe schließt an mit einem Vortrag über 'Effiziente Verwaltung von Unternehmenswissen - Corporate Ontology Management'. Wozu braucht man Ontologien in einem Unternehmen? Ganz einfach, zur Steigerung der Produktivität und der Effizienz der Informationsverarbeitung (typische Wirtschaftsinformatikerantwort...). Als Hinderungsgrund für den Einsatz im Unternehmen identifiziert Coskun die 'Akademische Orientierung' vorhandener Werkzeuge. Er sieht Ontologien als normativ und allgemeingültig, was einen weiteren Hinderungsgrund bzgl. deren Einführung im Unternehmen darstelle. Dem möchte ich widersprechen, da Ontologien stets auf einer 'gemeinschaftlichen Vereinbarung' beruhen (explicit, formal specification of a shared conceptualization), die den jeweiligen Blickwinkel der Beteiligten abbildet. Allgemeingültigkeit wäre eine Eigenschaft, die gar nicht erreicht werden soll. Wir betreiben ja schließlich Informatik und nicht Metaphysik, d.h. unser Ziel ist nicht die normative und allgemeingültige Beschreibung der gesamten Welt, da eine Ontologie stets der Interpretation des Benutzers, seinem Kontext und seiner Pragmatik unterliegt.

Nach der viel zu kurz geratenen Kaffeepause geht es weiter mit Olga Streibel von der FU Berlin und dem Thema 'Semantische Suche: Tagging und Wissensgewinnung'. Als 'Extreme Tagging' werden jetzt Tags eingeführt, die selbst als Objekte für das Tagging hergenommen werden können, d.h. die eigentliche Tag-Relation lässt sich taggen. Was gewinnt man dadurch? Streibels Erklärung, dass man 'durch Tags Assoziationen bildet, mit denen man Ontologien erzeugt', hilft mir hier nicht besonders weiter. Leider wurde meine diesbezügliche Frage am Ende mit der Bemerkung, dass wir das offline diskutieren sollten, etwas unschön abgebügelt. Dabei wäre es meines Erachtens für den Vortrag von zentraler Bedeutung, eben diesen Vorteil des Ansatzes herauszustellen und gegenüber einem einfachem (individuellem) Konzept-Mapping abzugrenzen.

Ralf Heese von der FU Berlin referiert als nächstes über 'Einfach Verlinken in Wikis / Experten mittels Wikis finden'. Es geht beim ersten Thema dabei darum, den Benutzer mit Hilfe von Hintergrundwissen beim Setzen von Links durch entsprechende Vorschläge zu unterstützen. Das zweite Thema widmet sich der Frage, wie sich aus den History-Logdaten eines Wikis Experten zu bestimmten Themen bestimmen lassen.

Gleich Mittagspause....! Leider nur mit Gulaschsuppe/Möhrensuppe und Rundgang über den 'Büchermarkt' im Hof vor dem HU-Hauptgebäude.

Wieder einmal ein paar Minuten zu spät bei Richard Hubers (FIZ Chemie GmbH) Kurzvortrag über 'ChemgaPedia - virtuelle Forschungsumgebung'. Und schon wieder eine Wortneuhülse: 'Wissenscloud' - ohne sich darüber im Klaren zu sein, was exakt damit gemeint ist.

Änderung im Programm, 'Semantic Profiles in Universal Plug and Play AV', Vortrag eines Diplomanden zur semantischen Anreicherungen von UPnP AV Daten.

Weiter geht es mit Johannes Krug von x:hibit, der das Berliner Museumsportal (finanziert durch entsprechende E-Commerce Anteile, z.B. E-Ticketing, u.a.) vorstellt, gefolgt von Radoslav Oldakowski von der FU Berlin mit dem Thema 'Semantische Datenintegration und Suche im Museumsportal Berlin'. Semantisch unterstützte Suche, die Suchbegriffe um verwandte Begriffe ergänzt...mal sehen, ob sie dies auch (1) intelligent und (2) visuell ansprechend tut.

Sebastian Hellmann gibt mit 'DBPedia Live Extraction' als erstes eine kurze Einführung in das zentrale Hub der Linked Open Data Cloud, der DBPedia, gefolgt von diversen Anwendungen rund um die DBPedia. Übrigens nutzt yovisto.com (including semantic features) ebenfalls DBPedia-Daten zur Implementierung einer echten explorativen (semantischen) Suche.

[...to be continued @ Semantic Web Meetup ]

W3C-Tag an der HU Berlin, 14.09.2009

Es ist mal wieder soweit: W3C-Tag an der HU Berlin im Rahmen der XInnovations 2009, diesmal mit Prof. Felix Sasaki als Vertreter des lokalen W3C-Büros an der Uni Potsdam....und es geht auch schon gut los. Prof. Robert Tolksdorf, der die Veranstaltung eröffnen sollte, steckt im Berliner Verkehr fest und so warten wir erst einmal 20 Minuten bis hier irgendetwas heute morgen passiert.

Atemlos kommt Herr Tolksdorf mit 20 minütiger Verspätung an, entschuldigt sich kurz (ohne dabei nicht auch einen kurzen Hinweis auf die Situation der Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe zu geben und auf seine Solidarität mit den Berliner S-Bahn-Fahrern hinzuweisen) und stellt das STI (Semantic Technology Institute) vor.

Interessanter wird es jetzt schon mit dem ersten, dem 'Semantic Web' gewidmeten Vortrag, genauer geht es dem Titel entsprechend über das 'Rule Interchange Format' (RIF) und das neue OWL 2, von Prof. Adrian Paschke von der FU Berlin. OWL 2 verwirft die übliche Dreiteilung in OWL-Light, OWL DL und OWL full und definiert verschiedene OWL DL Sprachprofile bzgl. ihrer 'worst case' Berechnungskomplexität. Dabei lässt sich OWL EL sogar in Polynomialzeit berechnen (daneben existieren noch OWL QL und OWL RL). RIF als Austauschformat für Regeldialekte bringt ebenfalls wieder eine Unmenge an neuen Syntaxvarianten. In diesem Zusammenhang wird auch auf ein Handbuch hingewiesen (Handbook of Research on Emerging Rule-Based Languages and Technologies, IGI Global), das sich allerdings nicht gerade durch seinen Preis (> 300 Euro) empfiehlt...

Prof. Felix Sasaki vom deutsch-österreichischen W3C-Office stellt als nächstes die aktuellen Entwicklungen rund um den neuen HTML5 Standard vor (hier ein Link auf die im Vortrag gezeigten Beispiele). Warum eigentlich jetzt HTML 5, nachdem bereits 2000 XHTML 1.0 veröffentlicht wurde und die Entwicklung von XHTML 2.0 auf vollen Touren lief? Nun, die Entwicklung von XHTML 2.0 wurde abgebrochen, der Anspruch ein 'sortenreines' XML im Browser einzuführen (eine 'Revolution') ist gescheitert. Nach einer von Opera durchgeführten Studie 2008, ist lediglich 4.13% des gesamten Web-Codes tatsächlich valide. Daher versucht man mit HTML 5 eine (fehlertolerante) 'Evolution' des alten Standards zu realisieren.

Eigentlich ist HTML5 genau genommen sogar ein Rückschritt, da es auf eine dezentrale Erweiterung über einzubindende Namensräume zugunsten eines eindeutig zu interpretierenden DOM-Baumes verzichtet. Dahingehend sind Probleme mit semantischen Erweiterungen, wie z.B. RDFa oder Microformats vorprogrammiert!

Mittagspause im Café Chagall mit Bliny und saurer Sahne mit anschließendem Rundgang zu Dussmanns Kulturtempel...

Thomas Caspers spricht zunächst einmal über Barrierefreiheit (Die deutsche Übersetzung der WCAG 2.0 a.k.a. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). 'POUR' steht für die vier Grundprinzipien der Richtlinien für barrierefreie Webanwendungen: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable und Robust. Allerdings konnte ich die beschriebenen Übersetzungsprobleme ('programmatically determined' usw.) nicht nachvollziehen...vielleicht hätte man mal einen Informatiker fragen sollen....

Mit gut 20 minütiger Verspätung (dank der Ausdauer des Vorredners) beginnt der Vortrag von Joachim Neuberth über SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization Systems). Warum müssen manche Vortragende nur immer so leise sprechen. Das Verfolgen des Vortrags gestaltet sich nicht wirklich einfach (was nicht etwa in der Komplexität des Themas begründet liegt). Zugegebenermaßen ist aber auch die Entwicklung von SKOS und das dahinter liegenden Datenmodell nicht so besonders spannend. Besser wird es erst, als unterschiedliche Ressourcen, wie z.B. die Library of Congress Headings oder die französische Nationalbibliothek aufgezeigt werden und am Ende dann doch Linked Open Data angesprochen wird.

Prof. Felix Sasaki widmet sich als nächstes dem Thema Metadaten für Multimedia und berichtet von der W3C Metadata Annotations Group. Das Ziel der Metadata Annotation Group kann als "DublinCore + X" paraphrasiert werden, also ein minimales Multimediametadatenschemas mit Mapping zu bereits existierenden Formaten. Der zweite Teil des Vortrags beschäftigt sich mit XProc (XML Pipeline Language) zur Modellierung und Beschreibung von XML-Verarbeitungsketten, die eine Pipeline-artige Verarbeitung von wechselnden Validierungs- und Transformationsschritten unter Ausnutzung einer rudimentären Programmlogik (konditionale Verarbeitung, Iterationen, Selektive Verarbeitung, Ausnahmebehandlung, u.a.) mit heterogenen XML-Daten erlaubt.

[Nach der noch folgenden Diskussion, weiter mit "Brezeln und Wein" im Foyer..... :)]

Links:

• Felix Sasaki: Das Web der Daten und das Web der Menschen, Pressemitteilung zum aktuellen W3C-Tag

i-Semantics 2009 in Graz (Day 03)

The second day of i-Semantics ended with party and dancing to live music performed by 'Egon 7', and of course with a lot of interesting talks with interesting and nice people :) This morning at breakfast, Jörg really looked as if he had not really had got enough sleep (he continued to party after the official ending somewhere downtown :)

Keynote

Peter Kropsch (Austrian Press Agency): When technologies are drivers, integrated concepts are needed for success,

talking about scenarios of future media convergence, the development of the information technologies and the possibilities opened up by them, esp. about the expectations of APA what to get out of semantic technologies. In general, keynotes without some slides (to get hold of the information structure of this 60 minutes talking) are rather difficult to follow, if the speaker is not able to awake sufficient enthusiasm in the audiences...

The Role of Semantic Technologies in Future Internet Track,

Klaus Tochtermann (Know-Center, TU Graz): The Role of Semantic Technologies in the Future Internet

explained, why the vision of the future internet is not only 'old wine in some new bottles'. Although all the components that consttute the Future Internet (Content, Services, Security, People, etc.) is already around, the main contribution of FI is the integrated view and interaction of thes components.

Marco Pistore (FBK): Highlights of the Future Internet Conference Berlin

In parallel to i-Know/i-Semantics in Berlin the 2nd Future Internet Symposium took place...

Jan Reichelt (Mendeley): Mendeley - A Last.fm for Research?

Mendeley wants to help researchers to manage their resources. Research is inherently social. Mendeley offers a desktop tool, similar to last.fm audioscrobbler that (a) analyzes your search papers and enables full-text search and (2) smart metadata extraction and generation. The mendeley web service offers an online backup of your own research library and enables on-click import from google scholar and other citation services.

Interesting stuff...I have just registered and download my desktop client for Mac OSX...

Paolo Rosso (Universidad Politecnica de Valencia): Geographical Information Retrieval and Toponym Disambiguation

Geographical filtering of information retrieval results by expanding query strings with semantically related geographical information (...like that stuff!).

I-Semantics 2009 in Graz (Day 02)

The first day of i-Semantics ended with a guided tour through the old section of the town (that we already had enjoyed the day before), and a welcoming party located in the Kunsthaus Graz. The Kunsthaus Graz has some extraordinary architecture and reminds me more of some strange submarine lifeform than of a building. Unfortunately we had to leave earlier to prepare our talk for today....

The second day of i-semantics 2009 started in a very conveniant way - again great espresso, fresh fruits, and nice talking.

Linked Data Track

Harald Sack (HPI): How can Software Developers benefit from Linked Data Vocabulary,

Well, the title is misleading somehow. Of course software developers do benefit from the use of linked data, but.....the problem is the feasibility of APIs and automated tools for mapping knowledge representations to object-oriented data structures. I had to deliver the talk (instead of Matthias, who actually was the main contributor, but is STIL on vacations) and I'm afraid that I have overstressed my audience with lots of software engineering details (bad for an introductory first talk of a session on linked data...).

Jörg Waitelonis (HPI): How to augment Video Search with Linked Data,

Jörg introduced yovisto.com and its connection to the Linked Open Data cloud, featuring our 'exploratory search' widget, suggesting additional search results to the user and providing seredipenditios findings.

Atif Latif (Know-Center, TU Graz): The Linked Data Value Chain: A Lightweight Model for Business Engineers

First, Atif stated significant differences between the aims of the scientific community and enterprise level business. He introduced the concept of Linked Data Value Chain, where the most valuable output consists out of an increase of the (code/data) readability for the human engineer, thus also serving the same duty as Matthias work in making semantic web software engineering very, very simple. So.....let's make Semantic web a No-Brainer (finally) ;-)

I had to skip parts of the afternoon sessions (Poster/Short-Paper and Student Sessions) due to interesting talks and reviewing work (deadline today...unfortunately). But I'm looking forward to more interesting contacts, lots of delicious espresso, maybe again some cake and pastries, and then of course the Gala Diner in the evening...

The Gala Diner startet with an interesting performance of Austrian cultural heritage. In particular, we listened to a musical performance of 4 original "Wurzelhorns" (Wurzelhorn is a variation of the well known Alphorn).

i-Semantics 2009 in Graz (Day 01)

Although already having been at the PC of i-Semantics some years ago, this year it's the very first time for me being in Graz. We've already arrived yesterday and spent an beautiful day with sight seeing in the baroque historic section of the town (including the Schlossberg with 260 steps in the midday sun).

The conference is starting right now with greetings by Hermann Maurer (TU Graz) and Klaus Tochtermann (Know-Center, TU Graz). I will report about all upcoming the conference highlights...

Keynote 01,

Paolo Traverso: Towards a future Internet of Services and Content
Pointing out differences between real worl services and software services (duration, accessibility, time contraints, etc.) towards the proposition of a 'Future Internet', where research is focussed on modeling, compositing, and monitoring real world services...

Social Semantic Web Track,

Liana Razmerita: Towards a New Generation of Social Networks: Merging Social Web with Semantic Web

Conclusion: Semantic Web Technologies will enable the development of a new generation of social networking applications...nothing new up to now..

Web 2.0 und Neue Medien Track,

Watraud Wiedermann (APA Defactor): Semantische Suche in Medienarchiven

Demonstration of search application on newspapers, deploying synonym search and search for significant co-occurrences.

Knowledge Visualization Track,

Sven Havemann (TU Graz): Patterns of shape Design

Raising the question 'What's the point on semantic enrichment of images?' One of the problems in computer graphics is that different communities use slightly different vocabularies with inherent ambiguities. Furthermore, there is also a 'semantic gap' in the way that (correct) CG-algorithms often do not deliver the expected result, due to the lack of a proper vocabulary. This leads Haveman to the development of a conceptual reference model (like CIDOC-CRM) for shapes.

Innovative Funktionen für E-Learning Track,

Viktoria Pammer (TU Graz): Intelligente Ad-hoc Erstellung von Lerninhalten mit semantischen Technologien

Presentation of the APOSDLE system that proposes learning material to the learner according to his current skills and needs. Seems to be an Intranet (non web based) system...

...and now on for some espresso and sone 'real Austrian' cake and pastries ;-)

Corporate Semantic Web Track,

Fan Bai (Uni Duisburg/Essen): Exchanging Knowledge in Concise Bounded Descriptions. An Approach to Support Collaborative Ontology Development in an Distributed Environment

Interesting variant of versioning of ontologies (for distributed ontology development). Using simple cvs is not suitable, simply because most ontologies simply consist out of one huge file...

Usage and Case-Studies Track,

Sanja Vranes: Maturity and Applicability Assessment of Semantic Web Technologies

ok...ready for 'Guided Tour from Conference Venue to Welcome Receiption' at Kunsthaus Graz

[see you again tomorrow...]

ESWC 2009 at Heraklion, Greece, Day #01

Perfect loction for a summer holiday....as well as for the European Semantic Web Conference 2009. Arriving yesterday afternoon at a beautiful sea resort, blue skies, blue sea, white beaches...Kind of an environment that makes it hard for speakers and presenters at a scientific conference keeping their audience interested ;-)

First Day starts with several Tutorials and a Workshop. I have chosen the "Evaluation of Semantic Technologies" workshop for the morning. I cam a little bit late, thus the first presentation I fully attended was Ulrich Küster's ''evaluation of Semantic Web Service technology", which is not exactly my research topic. Interesting was the discussion whether a binary measurement for ranking results of service matching is appropriate or not (it's not...).

In the following presentation, Jerome Euzenat is talking about 'Ontology matching Evaluation". This topic for me is much more interesting (although not being my research topic).

Unfortunately the internet connection was so bad at ESWC 2009 that 'Live Blogging' was almost not possible. Sorry for that! But, at last I switched to twitter to give some 'live' updates. Just search for the hashtag #eswc2009 at twitter to get a timeline of tweets related to the conference program of ESWC 2009.

Chris Bizer from FU Berlin is the last presenter in the tutorial with a talk about 'Evaluation of Semantic Storage Systems'.

3. tele-TASK Symposium am HPI in Potsdam

Heute und morgen (13./14. November 2008) findet am Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam das 3. tele-Task Symposium statt. Ich freue mich auf ein spannendes Programm als auch auf interessante Gäste (unter anderem von der ETH Zürich mit dem Projekt REPLAY, Andreas Nürnberger von der Uni Magdeburg, das Fraunhoher IDM aus Illmenau und viele mehr...).

Natürlich werde ich selbst auch im Programm vertreten sein zum Thema "Semantisch unterstützteu Suche und Navigation in audiovisuellen Datenbeständen" (Slides gibt es später hier via slideshare).

Trendseminar "Semantische Technologien" in Stuttgart am 5. Nov. 2008

Morgen werde ich in Stuttgart die Moderation durch das Seminar "Semantische Technologien - Wissen intelligent und gezielt nutzen", initiiert durch die MFG Fazit Forschung - Informations- und Medientechnologien in Baden-Würtemberg. Dabei geht es insbesondere um die Anwendung von Semantic-Web Technologien in Unternehmen.

Auf der Gästeliste stehen unter anderem Prof. Rudi Studer vom AIFB Karlsruhe und Tassilo Pellegrini von der Semantic Web Company aus Wien, und ich freue mich schon auf die abschließende Podiumsdiskussion, in der ich von den Gästen ihre Meinung zum aktuellen Marktpotenzial der semantischen Technologien, den Chancen für mittelständische Unternehmen und die Zukunft des Semantic Web erfragen werde....

W3C-Day, Berlin, 2008 (at XInnovations 2008)

Today, I'm going to visit the annual W3C-Day being connected with the XInnovations 2008 in Berlin. According to the program the sessions were supposed to start at 9 am (For this reason I got up rather early thismorning....) but also the first speaker seemd to think that 9 am is a little bit early ;-) So we started with a 20 minutes delay. In the introducing talk, Klaus Birkenbihl from W3C Semantic Web Activity Group is giving an introductory talk on the Semantic Web, solving the question, how to explain Semantic Web to an (more or less' ordinary web user. Not a simple task, but the best you can do ist to explain it via examples, showing that integrating information in the web today is a rather tedious and extensive manual work. Of course, with semantic web technologies, automated integration of heterogeneous data might soon be possible...

Unfortunately, the speaker for the second talk did not show up. Moreover, it should have been a presentation about the semantic search engine ConWeaver, which I know very well and I was rather curious about its progress. Therefore, the session continues with some kind of RDF tutorial being presented by Lars Bröker from Fraunhofer IAIS. Next, a short introduction in SPARQL is given by Thomas Tikwinski from Fraunhofer IAIS und W3C DE/AT.

[to be continued]

XInnovations 2008, Berlin, Day 02 - Sept. 23, 2008

Today, I'm going to visit the 'Corporate Semantic Web' workshop at XInnovations 2008 in Berlin. At least it seams that semantic technology has reached industry and corporations. "There is no market for semantic technology", as Christoph Tempich from Detecom Int. quotes a former oracle statement in his talk "Analytics drive the Corporate Semantic Web". Therefore, you just have to provide another label, which is 'Enterprise Information Management' with semantic web technology as underlying technology.

During the coffee break I followed a discussion on the planning of an 'Asocial Semantic Web Workshop' for the next WWW conference or ESWC conference. The goal o fthe workshop should be to show in which way the semantic web is vulnerble by SPAM or other offensive techniques, as e.g. denial of service by providing a deadly RDF-sequence that causes temporary data to grow exponentially.....sounds rather intriguing. I'm looking forward wo contribute ;-)

The 2nd session this morning starts with a presentation from Markus Luczak-Rösch from FU Berlin on 'Corporate Ontology Engineering'. Next, Holger Seubert from IBM is presenting 'Enriched Content Browsing', i.e. during page load in the traditional web, the web page is enriched with additional content. The text of the web page is analysed and terms of interest (info spots) are selected and linked with additional contextual information (from the web, from corporate data bases, etc. in another frame of the same window) without leaving the current context.

We had lunch in a small cafe underneath the nearby public railway with russian dishes (Cafe Chagall, Georgenstr. 4, 10117 Berlin). The pelmeni was really delicious!

The afternoon session starts with Thomas Hoppe from Ontonym with a presentation on 'Corporate Semantic Web'. According to his interpretation, the general 'Semantic Web' concept of Tim Berners Lee cannot be simply transported into the corporation as it is. Inside the corporation, it's a different world compared to the outside. All users are employees, vocabulary is (most times) strictly controlled, there are strict access restrictions, services have to be integrated in portals and corporations have to support corporate processes. The session continues with a presentation by Ralf Heese from FU Berlin on 'Corporate Semantic Collaboration'. He introduces the simple text-annotation tool loomp which has the purpose to enable nonexpert users to provide semantic annotations.

[to be continued tomorrow, W3C-Day, XInnovations 2008, Berlin, Day 03...]

XInnovations 2008, Berlin, Day 01, Sept. 22, 2008

For the third time, I'm attending the XInnovations (formerly known as XML-Days) 2008 in Berlin. Although I was often rather dissapointed about the quality of the conference program (you might refer to my previous posts about XML-Tage Berlin here), I decided to give it another try (simply because I can reach Humboldt University in Berlin with local public transportation in about 45 minutes). Also this time, there seemes to be some emphasis on semantic web technology (at least considering the program, there are Semantic Wikis in the Corporate Wiki track and anoteher Corporate Semantic Web Workshop, not to forget the Semantic Web topic in the PhD-Forum).

I started the first day of the coference with participating the Coprporate Wiki Infotag. Denny Vrandecic is talking about the "Semantic Media Wiki" from AIFB Karlsruhe. Denny is starting his talk with some historical facts about WIkipedia. Interesting thing to mention, according to a study from Aaron Swartz, only 2% of all Wikipedia users (it come up to 1.400 people) are primarily responsible for all article changes. This contradicts the commonly assumed opinion that wikipedia is written by millions of users. Then he was introducing the semantic web in general, by stating that the semantic web is nothing but things (nodes, concepts) being connected by certain relationships, forming graphlike structures that can again be related to each other. According to his definition, a semantic wiki is nothing but graphs being created from wiki data.

The next talk I'm attending is in the Ph.D workshop. Olaf Hartig is talking about 'Trustworthiness of Data on the Web'. With the Semantic Web more and more software agents are taking decisions based on (RDF-based) data on the web. But how can we trust those data? Olaf is developing an RDF trust model as a basis for trust assesment and trust-aware data acces. He suggests a scale from [1-;1], where -1 represents 'absolute distrust' and +1 'absolute trust' for a statement. Now, all relationships in an RDF-graph can be weighted with according trust values ranging from [-1] to [+1]. Trust into a set of statements can be expressed with aggregated trust functions ranging from a cautious (conservative) minimum to a slightly optimistic median. The formal trust vocabulary can be found here. Next, criteria for trust assessment are collected and three different trust assessment strategies are defined: user-based (ask the user on his/her opinion about the trustworthiness), provenance-based (taking into account the trustworthiness of the referring users), and opinion-based (recommendations by other users according to their own trustworthiness).

The afternoon session started with Nils Barnickel from Fraunhofer IOCS with a talk on 'Semantic Mediation between Loosely-Coupled Information Models in Service Oriented Architectures'. Semantic descriptions of Web Services are supposed to enable data and service interoperability. One problem being addresses ist the lack of efficient ontology mapping options in current existing onlology languages (although OWL does have a differentFrom or sameAs operator, complex mappings deploying concepts with totally different subgraphs or 1:n, n:m mappings are missing).

Ok, now it's definitely time for a coffee break. after that, I will be joining the 'World Cafe' session, where I will participate in the discussions instead of writing blog.

[to be continued tomorrow, XInnovations Day 02, Corporate Semantic Web Workshop]

Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval 2008 in Berlin, June 26-27, 2008 - Day 02

After the dinner cruise along the river Spree, the second day of Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval 2008 again starts with an interesting invited talk on the European answer to Google search engine technology - THESEUS.

Karsten Müller from Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute is presenting on "THESEUS Project - Applications and Core Technologies for the Semantic Web". First, Karsten makes clear, that THESEUS doesn't want to be Google ;-) THESEUS is a research program for a new internetbased knowledge infrastructure....which from my point of view means nothing else but "the semantic web"....
One part of the THESEUS project is ALEXANDRIA, the virtual library, being lead by Yahoo! with the objective of semantic processing of different forms of content to enable faster access to relevant content, which again means an increase in information quality. Concepts such as an automated tagging framework (including language error correction, synonym & tag merging, and topic focussing, identification of semantic relations), innovative navigation (by presenting thematically related contents) and interaction concepts are involved.
Another part is ORDO, which deals with "Organizing your digital life" with the goal to unify various data formats, multilingual information, structured and unstructured data on the web to enable homogeneous information sources.Problems such as separating important from unimportant, ordering information instead of searching, priorization, identification and visualization of interrelations are addressed.
TEXO is another part with the objective of "Realizing the internet of services" (being lead by SAP Research), offering personalized customized services, community involvement to improve services, as well as a smooth & seamless (userfriendly) adaption and integration of services.
PROCESSUS deals with the "Optimization of business processes" aiming for the objective of anytime providing the user with theright information at any stage of the business process.
MEDICO is another subproject dealing with "Towards Scalable Semantic Image Search in Medicine" and being lead by Siemens.
CONTENTUS, as being the last Use case "Content access and generation from cultural institutions is lead by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Being part of CONTENTUS are tasks such as Digitizing books as well as audiovisual material (including the German Music Archive in Berlin) protecting the cultural heritage. The goal is the semantically interlinked collection of content to achieve a next generation multimedia library.
.....impressive and ambitious project!

The upcoming section this morning is on "Image Tagging" and Marius Renn (at least I hope so) from TU Kaiserslautern is givig a presentation on "Automatic Image Tagging using Community-Driven Online Image Database". Automatic image tagging requires a lot of training data....and flickr is delivering tons of tags per day...but are these flickr data really good candidates for learning? So, in the end, unfiltered community image sets directly do not provide satisfying results. Alas, these databases at least allow large scale image aggregation...
The next talk in this session is given by Christian Hentschel from Fraunhofer HHI Berlin about "Automatic Image Annotation Refinement using Object Co-Occurences". Again, flickr is the target image set with its huge collection of more than 2 billion images, growing by 3 million photos every day. Objects always appear and are perceived in a semantic context.

The following session is on "Symbolic Music Retrieval" and starts with Rainer Typke from Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (ÖFAI), but I had to skip this talk. Anyway, the samples of the reduced MIDI files were quite interesting (although I'm not a fan of the Scorpions!). OK, I had to ask afterwards about the usefulness and application of his approach. In music retrieval it can be used to reduce the index size down to 30% of the original index. Also QBE-processing will become much easier while on the other hand you might connect this MIDI-collection to real music files.
The last talk of the morning session is given by Giancarlo Vercellesi from University of Milan on "Automatic synchronization between audio and partial music score presentation". He presents the ParSi architecture, which perfoms an alignment of PCM signal and partial MIDI scores.

The afternoon session is simply entitled with "Systems". Fernando Lopéz from Madrid is giving a presentation on "Towards a fully MPEG-21 compliant adaption engine: complementary description tools and architectural models". Within the MPEG-21 framework several aspects of metadata-driven adaption is not clearly covered. He introduces CAIN, a tool for adapting Digital Items e.g. to different output devices.
The session continues with a presentation on "Mobile museum guide based on fast SIFT recognition" with the objective to identify paintings in galleries simply with the help of mobile pattern recognition without any extra installation on site. The SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) method is a rather cool algorithm for detecting local features within images that are used to map photographs taken with your PDA or mobile phone in the image gallery with reference pictures from a given database. And actually the live demo did work :)
I guess, we will also use the SIFT-algorithm in yovisto for synchronization of ppt/pdf-slides with the lecture video.

For the last session - "Structuring of Image Collections" - only one speaker showed up. Marc Gelgon is presenting on "Geo-temporal structuring of a personal image database with two-level variational Bayes mixture estimation".

[to be continued...]

Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval 2008 in Berlin, June 26-27, 2008

The next two days, we are attending the Berlin Adaptve Multimedia Retrieval 2008 Workshop at the Heinrich Hertz Institute being located in downtown Berlin. So, it's pretty close to home and the only travelling involved was by S-Bahn :)

The first speaker is Francois Pachett from Sony CSL giving a keynote entitled "What are our audio features worth?"
The fundamental questions are "What makes objects what they are?", ""What are the features of subjectivity?", "How do we perceive objects and how can we transfer this to a machine?" Pachet's research is concerned with the classification of musical objects based on the so called polyphonic timbre that describes the sum of all features of a music object. Interesting thing is the identification of hubs, i.e. songs that are pretty close to every other song. Hubs in general seem to be mere artefacts of static models.
Interesting fact ist that there are companies now, predicting if your song is going to be a hit. Their judgement also relies on feature analysis and they even give recommendations how your song can be improvent to become a hit. Of course you have to pay for that service...but does it really work??

After the coffee break, there's a session on User-Adaptive Music Retrieval. The first talak is presented by Kay Wolter from Fraunhofer IDMT Ilmenau on "Adaptive User-Modelling for Content-Based Music Retrieval". They are adapting a content-based music retrieval system (CBMR) according to user preferences that are determined by acceptances and rejections of recommended songs by the user, which is furthermore used to improve the quality of music recommendations....Reminds me somehow to Pandora or last.fm...
The second talk is presented by Sebastian Stober from Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg on "Towards User-Adaptive Structuring and Organization of Music Collections". So, wouldn't it be nice to structure your music collection automatically...but not in the way the software tells you, but the way you like it? The presented system is based on an general adaption approach using self-organizing maps that can be adapted by user interaction.

The first afternoon session is on "User-adaptive Web Retrieval" and starts with a presentation of Florian König from Johannes-Kepler-Universität Linz on "Using thematic ontologies for user- and group-based adaptive personalization in web searching". He introduces Prospector, which is a generic meta-search layer for Google, not constrained only to web search, based on re-ranking of search results and deploying user modells based on Open Directory Project (ODP) taxonomies. As far as I have understood, the applcation is based on the carrot2 framework for open source search engine result clustering.
Next, David Zellhöfer from BTU Cottbus presents on "A Poset Based Approach for Condition Weighting". Similarity search can be determined according to different conditions w.r.t. the search query. Esp. different people have different expectations if it comes to similarity. So, condition weights have to be determined by psychological experiments.

The second afternoon session is about "Music Tracking and Tumbnailing" and starts with a presentation of Tim Pohle from Johannes-Kepler-Universität Linz on "An Approach to Automatically Tracking Music Preference on Mobile Players". Ok, so the basic problem is, someday you will get bored by the music selection on your ipod. Therefore, the goal is to remove songs that you don't like anymore and replace them with new songs that you probably will like. How do you achieve this? Well, with according user feedback, i.e. by tracking the user's decision on choosing or skipping tracks. Tracks that have recently been skipped often will be dropped and replaced by tracks that are similar (according to some feature analyses) to the remaning tracks.
Next, Björn Schuller from Technische Universität Münschen is presenting on "One Day in Half an Hour: Music Thumbnailing Incorporating Harmony- and Rythm Structure". Music thumbnailing is some really cool feature, Just imagine, your sitting in your car and you are looking for another track to hear, but your player always starts songs at the beginning and they have long and boring intros. Therefore, getting to the most interesting (or significant) part of the song immediately would really be something...

The sessions close with an invited talk given by Stefan Weinzierl and Sascha Spors on "The Future of Audio Reproduction. Technology - Formats - Applications". Promissing title, let's see.... We start with a brief history of audio recording and reproduction technology starting from the very first phonograph to modern multichannel spatial surround sound systems. So, the future seems to be real sound field synthesis (wavefield synthesis, WFS) instead of relying on psycho-acustic effects as in today's stereo. Here, an array of loudspeakers reproduces exactly the wave front of the original sound source. For transmitting signals like this, no single channels are recorded anymore, but the original sound signal (without spatial characteristics of the room where it has been recorded, because this would interfere with the characteristics of the room, where it is reproduced) including movement and position of the sound source. Besides existing VRML and MPEG-4 Audio BIFS that focus more on visual scene description than on audio scene descriptions, there is the proposal of a new modeling language for high resolution spatial sound events called ASDF (Audio Scene Description Format).

[...to be continued in Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval 2008 in Berlin, June 26-27, 2008 - Day 02]

bibcamp in Potsdam, 15.-17.5.2008

Bibliothek 2.0 - von der Theorie zur Praxis....
Unter diesem Motto steht das erste deutsche bibcamp, das heute hier in den 'interessanten' Räumlichkeiten (i.e. das 'Schaufenster') der FH Potsdam stattfindet. Geografisch und strategisch günstig in der Nähe des Hauptbahnhofs gelegen präsentiert sich das Gebäude-Ensemble der FH-Potsdam, das sich in direkter Nachbarschaft zur klassizistischen Nikolai-Kirche befindet (die mit ihrer riesigen Kuppel die Skyline von Potsdam dominiert), mit dem diskreten Charme des mir aus Weimar wohlbekannten 'Gauforums' (einem der größten Betonhässlichkeiten, die uns der Bauwahn des dritten Reichs hinterlassen hat...). In einer guten halben Stunde geht es los und ich werde heute vom ersten Tag des bibcamps berichten....

Wie immer beginnt die Konferenz mit der kollektiven WLAN-Suche, die sich hier für manchen Benutzer etwas schwieriger gestaltet, da das WLAN der FH-Potsdam nur in Verbindung mit einem VPN-Tunnel genutzt werden kann...insbesondere mussten wohl Benutzer eines älteren Windows eine hohe Frustrationstoleranz an den Tag legen (zumindest schaute Jörg quasi als 'Guter Geist' dem ein oder anderen über die Schulter und versuchte zu helfen).

Das bibcamp hat sogar ein eigenes Maskottchen, das allerdings noch nicht eingetroffen ist. Die Maskottchen-Idee ist über eine Google-Suche entstanden. Gab man im Vorfeld der Veranstaltung den Suchbegriff 'bibcamp' ein, wurde man von der Suchmaschine vorsichtshalber gefragt, ob man nicht doch den Begriff 'bibercamp' gemeint hatte. Was lag also näher, als den Biber als offizielles bibcamp-Maskottchen zu küren. Foto folgt...


Ok...Vorstellungsrunde. Nicht die Teilnehmer, sondern die Beiträge sind als erstes dran. 'Den Mutigen gehört die Welt' und ich bin mal wieder der erste, der sich vortraut und stelle unser Thema 'yovisto' vor. Ach ja...ich hab jetzt auch ein yovisto-T-Shirt. Foto folgt....

Interessante Beobachtung am Rande: für eine barcamp-Veranstaltung ist hier alles ein klein wenig langsam. Auch war nicht jeder 'gezwungen', sich selbst und seine Motivation vorzustellen. Diejenigen, die es taten, waren dafür aber 'sehr' ausführlich...(also nicht die berühmten drei(!) Tags).

Jetzt wird's langsam interessant. Die Diskussion entspannt sich über das bibliothekarische Selbstverständnis ('Bibliothekare haben ja viel mit Büchern zu tun') über den Bibliothek 2.0 Begriff. Vom Schlagwort zum Schlachtruf, dem Für und Wider der damit verbundenen Technologie und dem Ausgeliefertsein gegenüber der Akzeptanz der Nutzer. Nebenbei bemerkt weiss ich jetzt, dass 'Archivar' ein cooler Beruf ist, ohne den die Realisierung des Disney-Films 'Ratatouille' kaum möglich gewesen wäre....

So, nachdem wir (Jörg und ich) noch für ein Videointerview herhalten mussten beginnt jetzt das Abendprogramm mit Powerpoint-Karaoke (inklusive einem 'Chicken-Chicken'-Vortrag...). Das kalte Buffet (inklusive Schmalzbrote) war gar nicht schlecht. Der Rest des Abends spielte sich vornehmlich 'draußen vor der Tür' ab, die gut gemeinte musikalische Untermalung spielte mutterseelenalleine drinnen vor sich hin und berieselte die Reste des kalten Buffets, während sich draußen die interessanten Diskussionen entspannen. Tatsächlich endete der Abend auch 'fast' in einem Fiasko (2.0)..., als das Maskottchen (heist es nun 'Horst' oder nicht?) vorgeblich entführt wurde....

Zum bibcamp wird ja auch eine Menge getwittert....

1st German IPv6 Summit at HPI, Potsdam (Day 02)

The first session today is about IPv6 status and deployment from ISP's (Internet Service Providers) and Operator's point of view, starting with Henning Grote from Deutsche Telekom (DT). DT is one of the big players in Germany, if it comes to IPv6. With more than 10 million end customers the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 really becomes some challenge...Thus, DT was going to present an overall strategy for their IPv6 migration....unfortunately, without giving en explicit timeframe.

Next, Yes Poppe from Tata Communications started his talk with telling the story how IPv6 came into life more than 10 years ago. Certainly interesting for someone like me, who was first involved in IPv6 at about 2000/01. Furthermore, he was referring to global IPv6 connectivity, stating that finally now you can show that there will still be Internet alhough if you completely shut off IPv4.

Wolfgang Fritsche from IABG as being the next speaker was referring to IPv6 deployment in mobile application environments with regards to results being achieved by the EU-project ENABLE. IPv6 offers special benefits for mobile networks such as a sufficiently large address space or an efficient autoconfiguration capability.

Lutz Donnerhacke from IKS Jena as being the next speaker was providing insights into IPv6 deployment from the viewpoint of an ordinary regional ISP, which are obviously of different nature compared to one of the big players such as DT or others.

In the second session -- IPv6 Applications & Developments - Carsten Hatzig from BWB/WTD81 was speaking about IPv6 deployment in military environments. 'The long way to IPv6' for the German Forces was depicted, but among the 5 phases (ranging from general preparations up to the shutdown of IPv4) we are almost only at the beginning...

1st German IPv6 Summit at Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam, May, 7-8, 2008

Today, I'm writing about a conference, which I had to organize during the last months: The 1st German IPv6 Summit at Hasso Plattner-Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, May 7-8, 2008. Of course I was supported by a rather commited team here at HPI and - at least up to now - everything works out fine.

The first day is reserved for almost political talks only. Although not so interesting from a technical point of view, political statements about the deployment and status of IPv6 are rather important and might help to progress with the great upcoming transition from the old IPv4 to the future internet IPv6. So, the summit started with two important keynotes by Vivane Reding, EU-Commissioner for Media and Information Society (video link to Viviane Reding's keynote) and Vinton Cerf, Chief Evangelist and Vice President of Google -- and of course 'father of the Internet' (video link to Vinton Cerf's keynote).

Other interesting talks were given by Martin Schallbruch, CIO of the Bundesministerium des Inneren about deployment of IPv6 in the public sector, Prof. Lutz Heuser, Vice President of SAP Research, on the Future Internet, and Detlef Eckert from EU Commision of Media and Information Society about the EU strategy on IPv6 deployment.

In the afternood session, internationale experiences with IPv6 deployment were reported by representatives of the Japanese IPv6 Promotion Council, the IPv6 Forum Malaysia, IPv6 Forum Korea, and Telecom Bretagne.

Anyway, we all know that we are running out of IPv4 address space soon. Although, not everybody takes this warning serious, we should face the possibility that there will be no more IPv4 addresses left after 2012. Of course there will still be the internet there, and of course you will receive also your email....but maybe not necessarely on all your mobile devices (at least if you take into account that 2008 there will be more than 3 billion mobile phones....and most of them are able to access mobile internet...well technically speaking...).

And I almost forgot to mention that yovisto.com is also exhibiting at the IPv6 summit. We succeeded in connecting our search engine to the IPv6 network (we have an IPv6 connection from FSU Jena being provided by University of Potsdam...)

IPv6 summit in the media:

• Neue Regeln braucht das Netz, heute.de


• Das Internet braucht neue Hausnummern, FAZ.de


• IPv6: Klagen über zähe Umstellung, orf.at


• IPv6 Protokoll kommt endlich in Bewegung, der Standard.at


• Internet wird umgestellt, Frankfurter Rundschau


• In drei Jahren gibt es keine Internetadressen mehr, netzzeitung.de

bibcamp 2008 in Potsdam / Berlin ahead......

After the succesful educamp 2008 in Ilmenau, I would like to draw your attention to the upcoming bibcamp in Potsdam and Berlin, on May 16-17, 2008. Like educamp 2008, bibcamp is being organized as a barcamp. Up to now, we have 45 participants, and more to come...

If you don't know what a barcamp is all about, here are the rules (....thinking about fight club):
1st Rule: You do talk about Bar Camp.
2nd Rule: You do blog about Bar Camp.
3rd Rule: If you want to present, you must write your topic and name in a presentation slot.
4th Rule: Only three word intros.
5th Rule: As many presentations at a time as facilities allow for.
6th Rule: No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists.
7th Rule: Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation slot.
8th Rule: If this is your first time at BarCamp, you HAVE to present. (Ok, you don’t really HAVE to, but try to find someone to present with, or at least ask questions and be an interactive participant.)

If you want to know more about barcamps, you might have a look at the following video being produced by the Hochschule für Medien in Stuttgart:

Link: sevenload.com

educamp 2008 in Ilmenau

NEW: The video recording from the first day podium discussion of educamp 2008 is now available via yovisto.com.

Today, we are visiting educamp 2008 in Ilmenau (April 18-20, 2008) on behalf of FSU Jena and yovisto.com. Educam 2008 is organized as barcamp, i.e. it is almost unorganized. But, with more than 150 visitors the e-learning focus of the 'unconference' obviously has attracted a lot of people.
The day started with a short introduction of everybody with 'name + 3 tags', which really is not so simple. Just try to focus your interests in 3 tags, where at least one tag is reserved for your affiliation, one for your profession, and the last tag for your interests. Oh, but wait. The day did not really start because of a lack of coffee (which is essential for any kind of scientific working...).

For yovisto, we have managed to organize a session in the afternoon (1.30pm, 'Geistesblitz'). Therefore, we have some time for visiting other sessions, connecting to people, and public relations for yovisto... ;-).

ok. 1.30 pm. Our session is streamed live into the internet. You may find the live-stream at mogulus. From my point of view our presentation went very well. We had a lot of interesting questions including comments and advice how to improve the services of yovisto.

Unfortunately, we are a little bit too late for the upcoming session 'slidestar'. Concerning content and targets, slidestar for sure is one of our competitors. They offer an entire framework for authoring, recording, and searching lecture presentations....but only in a proprietary manner. One of the problems of slidestar seems to be the accessibility of slidestar-presentations for search-engines. slidestar is a flash-based application and therefore, linking and indexing the content is not possible for search engines like google. Anyway, they have won the 'Deutscher Bildungspreis 2008'...

Now, we are following a session on 'Exzellenz & Kompetenz' for universities and lecturers given by two speakers from meinprof.de. One of the questions being discussed is the motivation for students, which university to choose. Based on the experience of the participants, regional factors seem to be rather important, i.e. students are chosing a university near their hometown or where their friends are. Thus, is 'excellency' really the main criterion for choosing where to study...?

All in all, I really like those barcamp conferences. The athmosphere is much more liberal compared to 'hardcore' scientific conferences, because there is no strict line between gurus, experts, nobel price winners, and new commers. There's discussion everywhere and a lot of new ideas do come up. It's all about networking....and I guess also the 'hardcode' scientific conferences can learn from barcamp.
At least, there have been no conference fees. Everything (lunch, dinner, refreshments, etc.) was for free, thanks to the sponsors. I'm looking forward to my next barcamp, which will be bibcamp in Potsdam/Berlin on May, 17-18, 2008. Hope to see you there!

German IPv6 Summit in Potsdam

The German IPv6 summit will take place at Hasso-Plattner-Institute at the University of Potsdam (Germany) on May, 7-8, 2008. On behalf of the German IPv6 Council I am pleased to take the opportunity to invite you all to visit this important event.

The German IPv6 Summit provides two days of International, European, and German experts to address IPv6 technology at work. The first day includes talks about IPv6 strategy and deployment status worldwide, with a focus on Europe, China, Japan, USA, India, and Korea. The second day of the event will complement the program by addressing IPv6 deployment from the perspective of operators and ISPs as well as deployment in the public sector including education, administration, and defence.

As keynote speakers, there will be Vivane Reding, commissioner for information society and media at the European Commission, and Vinton Cerf, vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google (and one of the "fathers" of "the internet" as far as TCP/P is concerned).

For further information including registration, conference venue and accomodation, please visit www.ipv6council.de.

Hope to see you all at Potsdam in May!