Knowledge Management |The Semantic Puzzle

KiWi Annual Meeting

March 17, 2009 by Thomas Schandl, Category: Conferences & Events, Knowledge Management, Tools & Software

Last week the partners of the KiWi (Knowledge In a Wiki) project met in Salzburg for the 2009 Annual Meeting.

Sebastian Schaffert and his team demonstrated the latest version of this semantic based framework based on wiki principles and built on JBoss Seam.
You can take a look at the online showcase and download the one click installer of the pre-release.
Sebastian emphasised that KiWi will follow Linus Torvald’s maxim of releasing early and releasing often.
In June 2009 KiWi 1.0 should be ready, followed by 1.5 in December 2009, at which time Enabling Technologies and a first implementation of the uses cases will be included in the system.

After hearing talks about the KiWi User experience, data model and transaction management, we learned about the status of reasoning, querying, information extraction and personalisation of the Enabling Technologies groups (online slides forthcoming here).

Peter Reiser presented the Sun use case, in which the focus now is on realising an expert finder mechanism based on the “Community Equity” concept found in Sun Spaces (their highly popular, heavily customized version of Confluence).

Community Equity Diagram

In short Community Equity is a system for analysing the social activities in a community and measuring the value of the contributions to the community. Social activities are anything from creating content to simply viewing it. These activities are used to calculate the Community Equity (which is simply a number) of content, tags and people.
Consider this example for a content page: The more people view, download, reuse, comment on or rated the page positively, the higher the page’s Information Equity will be.
In turn the community members acquire Contribution Equity through the content items they create, i. e. the Information Equity of a content item “spills over” to its creator.
The same goes for Tag Equity: Each tag obtains the Equity from all the pages it is applied to. E.g. if there are 3 pages with the tag “JBoss” with Information equity of 10, 5 and 20, then the Tag Equity of JBoss is 35.
These things alone is very helpful for motivating people to contribute to the community and for judging the quality of content and ranking it accordingly.

On top of that, the Equity system allows for a expert finder system. People are related to all the tags that are used on the content items they created. Imagine a contributor has created several documents that were tagged with java and the sum of information equity of those pages is 550, then the person also has
That way a search for “Java” doesn’t only bring documents tagged with java, but also people with expertise in Java.
In KiWi this Community Equity system will be implemented and extended. For one, instead of flat tags KiWi will use concepts coming from SKOS thesauri, which will be managed using PoolParty.
These thesauri act as a shared knowledge model. In this way synonyms, parent/child concept relationships, etc. can be considered for Equity calculation, therby taking personalization, querying and expert finding to a whole new level.
Research will engage with questions like how should the Equity disperse through the graph: Imagine a community member with high Equity in “JBoss”. This means she probably has good expertise in Java too. As this subconcept relationship is expressed in the thesaurus, it is possible to transfer Equity from JBoss to Java, but one has to consider what percentage the equity will be transferred, if Equity only can only spread upwards from subconcept to parent concept or whether other kinds of relationships also warrant the transfer of some Equity.

Enterprise Search goes Open Source

February 19, 2009 by Thomas Thurner, Category: Corporate Semantic Web, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge Management, Tools & Software

management_lenz_web In his recent interview Andreas Blumauer (SWC) asked Mario Lenz, from german-based knowledge management solution provider EMPOLIS, about their OS-Initative SMILA. As Lenz explained, SMILA acts within a domain of various approaches and already established solutions re. Enterprise Resource Planning Systems. So, he sees SMILA’s USP in: “a standardized way of representing, accessing and managing those unstructured data which not exist today. Rather, each vendor ships his own, proprietary solution. SMILA’s goals are to define and implement such a standard infrastructure framework and to establish a community bringing it forward.”

Besides an insight in many aspects of the initiative, the interview provides thoughts on how connected business-models, in providing services, could look like.

[read more]

Issues on the Corporate Semantic Web

January 26, 2009 by Tassilo Pellegrini, Category: Conferences & Events, Corporate Semantic Web, Enterprise 2.0

Prof. Adrian Paschke, head of the Corporate Semantic Web Working Group at the Free University of Berlin, gave an extensive interview on promises and challenges of the Corporate Semantic Web addressing methodological, technological and economic aspects. He says:

Corporate Semantic Web addresses both the consumer and the produce side, where consumers and producers might be humans as well as automated services, e.g. in business processes and enterprise service networks. This also includes the adequate engineering, modelling, negotiation and controlling of the use of the (meta)data and meaning representations in a (collaborating) community of users or services in enterprise settings where the individual meanings as elements of the internal cognitive structures of the members become attuned to each others’ view in a communicative process. This allows dealing with issues like ambiguity of information and semantic choices, relevance of information, information overload, information hiding and strategic information selection, as well as positive and negative consequences of actions (e.g. in a decision making process).

But, CSW does not only address the technological aspect but also the pragmatic aspect of actually using Semantic Web technologies in enterprises, which includes learning and training aspects as well as economical considerations. Incentives need to be provided to encourage in-house adoption and integration of these new Corporate Semantic Web technologies into the existing IT infrastructures, services and business processes. Decision makers on the operation, tactical and strategic IT management level need to understand the impact of this new technological approach and its adoption costs and return on investment. Therefore, companies will have in mind the economical justifiability of the deployment of new technologies.

I think he addresses some really crucial aspects of this emerging application field. Read the full interview here.

Corporate Semantic Web will also be a major topic at this year’s I-Semantics Conference from Sept. 2 – 4, 2009 in Graz/Austria. Also check out the forthcoming Semantic Web Meetup in Berlin on March 20, 2009, which is organized by Adrian Paschke’s team and the Semantic Web Company.

KiWi as a Social Wiki Platform for Software Development, Open Ontology Management

November 28, 2008 by Jana Herwig, Category: Knowledge Management, Social Software, Tools & Software

KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki, Day 2 – Josef Holy from Sun Microsystems Prague led the first part of today’s use case presentation. With the KiWi semantic wiki system (or: wiki on steroids, as Josef Holy put it), they want to be able to increase the productivity of knowledge workers. Sun Microsystems have extensive experience with online and community collaboration and they want Kiwi to become a social wiki platform that is deployable in various contexts, i.e. that ties in with other platforms such as Netbeans or Zembly.

One of Sun’s further assumptions is that users will migrate to KiWi neither immediately nor completely – and that’s an insight anyone developing yet another social platform should take to their heart. What was true in Field of Dreams – “If you build it, they will come” – does not quite apply here. The network effect works in favour of existing communities, and instead of striving to replace an existing platform, one might be better off with mashable contents and services.

The particular benefit of a semantic wiki is that it allows moving from unstructured to structured information (relatively) easily. For KiWi @ Sun (and in favour of mashed information), this means that what is relevant will be structured, both by people and by machines – a process that is going to extend beyond company boundaries. People will bring in structure by creating links from KiWi documents to external systems as well as by writing new facts (which the KiWi system will represent as triples) about external information. What is not relevant, won’t be structured – and will be forgotten. After all, it’s forgetting that makes you remember the important stuff.

One note about the users of KiWi at Sun: Since this use case focuses on knowledge management for software development, it can be taken for granted that users will have an above-average level of web savvyness. Primary users will be software designers (i.e. the people who design for the users of the final product) and developers – learn more about the different roles in a software development project at Sun here.

Consequently, the User Interface (UI) concept Josef introduced also comprises a social networking unit – things such as a ‘My Contacts’, ‘My Pages’ list, but most importantly an activity feed, which will help users to collaborate, participate, discover activities that others are currently working, develop a mental ‘social map’ of the community. Such an activity stream (similar to Facebook’s News Stream) would contain items such as:

Szaby wrote a blog post
Josef rated document XUI specs: five stars
Peter created document ToDoList KiWi-UI
Stephanie is now a contact of Marek
Klara shared a document with Sebastian

Considering the target group, it is also planned that the UI will be extensible through widgets that users are able to write themselves.

*coffee break*

Above: The KiWi-Team, hailing (officially) from Austria, the Czech republic, Denmark and Germany

After the break, Andreas Blumauer (Semantic Web Company, Vienna) followed up with a talk entitled “Open Ontology Management & Linked Data” which explored the uses of the Web of Data for the Sun usecase.

His argument was that content and topic-centred, open communities should have mechanisms at their disposal for relating content and activities to particular parts of a shared concept model, e.g. of an ontology. In particular in projects like NetBeans, where contents and related processes evolve over time, different NetBeans groups utilizing the KIWI system should be allowed to maintain and share their own concept models. The combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches would, for instance, come as the combination of free tagging (where people often use different labels to refer to the same, or the same label to refer to different things) and concept tagging.

Free concepts can be turned into controlled ones, too, by being inserted into an existing controlled vocabulary, as either a narrower or related concept of any existing controlled concept. Open Ontology Management done this way is a Learning system: Through the combination of a Free Extraction Model (FEM) and a Controlled Extraction Model (CEM), text extraction improves over time.

Andreas also revealed a first glimpse of a project currently in stealth mode, code name ‘PoolParty’, which is an Open Ontology Management System that can be used to enrich local knowledge with data from the web. PoolParty consumes Linked Data and provides Linked Data; in the context of the current use case, it will be able to communicate with the KiWi System. Please contact Andreas if you would like to be notified about the further development of PoolParty.

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