Tag Archives: Salzburg Research

Jana Herwig

KIWI Project Partners, Pt.6: Salzburg Research

by , Category: Companies & Institutions

Sebastian SchaffertPlease forgive me that the key player is now getting the last mention in my little ‘KIWI Project Partners’ series: Salzburg Research has actually the biggest share of responsibility within KIWI, as they are home to the Project Office consisting of Sebastian Schaffert (coordination, planning and controlling), Julia Eder (dissemination and communication) and Ursula Atzlinger (administration). But most importantly, they have also developed IkeWiki, which is the semantic wiki system KIWI is going to build upon. As those who have been following this series will know already: A semantic wiki is a wiki that allows users to annotate pages and to enhance links between pages with semantic annotations. IkeWiki is also intended as a tool for knowledge engineers:

The “Ike” in IkeWiki is the Hawaiian word for “knowledge”. That is because the purpose of IkeWiki is to be an easy to use, collaborative tool that guides knowledge engineers in the process from unstructured informal texts over semi-formal knowledge in thesauri and taxonomies, to knowledge represented in a formal language or ontology. Our aim is that domain experts who are not proficient in the rather complicated tools and languages (like Protege and OWL) used on the Semantic Web are nonetheless able to formalise their domain knowledge and make it accessible by other Semantic Web applications. [Source]

You can download the pdf of Sebastian’s article IkeWiki – A Semantic Wiki for Collaborative Knowledge Management here. Another project by Salzburg Research that was recently the subject of revived interest after OpenCalais recommended using it as a desktop RDF explorer is RDF-Gravity. Continue reading →

Jana Herwig

The KIWI Vision (with a funny twist)

by , Category: Miscellaneous

Confession: No, we did not create the KIWI Vision Video below – but collaborative environments are pretty good at identifying emergent ideas, and this Youtube video does a great job at establishing the kiwi as a character who, using ingenuity and bold ideas, is able to make his dream come true – and that is what the KIWI project is also aiming to achieve and why Sebastian Schaffert decided to launch today’s project sessions with this flick – enjoy!

The Kiwi! movie was created as part of a master’s thesis in animation, completed by Dony Permedi, then a student of Computer Art at The School of Visual Arts in New York City.

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Jana Herwig

Kicking off the KiWi

by , Category: Conferences & Events, Social Software

Logo Knowledge in a WikiToday I am in Salzburg, finding myself in amidst a discussion of possibly global impact: The Knowledge In a Wiki (KiWi) project is about to kick off! Andreas Blumauer, Matthias Samwald and I are right now meeting up with Josef Holy and Henry Story from Sun Microsystems. Josef is an interaction designer, working on social and semantic web applications, blogging because he believes in Web. Henry is a researcher, developer and semantic web evangelist – you’ve probably also come across his blog, The BabelFish Blog, before.

Now imagine these two being in the same room as Andreas and Matthias, discussing a project that:

  • aims to develop an advanced knowledge management system based on a semantic wiki
  • is especially tailored to the needs of the knowledge-intensive industries
  • provides special support for managing tacit knowledge (e.g. knowledge about processes)
  • manages distributed knowledge (i.e. distributed across different people and different systems)
  • is able to manage different kinds of semantically rich content (e.g. source code, tutorials, documentation, etc)
  • considers the needs and preferences of different user roles in terms of content and user interface

Quite impressive, isn’t it? Well, that is exactly what the KiWi application (based on IkeWiki) is supposed to be able to do in the end. Here is the output of the first hour – I was mainly following the discussion, yet was pleased to find that all of them are ‘open source thinkers’ to the effect that advanced users (i.e. non-developers) like me are not left behind:-)

Minutes March 11

Many thanks already to Sebastian Schaffert and Julia Eder from Salzburg Research for organising this kick-off event!

P.S.: You can download the KIWI factsheet here.