During the closing session of ESWC 2009 which was held in Crete, KiWi was awarded as Best Demo of the Year amongst 23 other participants. See the showcase here and let the KiWi consortium know what you think!

If you have just a minute, see what KiWi can do for you and how it can break boundaries, as a system following the Linked (Open) Data principles. Enjoy!

Virtuoso+DBpedia+OntoWiki together with several industry relevant uses cases – that´s about the formula of the OntoWiki project, which was launched yesterday in Leipzig.

Sören Auer and his team from AKSW at Uni Leipzig are the coordinators of this EU funded project which supports the development of innovative software products. All industry partners are SMEs which offer services for different fields like E-learning, E-tourism or Business Intelligence. Leipzig and OpenLink Software will work on an integration of OntoWiki & Virtuoso.

The first day of the meeting was, of course, dedicated to socialize and get to know each other. The mixture of the project team turned out to be well chosen – and in the evening we flew at higher game: We had a nice overview over Leipzig standing on the highest building of the town.

On the second day of the meeting Orri Erling, Program Manager at OpenLink Software, came up with an idea which is pretty forward: Why shouldn´t we provide OntoWiki as a Linked Data Browser, e.g. on top of DBpedia etc.? One possible outcome of this project.

Some other use cases which make already use of the existing OntoWiki system were demonstrated: Take a look at Vakantieland (…and start to plan your holidays in the Netherlands) and also at LinkedGeoData where a nice user interface can be tried out.

The Kick-Off Meeting will proceed with two workshops dedicated to semantic technologies and to Application Development with the OntoWiki Framework. Thanks to Sören and his team for the excellent hosting of this event!

KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki session, pt. 2: This afternoon, we turned to the Logica use case, which is dedicated to the development and optimization of KiWi as a knowledge management tool specifically tailored to the needs of project management.

Regarding the use case requirements: As Daniel Grolin, a process expert and business architect at Logica (formerly WM Data), pointed out, what is most required at the moment is an application for designing processes, i.e. for designing the ways that people do things. This can be a painful process, in particular if one group of people (consisting of process designers) thinks about the ways that another group of people (e.g. the project managers) are going to do certain things – a collaborative approach should be able to

1) alleviate this challenge
2) generate commitment among the involved parties.

The primary users will be on the one hand the process engineers, and on the other hand the project managers who are the recipients and users of these processes.

In his presentation, Daniel Grolin chose one of four scenarios in which KiWi would ideally be employed: the risk analysis process – which is a vital process for Logica, as the outcomes of this analysis influence the decision whether or not a project will be accepted. From an architectural point of view, KiWi is going to mediate between the process guidance column – which consists of process and workflow features – and the final work product, i.e the result of a process, in this case the report of the risk analysis.

In practice this means that if, for instance, a user has selected the risk analysis process, the Kiwi core system and enabling technologies will provide concepts related to risk analysis, supporting the user in the tagging process. Wiki technology is already being used in the industry, said Daniel, but what is lacking at the moment is the integration of structure, and this is also where he sees the potential of KiWi as a knowledge management tool, and as a means to move easily from unstructured to structured information (by the way, if you are interested in using wikis in the enterprise, I also recommend this article: Wikis for Knowledge Engineering, and in Global Businesses).

Karsten Jahn (Aalborg University) then gave us a preview of a possible user interface (i.e. not of the screen design, but the functionalities) which seeks to address one particular problem: Many companies use many different, sophisticated tools which operate fine on their own, but are not integrated (i.e. there is no communication or exchange of data between them). With KiWi, the aim is to develop a tool that is going to be able to cover all features and processes currently being taken care of by individual tools, to allow for an optimum of data integration.

To conclude, Rolf Sint (Salzburg Research) showed us screens of the current configuration of KiWi for Logica’s needs – the example below is related to the risk analysis process outlined by Daniel Grolin above.

This morning I received an invite from Christoph Lange, Jacobs University Bremen, to attend a Birds-of-a-Feather meeting as an informal side-event/after hour to ISWC (this event label was unknown to me, but “Birds of a feather/ flock together”, so I assume that this must be a meeting of people who share the same interests). There’ll be lightning talks, open discussions and of course plenty of opportunity to network. Here’s a link to a wiki page for the meeting – please put your name on the appropriate list if you’d like to attend or give a lightning talk. The event is scheduled for Sunday October 26th, after the ISWC program.

People unable to attend physically, Christoph wrote, might consider participating in the Semantic Wiki Mini-Series Launch Event via ONTOLOG (= Open, International, Virtual Community of Practice on Ontology, Ontological Engineering and Semantic Technology), to take place online on Thursday, October 23, 2008, 10:30 AM PDT / 1:30 PM EDT / 7:30pm CEST / 17:30 UTC (click here for more details, time zones, registration procedures for first-time participants).

Here are some of the topics that have already been put on the wish-list for the Semantic Wiki Mini-Series (source):

• usability vs expressivity
• community building
• uncovering more implementations
• HCI: navigation of large, high-dimensional knowledge spaces
• e-science (especially pharma research & biomedicine)
• semantic wikis and mashups
• recommendation and personalization in semantic wikis,
• knowledge representation (expresivity vs. simplicity)
• how to make business subject matter experts able to enter, review and validate
  meaningful information without them having to learn new words
• what dialect of OWL supported
• integration of semantic resources (Protege / OOR / MW / …)
• content quality
• integration of external data
• a semantic wiki & OOR session
• experiences with distributed collaboration
• server-side infrastructure to support semantic wikis
• survey of semantic wikis for vertical domains (e.g. HCLS)
• integration with other tools / linking wiki content to other apps

If you ask me, there are more than enough topics not for a mini, but for a grand series of conferences on Semantic Wikis:) For updates, bookmark the homepage of the series.

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In recent debates within the KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki project, the need arose to further refine and find a common understanding of the type of knowledge that is (ideally) managed and processed using (semantic) wikis. One of the proposals evolved around a conceptualization of knowledge put forward by Gabi Reinmann-Rothmeier, also dubbed the “Munich Modell” (Münchner Modell).

In the Munich Modell, knowledge comes in three states of matter: solid (like ice), liquid (like water) and gas (like water vapor).

“Frozen” knowledge is knowledge in its most tangible, manageable form, for instance the type of verified, expert-endorsed information you would find in an encyclopedia like the Encylopedia Britannica.

“Gaseous” knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge in its least consolidated form: think for instance of the type of heated debate you might have with folks in a pub, which is arguably the least structured, most uncontrollable, but also the most engaging type of knowledge!

And the “liquid” form of knowledge, eventually, is the common knowledge of day-to-day-life. It’s probably fair to say that it becomes obvious mostly when in the process of changing its state of matter: When it is calibrated against “frozen” or informational knowledge or when it is debated, becomes “gaseous” knowledge that informs action. (If you’d like to know more about the Munich model and are able to read German, you might want to download the original article here – PDF, 365 KB).

When talking about knowledge that is managed, used or, respectively, that evolves online, I think it also makes sense to pay some attention to the type of community that is preferred by particular online tools or environments. The particular flavour of knowledge, in this sense, is simultaneously characterized and shaped by the state of matter of knowledge and the form of the community that applies.

N.B. The following is not an immediate translation of the “Munich model”, but rather a reconceptualization which tries to also consider that different community models (and their implementation through IT) also play a role for the whole spectrum of knowledge management on and with the web (e.g. for online communication and interaction, online publishing and documentation and maintenance of web infrastructures).

Web-Flavour 1: The Blogosphere – gas, gas, gas!

Hmm… sniff it! This is the flavour I like best because it is my flavour. On the blogosphere (and twittersphere), knowledge is exchanged, developed further and evolves almost like in a pub debate… it does have the extra advantage though that you can add links, cite resources and that you get to keep your blog posts (or tweets or equivalents thereof) for later reference or debate. Different people approach blogging differently – the approach I would favour in the context of this definition is a form of blogging that invites dialog in that it allows others to comment and react, and where contributors aren’t anonymous, distant institutions, but are addressable using their personas/identities on the web. As such, contributions are often marked or tinted by the views and personality of that real-life person behind a persona/identity. As a short cut, think of this flavour as the flavour of the social media tag cloud.

Web-Flavour 2: Wikipedia – evolving slowly with the flow

Wouldn’t you agree that Wikipedia is like a sea of knowledge? It is fed by brooks and rivers (in this analogy: for instance the article and contributions that are invited on the Wikipeda Community portal) that make it rise and swell like tidal waves would, but mostly by millions, billions and trillions of tiny drops that trickle in on a daily basis. In comparison to the blogosphere, the world inside wikipedia is a rather neat and orderly one: Titles of pages are unique, and were they aren’t, there are disambiguation pages (like this one) in place. Even though articles are written by real humans (I assume), there is no visible author attached to an article (unless you start developing an interest for Discussion Pages, e.g. this one; most people don’t). Wikipedia is the sea of knowledge we bathe in on a day-to-day-basis without even noticing – just try to remember how many and which Wikipedia pages you have looked at today or this week – can you? Most probably not. It’s the result of a community effort, but it’s not about views and opinions of individuals, but about what we all know together or would know together if we could wire our brains to one another (tired of the Wikipedia examples? Check out Factolex instead, a collaborative, micro-content encyclopedia that allows you to extract and conceptualize bite-sized pieces of knowledge as you go).

This is the flavour I like to have around me every day, because it makes things easier without asking for a huge effort. It’s also the flavour of thesauri and metadata schemata.

Web-Flavour 3: The unfinished structure of ontologies

Flavor three is NOT (as one might expect) the flavour of the Encyclopedia Britannica Online (which is one huge data silo and therefore not relevant for my scope of interests) … instead, I would argue that it’s the flavour of the web’s infrastructures and of knowledge infrastructures like ontologies. Think of the geometry of snow flakes: they all follow rules but none of them is like another. The open world assumption of ontologies also applies to snow flakes – just because you haven’t seen a particular shape doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! Nobody has the patent for building snowflakes – Wilson Bentley in his famous snowflake shots just captured an expression of rules that are out there, in the world, belonging to the world. Ontologies capture the structure of what, to the best of knowledge and belief, can be said about the world. Anyone can build an ontology, but we prefer to have experts do that job: members of the scientific community which has its own ranking and weeding mechanisms in place.

Flavour three is the flavour of things we wish to be able to rely on on the web, and where we can invest a trust that is much greater than the trust we invest in people. More like the trust we invest in, say, the laws of nature.

So what is the flavour of a Semantic Wiki?

A good mix of flavour two and three, I would argue. A Semantic Wiki is a vessel for the sea of relevant knowledge (relevant for instance for the members of a particular team), but enhances it with the structure of the domain knowledge that applies.

Having said that: A semantic wiki would be much spicier if it also had a bit of the flavour of the blogosphere and social media (i.e. flavour one), as there are tasks where a bit of a debate, a bit of a controversial exchange and the ability to respond to people directly is highly valuable! Just as water, knowledge goes through a cycle of different states of matter, and knowledge is not processed by segregated individuals, but in communities and through networks of people.

Before publishing this, I wanted to get some feedback in particular from KiWi members working on enabling technologies – here is Peter Dolog’s take; Peter is an Associate Professor in the Information Systems Unit at the Dept. of Computer Science Aalborg University:

I like the distinction and comparison of knowledge to some natural elements like gas, liquids, solids or snowflakes. These give a good metaphor for understanding when talking about different flavours of knowledge. It is also fascinating to see how humans move between these three categories by participating in different social processes or simply by studying these things.

It is, however, a bit more difficult to see how this can be done or supported in the most suitable form on the web or in the intranets of companies. At the same time it seems to me, from the discussions we have had in the KiWi project, that semantic wiki platforms could indeed facilitate this. Wikis naturally provide the social contexts for contributions. Semantic wikis with tags and ontology management seem to be a first step towards a flexible knowledge consolidation infrastructure where one can move easily between these categories; and other technologies such as natural language processing and automated reasoning can help further. Personalization can further provide and adjust views on the knowledge according to preferences.

I am happy that we can study these phenomena in the KiWi project at least to a certain extent and perhaps contribute to this as well. I am confident that this is relevant also for the industry and especially for large distributed companies where externalization of knowledge is a must.

So there is a lesson to be had: When building a knowledge management system using the web, think of the three states of knowledge, but most importantly, also think of the form of community and community processes that are required or preferable to allow future users to really put that knowledge to work – melt it, share it, heat it, debate it, freeze it, keep it, let it evolve!

Image sources on Wikicommons:
Water vapour by Markus Schweiss
Wake at Boelge Stor by Malene Thyssen
Ice Crystals by Petr Dlouhý

Author: Jana Herwig

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Sebastian Schaffert, coordinator of the KiWi project, just pointed readers of his blog to the video of his ESWC-Lecture
“Semantic Wikis – IkeWiki – A Semantic Wiki for Collaborative Knowledge Management”, also discussing knowledge management and why it should not be informed by quality management approach. Also published now is Peter Dolog’s talk about Semantic Wikis in general.

Semantic Wikis – IkeWiki – A Semantic Wiki for Collaborative Knowledge Management

Semantic Wikis – Introduction to semantic wikis

Here is an example of an implementation of IkeWiki, an open source semantic wiki developed mainly by Sebastian Schaffert.

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An implementation of Semantic MediaWiki in public administration reiceved a jury award yesterday in the final ceremony of the highly coveted multimedia state award (Staatspreis Multimedia) 2008 in Vienna: Centre for Public Administration KDZ’s platform for the cooperation of administrations (Plattform Verwaltungskooperation) in Austria, Germany, Italy and Switzerland received praise for its use of open, semantic technologies in their effort to further the collaboration between administrations and administrative staff. Those of you who can read German: read the response from Bernhard Krabina, KDZ, here or contact him here, if you’d like to learn more. The top state award itself went to HPC Dual, a combination of electronic and physical mail delivery.

Also published yesterday was an interview with Matthias Schindler, former member of board of Wikimedia Germany, at the occasion of the publication of a physical Wikipedia, i.e. a one-volume encyclopedia in print (publisher: Wissen Media, a Bertelsmann division). According to the English Wikipedia, “the volume is planned to include abbreviated entries for the 50,000 most commonly used search terms of the prior two years. The book is to be priced at 19.95 euros, with one euro from every sale going to the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation.”

The interviewers also asked Schindler for his “encyclopedic Wikipedia dream” – I hope his response will catch on in the Wikimedia chapters worldwide:

I would one day like to see a large edition of Wikipedia (including a German language edition), which makes use of the Semantic MediaWiki extension. The dream in a nutshell, without consideration of the current state of research and development: A wikipedia that can be read not only by humans, but also by computers, a Wikipedia that can offer concrete answers to concrete questions and that creates content individually for users, something that they can make use of; great if Wikipedia played the role of the first, mainstream Semantic Web application. While this is still in the process of coming together, there are enough other things for us to do.

(btw, my translation).

Concrete answers to concrete questions, a personalized Wikipedia – I am not even aiming that high at the moment.

Just consider the absurd amount of lists in Wikipedia, all of which are maintained manually. Take for instance the list of hardcore punk bands, the list of fictional countries (to be distinguished from the list of European fictional countries) or the list of military operations.

How often do you think these need an update? And if a new hardcore punk band is added – will the creators of the new article think about adding it to the list? What about articles which make make a reference to or mention things that are or should be on a particular list?

As a list has the inherent claim of being complete, it shouldn’t be left to humans to create and maintain them – leave that to the machines! Vote Semantic MediaWiki for Wikipedia!

Author: Jana Herwig

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The IWIS Group at the Dept. of Computer Science, University of Aalborg, Denmark, have just opened up their evaluation of a tag recommender system they are building; the component is to be part of the wiki-based, semantic knowledge management system KiWi (itself based on IkeWiki). Anyone interested in participating, please send an Email to Fred Durão at fred@cs.aau.dk.

Hi,
We are conducting an evaluation of a tag based recommender system with personalization we have developed here at the IWIS group at Aalborg University (http://iwis.cs.aau.dk) and in the context of KIWI project (http://www.kiwi-project.eu). We would be very grateful if you could help us with this task.

The recommendater system is based on a set of algorithms we are evaluating. Later we are planning to plug it into the KIWI system and develop an appropriate user interface for it. Currently, we are evaluating it based on Delicious data (tags and content). The recommendations will be processed by our recommender system based on the tags you placed in Delicious.

As personalization is a crucial aspect to us, we will give you a generated username and password to log onto the Delicious Web site. Therefore please send an e-mail back to us that you would like to participate. You only have to tag a minimum 10 web sites of your preference. Tag as much as you can!

Afterwards we are going to email you a list of recommendations to web sites that you might be interested. These are computed by our recommender system. We will ask you to mark the recommendations by YES if the sites recommended suits your preference or NO if it does not.

The achieved results will be published to all participants after the end of the analysis.

People interested in participate of this evaluation please send an email to fred@cs.aau.dk.

Best regards,

Fred Durão and Peter Dolog

Here is link to the FAQ.