Sebastian Schaffert

Who is “Hudson” you may ask. Well, Hudson is a guy who accompanied us throughout this week’s 1st KiWi Programming Camp. Hudson is the one who complains when something goes wrong in the source code, for example when one of the tests breaks or worse: the source code does not compile properly. And Hudson had to complain a lot during this week!

So why is this a success then? Well, many complaints means that there has been a lot of activity in the source code, and this means that many people started committing their additions and changes. And this was actually the stated main goal of the 1st KiWi Programming Camp: help the KiWis and friends learn how to work with the code so that they can do their own modifications, particularly for implementing the enabling technologies and the use cases.

But the KiWi Programming Camp was also very successful in its second objective: starting to build up an Open Source community around KiWi. Although we sent out the invitation on very short notice (4 days before the camp started), we were joined by two additional external developers during the week who wanted to learn how to extend the system for their own purposes: Christoph Lange from Jacobs University of Bremen builds a Semantic Wiki for mathematical knowledge called “SWiM” and Michael Schneider from ArtAround, a small company in Salzburg, wants to build a community platform for art on top of KiWi.

Besides this, the programming camp was also a great place for spinning new ideas and moving the project forward. Since I did not want to disturb the social dynamics between the young researchers through my presence, I only joined from time to time, and every time I entered the room there have been lively discussions, people arguing at the flip chart, people programming together. In fact, I think we did not have many weeks in the project where we did such big conceptual steps forward like this week.

Among other issues, we managed to move forward the issue of annotating text fragments, the issue of semantic forms which are linked to the textual content, the recommendation functionalities, as well as compound content items. We also had quite some interesting discussions on search and querying, on reasoning, and on information extraction.

So, thanks for all who attended (i.e. Fred, Karsten, Marek, Klara, Jakub, Alex, Christoph, Michael) and particularly to my team in Salzburg (Rolf, Steffi, Szaby, Mihai, Thomas) for preparing it and helping the others get into the system. I am really looking forward to the 2nd KiWi Programming Camp, which will probably take place in autumn and be open to everyone interested to participate!

Now, we should probably try to get to “Hudson build is stable again”, so that we can prepare for the next prerelease end of March.

Tags: kiwiknows, programming camp, salzburg