semester break...

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.

Tag Clouds & Word Clouds

Ok, monday's lecture topic will be "Web 2.0" ... and of course we will talk about tagging, folksonomies, and tag clouds (as well as word clouds). A word cloud is a visual depiction of content (words) used in a body of text ... and here's the word cloud for my homepage.
You can create your own word cloud (and design a word cloud t-shirt...)

time flies...

Only four weeks and the semester will be over ... this means only three lectures to go. This semester the monday lecture included 2 holiday mondays, 1 workshop moday, and....the semester started on a tuesday. This means that instead of 14 lectures I had only 10 (!) ... lucky me....but somehow I had to stuff all the 14 lecture's information into only 10 weeks .. and ofcourse I had to shorten it somehow. We left out eBusiness (more interesting for students of economy), Basic Web Security (should have been already done in basic and networking lectures), and we will probably also leave out Trust Management and the Web of Trust.
I focused on web programming concepts (ranging from rpc to web services, covering web frameworks as well as ajax), search engine technology (how does google work...and how to improve it), web 2.0 (the recent hype...), and semantic web (the next hype...). We have just finished two lectures on search engines and next monday (july 3rd), the topic will be Web 2.0 with all its collaborative tagging, folksonomies, social networks, ajax, xml, etc... It's a entire new lecture (because Web 2.0 as a concept is rather new...remember the term was coined in 2004, although most of its technical infrastructure did already exist before), so I promise it might get quite interesting...

don't tell me...

Hey....what a week! Ok...it was a rather short week with monday's holiday, but I'll tell you...
I came down with a bad cold starting last sunday. So I was sneezing, caughing, and felt as if I had egg salad in my brains (if there's anything left of it). Then there were those deadlines....the patent application, the XML-Days paper, and several really important meetings. Everything worked fine - I don't know how I managed it - until friday. The most time-consuming thing of all was to get our XML-Days paper ready. I told Heiko (my coauthor) to start to work almost two weeks ago...but I knew in advance, where (better when) it would end....in a night shift on the very last day...friday. The deadline was friday night, 23.59 pm...we were stil working at 23.50pm, when Heiko was downstairs copying the last changes into our cvs-repository. At 23.52pm I received an email. It said......'attention: the deadline is extended to friday, next week!'.....
There I was, 23.53pm...thinking about what I could have done instead this night and all the nights before. I told it to Heiko at 23.58pm - just after printing out the final version for submission ;-)
so, don't tell me....

web application development...

This suits perfectly to the current topic 'web programming' of our lecture 'web technologies' at the FSU Jena. Sean Kelly is giving a very nice presentation on better web application development. Definitely worth while listening, not only if you are one of my students....

It was only a matter of time...

...that Google launched an own collaborative tagging service. Delicious went to Yahoo, and we were just about discussing plans on exploiting collaborative tagging for improving web search. With Google's personalized search you have the possibility to define and to add taggs to web pages (i.e. the results of your Google search). But, as said before, it was only a matter of time, because it was so obvious to use theese so called folksonomies for improving the results of a web search.
So what about all the other taggers...will they survive?

Trust in me....I know what I'm doing

According to a recent demographic survey most Americans trust in their government more than in their media. In Germany the situation seems to be similar...only that according to the study Americans think of their government being much more trustworthy than ours...Should I be worried?
Either Germans are much more suspicious than Americans, or our media are much worse. Certainly, we have the 'Bildzeitung' spreading the 'holy truth' day by day...but the one thing I'm concerned about is that almost 43% really seem to trust the media....
BTW, in Germany we trust news coming from friends or family only by 25%. This means that we have more trust in the 'Bildzeitung' than to anyone in our family....strange world. At least we think that Blogs far more reliable (38%) than any family member. Hurray for the 'BILDBlog'!

hey...what a crowd (part 2)

On monday I gave my first lecture on webtechologies for this semester. In difference to the semantic web seminar the lecture room really was crowded. I guess there were about 30 students - computer science majors and minors also as bioinformatics. Of course its much more fun if there are a lot of students in the audience...at least if I'm going to pretend that they are there because my lecture is somehow interesting for them. on the other hand, the semester takes 14 weeks....but there will be at most 11 lectures because of holidays and because of the semester was starting at tuesday. I guess, I have to talk even faster than usual :)
But there is also good news for the semantic web seminar. We have 6 students now enlisted for talks and there will be at least 11 talks (including those given by Heiko and myself).

BTW, there has been report on a new way to determine Google's index size. You simply try to find the most popular search keyword and examine the number of page hits. For the english article 'a' there are almost 25 billion hits....this means that there are 25 billion pages in Google's index containing the word 'a' (which includes at least every english web document).

Finally, I have an URI...

I've just read about in Tim Berners-Lee's Blog and so I have an URI now. It just refers to personal information about myself listed in my FOAF file. My URI is now

http://www.informatik.uni-jena.de/~sack/foaf.rdf#HS

As proposed in the referred article, everybody should have one...at least if you want to become part of the semantic web.

hey...what a crowd

Summer semester started today...right at 8 a.m. with the Semantic Web seminar. And what should I tell ya...what a crowd...I was looking into the more or less sleepy faces of three students. Shouldn't you think, the semantic web isn't something interesting??
I wonder, where all the computer science students do their seminars.....databases, I guess. It's so much more related to "practical" work and yes, it's so interesting to find the 27th normal form in fuzzy object quadrupels...not to mention that, if you really choose to become a database "expert", you will spend your entire life creating, maintaining, and programming databases of a certain (within here never to be mentioned) distributor (...a three letter word...pssst). Life could be so exciting....
O.K....there's always something good about bad things...at least I don't have to get up too early this semester. We will do the seminar "en block" at the end of the semester. Have a nice life :)

and again ... a new semester starts next week

Next week, on April 18th , the summer semester starts....and for me it starts right at 8 a.m.
For years now, I'm struggling with those 8. a.m. lectures...I have always bad luck. Every year, again and again, they give me the 8 a.m. lectures...
O.k....in summer it's not as bad. At least the sun is already up in the sky (if it's not overcasted, and rainy....as it is many times), and you avoid the "sleepy" summer afternoons. But, you know the students....who wants to get up so early, who isn't sleepy that time of day (at least I am...). This year I boldly arranged my "Webtechnology" lecture on mondays 10 a.m. ... but I didn't realized that they have scheduled my seminar "Semantic Web" on thuesday/thursdays at 8 a.m....
O.k....for two days in the week get up early, no chance for sports before work (only if I want to get up at 5 a.m.)...and of course looking into the face of sleepy students.....
Oh...wait! It's a seminar....this means that most times the students have to give the talking and I'm the one who listens. But - even worse - I have to listen carefully to give a sound critic afterwards...

So, everybody who wants to sleep longer (and who is able to understand german) might watch my lectures/seminars on the web. Unfortunately - at least up to now - I can't give them from home. Just imagine....get up at 7.45 a.m., brush teeth, get a cup of coffee, arrange yourself in front of your webcam, and give the lecture.....

Retreat "E-Teacher" in Dornburg

April 3-4th, I visited a retreat at the "Altes Schloß Dornburg" (old palace Dornburg) about a project called "E-Teacher". The medieval palace is located high above the river Saale with a beautiful view over the Saale valley. Rather interesting to watch because of the current spring flooding...
The E-Teacher project is about feedback based learning. I know...E-Learning is anything else but new. But the only feedback provided to regular E-Learning software nowadays are multiple choice tests etc...The E-Teacher system is supposed to watch the student closely. Facial Action Codes (FACS) are translated into emotions, giving advice about how to proceed within the learning scenario. In doing so, the system needs representations for the knowledge to be taught, for the student (how does she feel...), and for various didactic strategies.
The chosen topic to teach are NP-complete probems (btw one of the millenium price problems). I was giving a talk about NPBibSearch, a bibliographic search engine focused on papers related to NP-complete problems....and of course based on an ontology representing knowledge about NP-complete problems.

Internet and Civil Law

This week I had to give a lecture on Internet basics at the symposium "Internet and Civil Law" at the German "Richterakademie" (which is a conference center esp. for judges) in Trier. I lived in Trier when doing my PhD before I went to the University of Jena. It's interesting to get back to a town where you have lived for a long time. Everything seems to be rather familiar....but it isn't anymore. Things are changing.
So does my internet (basics) lecture. Although this symposium takes place every other year, almost 50% of my lecture differs from the lecture given the last time. The internet (and the Web) is rapidly changing....

"Informatik der digitalen Medien" Wintersemester 2005/2006

Another semester is over now. Again I had an interesting class for my lecture "Informatik der digitalen Medien" with students of 'lectureship' (=Lehramt), i.e. students who want to become a teacher, coming from a variety of fields of study.
Working with students of computer science is always (...better say most times) easy, because (at least you should assume) they all have the same background. Here, it was completely different. The fields of study of the students was ranging from german and geography, over sports and other languages, up to mathematics and computer science. All in all, really a great variety...and we had a lot of work to do: only 14 lectures and the material was ranging from computer network basics, coding theory, data compression, up to web technologies.
I like these lectures, simply because they teach you (i.e. me as a lecturer) to look at the stuff of your daily work from a completely different point of view. You have to explain things in a way that also non computer scientists (with almost no mathematical background) will understand....and that's a tough job, sometimes.
The lectures are recorded on video and available at its web page.
..hmm... I guess, I'm planning to put this special lecture down in a book....

anni squared

anni squared
Originally uploaded by lysander07.

ok....besides semantic I do photography. With flickr there is a great platform for sharing pictures of any kind...and it offers the posibility to post your pictures in any of your blogs. So, this will be my first one.

SWAP 2005 - aftermath

SWAP 2005
Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives '
2nd Italian Semantic Web Workshop
Trento, Faculty of Economics
14-15-16 December, 2005

I really enjoyed being there in Trento. The topics were mainly on ontology engineering and I was presenting a paper on NP-BibSearch, an ontology based bibliographic Search engine focussed on research papers related to NP-complete problems (here's a link to "NPBibSearch: An Ontology Augmented Bibliographic Search")

Pandora's jack-in-the-box

According to greek mythology, Zeus ordered the other gods to create Pandora as a poisoned gift for man. The intention was to punish Prometheus and mankind for betraying the secret of making fire. Prometheus was chained at a rock in the Kaukasus etc... while Pandora was sent to earth. Epimetheus (the brother of Prometheus) fell in love with her, but was told never to open the box, which was given her as a dowry. Until then, mankind had lived a life in a paradise without worry. Epimetheus told Pandora never to open the box she had received from Zeus. However, one day, Pandora's curiosity got the better of her and she opened it, releasing all the misfortunes of mankind. Once opened, she shut it in time to keep one thing in the box: hope...

As a derivative of the Music Genome Project an new music discovery service called Pandora started this week. You enter your favourite songs or artists and Pandora will make suggestions what to listen to. Furthermore, you can tell Pandora if you like its suggestions or not. You can create your own music radio stations and share it with friends. Also, Pandora tells you why it has selected a song it suggests.
Of course Pandora is not created on pure philantropy. The first ten hours of listening are free...and after you have become addicted you have the possibility to subscribe. Personally, I like the general idea of creating your own music radio station to listen to, but the question is, am I willing to pay for it? I don't know..... but I would like to have all the meta data :-)

Self Organized Retreat...

"Self Organization of Computing and Information Systems" was the topic of yesterdays meeting at Stadtroda (about 20 km east of Jena). The faculties of computer science at the FSU Jena discussed the new focal point of research: "Self-Organization".... and of course we have organised ourselves...

Much of our enthusiasm and of our effort went into the discussion about the definition of the term "Self-Organization", but the result was not really satisfying...Take 4 computer scientists and give them a topic to define...and you will end up in at least 5 different disjoint definitions. So what does the term mean...at least to me?
I would agree to the following (minimal) definition:

• a self-organized system is organizing itself with its own resources with no help or influence from outside
• self-organizing systems are adapting themselves over the time to fulfill required necessities/ to survive / to achieve a given goal
• as viewed from outside, self-organizing system indepently develop emerging (higher order) properties that were not previously given within the system layout

ok.... next thing to do is to think of how can I connect semantic web with self-organization...?
Autonomous agents independently fulfilling (higher order) tasks while adapting themselves using semantic description of their environment / using semantics to combine independent and unconnected services / ...

"in dubio pro google..."

On Monday I had to give talk at the symposium "New Media and Civil Law" for judges in Meißen (Saxony) about internet technology and its economic background. Meißen is well known for having the first european porcelain-factory, the Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Meißen, which is still existing today. The city has a beautifully preserved mediaeval and renaissance historic city center, a gothic cathedral (you can see its twin towers on the left) and with lots of little shops selling antiquities (esp. porcelain of course) and other oddities.

One interesting thing that I've learned at the symposium was that google and wikipedia already seem to be a firm part in the process of jurisdiction and legal practice...someday, highly paid experts and referees - as they are necessary today - might be looking for a new job...
Weird vision...winning or loosing a law suit because of some results achieved by a search engine (lucky for those, having a top page-rank)...google is more powerful than I imagined...

....more light!

1832...to be precisely, March, 22. 1832.
In Weimar (Germany, dukedom of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, writer, poet, savant, philosopher, humanist, and statesman, faces his last hours here on earth. When finaly taking his last breath, as legend has it, after an incredibly productive span of life he speakes the famous last words: "..... more light!" ("...mehr Licht!"<- in german). For more than a century scientists were debating about the meaning of these words (..or if they have been spoken at all). Did Goethe want to have the window shutters opened to have more light in the room..... or was he referring to some more philosophical topic in a metaphoric way, meaning to bring more light into the darkness of his (or better our collective) wisdom. Some are even joking that - as Goethe was hessian by birth - he started to say some sentence in hessian dialect, meaning as much as "one is lying in a very uncomfortable way here" ("Mer licht hier so schlecht"<-in hessian).

Ambiguity is a property of human language. Together with a lack of reference, sometimes it is impossible to derive (or even to guess) the meaning of words. One of the topics I'm dealing with ist semantic annotation of information. The transition from the world wide web of today to the semantic web of the near future will be one of the most important steps in technology....maybe with unimagined effects and unforseen side-effects. Therefore, the name of this Blog was chosen .... to bring "more light" into the information universe of the www.

....and of course to talk about life, the universe, and everything that matters....