Semantic Web Company

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).

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.

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.

It’s been five months since the last Joint Work Package (WP) meeting in the KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki – project. This morning, we gathered in Vienna for the next round – focus this time around will be on the core system (architecture developed by the WP3 team, handing over and paving the way for WP 4 team) and the use cases (Logica, Sun Microsystems) where it is of particular importance that everyone involved in the project understands the requirements of the use cases.

In the first presentation today, Sebastian Schaffert from Salzburg Research gave us a tour of two different configurations of the KiWi system. The KiWi core system is oriented towards content versatility, meaning that content items can be displayed and used in various contexts and configurations. As a service to the user, KiWi uses Javascript-based WYSIWYG Editor TinyMCE enhanced with a few home-grown plug-ins which, for instance, make it easier to set links to other wiki pages. Memorizing wiki shorthand is sometimes a challenge, so this feature helps getting things done.

Using a different skin and interface, KiWi can take various forms and shapes – even shapes where you might not spot the wiki in it at first glance. TagIT is such an example of an adaptation of the KiWi core system: a geotagging platform targeting youth in Salzburg who can locate, tag and comment on places that matter to them.

Vice versa, KiWi in its wiki incarnation displays a little map, provided a content item is enhanced with geoinformation; technically, the map on the wiki page is an interpretation of a georelated tag (learn more about complex, structured tags proposed by the KiWi Enabling Technologies Work Package in this article: Usage Data Model Day in the KiWi Project).

Take a look at the screenshots below:

It is the same article that is being displayed, in the first example using the classic KiWi interface, in the second example using the TagIT interface with the article appearing as an info page.

This afternoon, we expect to see another configuration of the system, in a presentation about how the system is specifically tailored to the needs of Logica’s “Knowledge Management for Project Management” usecase.

N.B. The system is not yet publicly available, if you have questions, please contact Sebastian Schaffert.

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It’s true: Facebook apps can be pretty annoying, in particular because of some developers’ misconception of viral marketing as represented by the “Spam 20 friends first before using this service” feature.

But if you could write your own Facebook apps, you would avoid all those mistakes, right? Because you would write an application tailored especially to your needs and those of your friends.

If only you could write code…

Worry no longer! It seems as if the “Wiki for Code” has finally arrived with zembly, a web service currently in private beta where users, according to its claim, can “easily create and host social applications of all shapes and sizes, targeting the most popular social platforms on the web.”

Now this may sound too good to be true, yet it is: On the last day of your KiWi-meeting in Prague, I was able to attend a demo session of zembly given by Jiri Kopsa, one of the engineers in the developer organization connected to Sun Microsystems who are currently working on zembly.

No additional software needs to be installed – using just their browser, users can develop applications for several popular social platforms, including Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial, build apps for their iPhone or other embeddable widgets.

In the demo we were given, Jiri showed us how create a widget that automatically requests the latest Flickr picture. We then deployed the widget on iGoogle as an automatically updating image widget – all that done in considerably less than five minutes. (more…)

The walls in room 3328, the observation room at Sun Microsystem’s usability lab in Prague, are painted a subdued blue. It swallows all the light, ensuring the testing scenario is not interrupted by curious guests like us, the Kiwi-project team members who were granted the privilege of a tour of the inner sanctum of Sun’s developer den. Through the one-way mirror, we can see a rosy-cheeked developer, talking to himself in Czech, interrupted by little sips from a coke bottle. He does not see us. The fact that very few of us understand Czech gives the situation an even more experimental appeal.

The new usability lab at Sun Microsystems, Prague

Jakub Franc, the cognitive psychologists in charge of the design of the study, explains to us that Sun rely on the Think Aloud method and observation in most of their test cases, rather than analyzing data from biofeedback sensors or eye-tracking devices. “Eye-tracking is good for testing the usability of web sites,” he says, “but for our purposes, the think aloud method, where the test person describes what he does and thinks, has greater benefits to offer.” The authenticity of the tasks to be performed in the study is a key: The developer behind the sound-proof glass wall is currently busy importing his own PHP application into NetBeans, Sun’s open source development environment, while the interaction designers and developers who created the tested module observe. A typical testing scenario lasts about 90 minutes, with the final 20 minutes consisting of an interview. “I always tell the testers that it’s not their fault if they fail to perform a task,” says Jakub. “If they fail, it’s the product’s fault. After all, that’s why we’re testing it.”

Before a software product is tested in its design or redesign phase, the ideal candidates are identified based on the results of questionnaires that are sent out to people in the tester database. The database includes both users of open source software as well as of competitive products, with the ideal test sample consisting of people who represent the whole spectrum of the target group, ranging from expert to newbie – and they must not necessarily be open source enthusiasts: “We offer a relatively high reward of 1000 CZK* as we want testers from all levels and backgrounds and not just the volunteering enthusiasts.”

Until Sun Microsystems moved into their new building in 2006, they collaborated with the Department of Computer Science at Czech Technical University (CTU), where they set up the very first usability lab in the Czech Republic in 2004. The deal was that Sun would supply the equipment and know-how, and CTU would supply the space and construction. Both institutions shared the facility until, after three years, all usage rights and equipment were transferred to CTU. One of the features of the new lab is the one-way mirror – the previous one relied on video observation: “From our experience, despite the fact that some participants feel less comfortable in this set-up, it makes a difference to observers”, writes Jiri Mzourek on his, i.e. one of the many Sun blogs, “they feel more connected to the participants”.

Jakub Franc, cognitive psychologist and usability researcher

Even though there is now an in-house usability lab at Sun, the collaboration between Sun and CTU continues, in particular in research and design projects. Students participate in projects led by Sun that focus on Sun products, learning about research methodology as well as gaining experience in project management in a real business environment. Jakub Franc also gives seminars in cognitive psychology and research methodology to CTU students, and is himself pursuing a PhD in environmental psychology – a relatively new discipline which, according to Jakub, deals with questions such as: “How should buildings be designed so that people are not getting lost in them? What recreational areas help people to recover from daily stress? What kinds of front gardens discourage burglars from invading the place?” In other words: Jakub studies the cognitive parameters of the usability of real objects.

Once the KiWi/Sun usecase enters the evaluation stage, the KiWi team will again be given access to the lab – but this time not as visitors, but as observers, witnessing how usable the KiWi-Wiki system really is to the inclined user. We are looking forward to the experience – and thank the designers of the lab for implementing a sound-proof wall, just in case the KiWis get emotional!

*) worth about 2 monthly passes for the metro in Prague, or 40 beers in a good pub

Josef Holy’s report this morning about the status quo in the KiWi usecase conducted in collaboration with Sun microsystem presented us with an interesting contrast. While the point of departure in the Logica usecase was a conceptual model of knowledge that is shaped by CMMI, Josef made the point that software development in an open source project follows quite different rules: “The lack of formal processes IS the process”, said Josef, characterizing the collaboration in the NetBeans development environment which (as reported earlier) has about 200 Sun developers working on it, in addition to thousands of external contributors and hundreds of thousands of active users. Correcting his own presentation regarding the development process from May ‘08 he said: “We shouldn’t think of a production pipeline here, but of a graph.”

Within Sun (or any software development project), one can draw a distinction between three groups of people working on a software project, depending upon the intensity of interaction and impact they have on the project: First of all, you have the planners, designers, developers and testers who interact intensely and whose work strongly affects the actual product. Secondly, you have people like the documentation writers who describe a software, but who do not shape it. And thirdly, there are people who translate the work of the second level to different markets or target groups, e.g. people working in localization.

A first important decision to be made was: Who to involve in the KiWi usecase? As the KiWi approach is decisively informed by the wiki philosophy, it only made sense that the designers, rather than the developers, should participate. Designers need to have access to various repositories of information, for instance user interface specifications, requirements descriptions, usability reports, marketing intelligence data, etc. And, to a much greater extent than is the case with developers, their work relies primarily on the written word, in the form of definition and documentation. And that makes them ideal candidates in the KiWi-Wiki usecase.

P.S: Yes, we all know that documentation is also a crucial part of the work of developers – yet we also know that the world has seen a lot of software developments that went undocumented;-)

So here we go again, the KiWi and me: Today, tomorrow and Friday I am in Prague with my colleagues Andreas Blumauer and Matthias Samwald, attending the first Joint Workpackage Meeting in the EU-funded project KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki. The present meeting is hosted by Sun Microsystems - Josef Holy and Inka Havlova gave us a very warm welcome, but thankfully the Sun offices are the direct opposite, namely perfectly chilled on this hot June day:-)

The day started with Sebastian Schaffert, project coordinator from Salzburg Research, giving us an overview of the actitivies of the first quarter in the project and a primer on the objectives of the meeting. The overall concern of this full meeting, in order to align core developments of the project early on, is to develop a common understanding of the functionalities and behaviour of the KiWi system, to define a core data model and to develop an outline for the upcoming dissemination plan.

An IT project is like herding cats, they say – in our case, we’ll be herding kiwis, and if we can enjoy it only half as much as these guys, I’ll be fine:-)

The first session is coming up: Peter Axel Nielsen’s report from Work Package 5, i.e. the usecase developed by Logica and Aalborg University. More updates coming up soon!

As soon as KIWI enters the use cases stage, collaboration with business partners is going to gain particular importance. One of these partners is Sun Microsystems – who hardly need an introduction. Yet an interesting new fact that I learned about Sun on Thursday was that they are not only a main contributor to open source software development, but that they are also opensourcing hardware: OpenSPARC is the world’s first free 64-bit micro-processor – the source code for the OpenSPARC T2 chip was released unter GNU GPL and can be downloaded here. Sun is also known for making an authentic web2.0 commitment, building communities within and beyond corporate boundaries: According to Josef Holy (pic on the right), Sun interaction and social network designer, they have literally hundreds of internal wikis, plus a universe of public wikis, public forums and blogs – Jonathan Schwartz is blogging, too.
So Sun has extensive experience with developing community infrastructures, for instance also in association with NetBeans, their integrated development environment, which is used by about 200 Sun developers, thousands of external contributors and hundreds of thousands of active users. The development of NetBeans might also serve as a testbed for KIWI, as the usecase conducted in collaboration with Sun is going to focus on software knowledge management; Josef suggested that KIWI should serve as a structured hub in an unstructured environment. When talking about the ideal user-centred design, he presented an empty slide, pointing out that no preconceived ideas must stand in the way, but that it must reflect real world problems.
Another interesting proposal that might influce KIWI is Sun’s Community Equity Specification – Peter Reiser, Principal Engineer, CTO Office, and Chief Architect for CE2.0 blogged about this recently after the patents were finally filed:

The objective is to build a dynamic Social Value system by calculating the Contribution, Participation, Skills, and Reputation equity a person can gain by actively engaging in online communities. The Equity values are captured through activities that the Community members are participating in.

Also involved in the Sun usecase is the Semantic Web Company (i.e. my employer), and from SWC in particular Andreas Blumauer, Matthias Samwald and Tassilo Pellegrini. Together and with the input of the entire KIWI team they are going to do their best to explore the opportunities of combining bottom-up maintenance (i.e. tagging and folksonomy) with top-down maintenance (i.e. reasoning and ontologies). The Sun team includes Peter Reiser, Josef Holy, Henry Story (semantic web evangelist – I already blogged about him and Josef yesterday) and Inka Havlova who is backing the team with administrative power.