Many guests attended our demo, so that we were really happy that we both went to Shanghai instead of sending only one person. Since we had a large table, we could give the KiWi demo at two laptops in parallel! We had many interesting discussions, and I think that we could get quite a lot of people interested in the project. KiWi has so much to offer that there is something in it for almost all conference attendees. I didn’t check the download figures yet, but I am sure they are going to increase. Just a pity that we only had 3 hours (2 were planned) to give the demo …

Dagstuhl Castle in a nice winter night

While a Dagstuhl workshop in itself is a special thing that you only get granted a few times in a researcher lifetime, a perspectives workshop is even more so, because it is aimed to “kickstart” a research topic, and there are only 5 such workshops overall in a year. Outcome of this workshop will be a manifesto that is distributed to decision and policy makers in politics, research, economy and media. Particularly interesting and noteworthy was the interdisciplinary nature of the workshop with participants from computer science, social sciences, and industry.

The Digital Social Networks Manifesto

In the following, I will briefly sketch the draft outcome of this workshop, a result of countless hours of discussions and a joint work of all participants of the workshop. Since the real manifesto is still to come (I’ll keep you updated), I’ll only summarise what is alreafy there without going into too much details.

What are Social Media?

In the group, we found a common definition of what we believe to be the central aspects of social media:

“Digital social media use information and communication technologies (such as the Internet, Web-based technologies, and/or specific software systems) for users and (possibly emerging) communities to collaboratively generate and exchange content and, more generally, to interact. They ease and strengthen social interactions by overcoming physical limitations in communication (like distance and synchronicity) and alleviating human limitations like in the number of people with whom one can maintain relationships. Digital social media thus offer opportunities for social interactions that would not be possible without them. Digital social media build and/or rely upon social networks which can even be the primary purpose of the media.

Examples of online social media are digital social networks (like facebook, LinkedIn and Xing), blogs, content sharing site (like flikr and YouTube), wikis (like used in the wikipedia encyclopedic project), backchannels (like twitter) and innovation markets (like InnoCentive).

Digital social media have appeared during the last decade and have spread extremely rapidly. Some are very successful at building up and keeping users communities. For some users, digital social media have become as common as, or have even replaced, telephone and email.”

Why are they important?

Social media are a revolutionary trend in our society and economy. They change the way we communicate to an extent similar to the invention of the printing press, and accommodate for the communication needs in a world of increased mobility, urbanisation, and globalisation. With the revolutionary character comes a dramatic change in society where existing business models, professions, and societal structures are replaced by new ones that have yet to emerge. At the same time, social media have the potential to offer huge benefits to society in many fields, e.g. the democratic process.

Challenges and Opportunities

We identified challenges and opportunities in the following areas:

• Socio-cultural Challenges: improving media literacy, smoothen negative and strengthen positive effects, importance of relationships, personal identity, trust and privacy
• Political Challenges: e-participation, e-democracy, e-Europe, Internet laws and policies
• Economic Challenges: new business models, integration of social media in enterprises
• Technological Challenges: usability, trust and privacy, decentralised social networks, media integration, personalisation, …

The challenges will be described in detail in the manifesto, scheduled for end of March.

Research Issues

The topic of digital social networks is a truly interdisciplinary field where researchers from several different fields can (and need to) participate. Since the majority of the participants of the seminar where from the computer science area, most research issues we identified have a computer science focus, but this does not mean that other research issues are less important. We structured research issues along the following themes:

• Society and Economy
• Architecture and Infrastructure
• Services and Applications
• Trust, Privacy and Security

Barriers and Enablers

There are a number of barriers and enablers that could either hinder that we benefit of social media or support the process. Since this is a delicate topic, I do not want to go into too much detail here until we have decided on the correct phrasing. Just a few examples:

• an important barrier is lack of media literacy throughout many parts of society, especially with decision makers and those in the educational sector
• important enablers are the technological development in itself, and the fact that the technology satisfies an apparent communication need in a society with increased mobility, urbanisation and globalisation

The final version of the manifesto is scheduled for end of March. I will publish it then on my website for everyone to read it (and comment on it). In the meantime, feel free to comment and add to what I have written above.

Acknowledgements

I would like to again say “thank you” to all participants (and all those who wanted to come but could not) for their important contribution. I conclude this blog post with the “group picture” taken before the hike we took as social event on Wednesday:

The Dagstuhl working group on Digital Social Networks

• Reasoning. This is the first release to include KiWi’s rule-based reasoner. The reasoner applies rules to triples in the triple store and allows to infer new triples based on this information. Rules can currently only be specified by developers (in a file called rules.txt), but we intend to open this to advanced users of the KiWi system. Evaluation is currently forward chaining with reason maintenance. Reason maintenance can also be used to “explain” to the user why certain triples have been inferred. This is for example visible in the “References” widget of the wiki when hovering the mouse over an inferred relation. The reasoning component has been implemented by Jakub Kotowski at the University of Munich.
• Querying. The 0.7 KiWi release also for the first time features the new and innovative querying component called “KWQL”. KWQL is an advanced query language that can be used as a replacement for the normal KiWi semantic search. It allows advanced query constructs for querying the structure of KiWi content in a simple-to-use language. KWQL also offers a visual query editor for composing queries. KWQL can be accessed by issuing an ordinary search and then clicking on “KWQL” besides the search input field. KWQL has been implemented by Klara Weiand and Steffen Hausmann at the University of Munich.
• Information Extraction. The 0.7 release of KiWi has also included a variety of different information extraction technologies (and more to come!) based on GATE and Semantic Vectors. For the moment, information extraction can be used for tag recommendation and recommendation of related articles. Using GATE, English or German texts can be analyzed and more precise tag recommendations can be made. Information extraction has been integrated by Marek Schmidt at the Technical University of Brno.
• Personalized Search. KiWi also now includes an option to personalize the search results based on the previous tagging activity of the user and the tags associated with the search results. To access personalized search, simply click on the “personalized search” checkbox in the search interface. Note that personalized search requires that you already have some information in your user profile (primarily  tagging behavious). Personalized Search has been implemented by Nilay Coskun and Fred Durao at the University of Aalborg.
• Community Equity. Release 0.7 is also the first KiWi version to have Sun’s Community Equity algorithm integrated in the system. Community Equity is an algorithm that tries to determin the “social value” of information in a collaborative system by tracking how much interest is generated about a certain item. Community Equity is pretty sophisticated, featuring also an aging algorithm that avoids reputation being built up ad infinitum. Community Equity has been implemented by the Community Equity team at Sun (Josef, Dimitri, Max) and integrated by Mihai Radulescu at Salzburg Research.
• Optimistic Locking. KiWi 0.7 switched the data and transaction model to more error-proof optimistic locking; this also makes the system more reliable in concurrent situations, i.e. if two users change the same content. Optimistic Locking has been implemented by Stephanie Stroka at Salzburg Research.
• Simplified Setup. When starting for the first time, users are now guided through a semi-automatic setup process that makes configuring KiWi much simpler than it used to be. The setup process has been implemented by myself, and Mihai is now working on making it even more simpler, allowing users also to configure database and path settings via the Web-based interface.
• TagIT2. The TagIT application has been completely reimplemented and is scheduled for beta-testing starting January. New features are a completely new user interface, the possibility to display users in addition to news and blog posts, and many usability improvements. TagIT2 has mostly been implemented by Thomas Kurz at Salzburg Research.

There have been many smaller enhancements that I cannot mention here in detail (Exhbit support, Facebook integration, FOAF+SSL integration, …) and even more bug fixes. Thanks a lot to all project members for their participation!

Availability

As usual, the KiWi release is available at the following locations:

• binary download (bundled with JBoss, ready-to-run): http://kenai.com/projects/kiwi/downloads/download/kiwi-jboss-0.7.zip (250 MB)
• source download: please use the KiWi Subversion repository at https://svn.salzburgresearch.at/svn/kiwi/KiWi/trunk (latest revision) or https://svn.salzburgresearch.at/svn/kiwi/KiWi/tags/0.7 (0.7 release)
• showcase/demo: the latest KiWi version can also be tried out at our showcase installation at http://showcase.kiwi-project.eu/KiWi/ ; be aware that the showcase is erased regularly and we don’t have much content in it currently (note: the showcase has been shut down over Christmas because vandals are misusing it for distributing their spam links and I don’t have the nerve to look at it over Christmas!)
• issue tracking: please use the KiWi Jira at http://wiki.kiwi-project.eu/atlassian-jira/browse/KIWI to report any issues you encounter
• help: please use either the KiWi developer mailinglist (kiwi-devel@kiwi-project.eu) or the issue tracking for the moment; we are currently also in the process of setting up a wiki for the project

Road Map

Undoubtedly, version 0.7 still contains many bugs. In the weeks after Christmas, we will therefore likely release minor updates improving the stability and reliability of the system. These will be numbered 0.7.x.

Version 0.8 of KiWi is scheduled for end of February 2010. It will have improved Community Equity support, first draft of permission management, and Semantic Forms support. Version 0.9 is scheduled for end of May and will feature an improved user interface and widget support based on SmartGWT. Version 1.0 (final) is scheduled for end of August, with one month of testing.

A KiWi handbook will be written starting September 2010. It will contain not only instructions on how to use the KiWi system but also practical examples and best practices on how it can be used.

Currently, there are several trends on the Internet, which I’ll in the following call “Linked People”, “Linked Content”, and “Linked Data”:

• Linked Content is the most simple to explain; it describes basically the current state of the Web where content can be linked using hyperlinks. It is important to note that this content is meant primarily for human consumption, i.e. human-readable text, images, or other media files.
• Linked Data in contrast describes linking of data that is designed for machine consumption. At the base of Linked Data lies RDF as data exchange format. The people working on Linked Data are organised on the Linked Data website.
• Linked People now is the connection of individuals through the Internet using social networking platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn or Xing. “Linked People” is one of the most exciting developments of the last years and one of the pillars of the ongoing revolution that changes our society.

Many applications follow one of these strands: most traditional Websites are “Linked Content”, most social networking platforms “Linked People”, and there are quite some interesting applications emerging based on “Linked Data”. There are even some applications that combine two of these lines (e.g. Facebook combines Linked People with Linked Content).

What is mostly missing though is a connection of all three strands in one application. Such an application would allow people to connect with each other and share content, but would also expose its data in structured form to the Linked Data cloud (Linked Data Server) to be used by other applications and consume data from the Linked Data cloud (Linked Data Client) to enrich the user experience of the application itself. Our project KiWi with its flexible platform for Semantic Social Software does the first steps into this direction. Henry Story’s FOAF+SSL is also an interesting approach in this area, if combined with social software applications. I believe that in the future we might see many more such applications – at least this is the direction that we will most likely be heading …

KiWi Core System and Collaboration with INSEMTIVES

On Thursday morning, we started with a general presentation of the current state of the KiWi system, mainly showing the demonstration given in Heraklion at ESWC09 (which won us the ESWC Best Demo Award) and in Luxemburg at the KiWi Review. Furthermore, Marek showed the prototype for information extraction and annotation, and Klara a prototypical visual editor for her rule-based query language.

Besides the KiWi core system, Tobias Bürger from STI Innsbruck presented the ideas behind the FP7 INSEMTIVES project to the KiWi consortium as a first step towards collaboration between INSEMTIVES and KiWi (he also blogged about it). We see possibilities for collaboration at several levels: dissemination (i.e. joint organisation of events, joint publications), research (INSEMTIVES results could improve Community Equity) and technology (KiWi platform could be used in INSEMTIVES). We will further investigate a possible collaboration at the INSEMTIVES meeting in Innsbruck next week, where we are invited to present KiWi in turn.

Enabling Technologies

On Thursday afternoon, we took a look at the four KiWi enabling technologies and how they integrate with the rest of the KiWi system. Jakub started with presenting ideas for a rule-based language capable of reasoning over tags and RDF structures (after Klara already presented her work in the morning). We had a lively discussion on the different aspects of the rule languages, how they might be unified and fit together, and how they might serve the other parts of the KiWi system. We decided that what we would need as a first step would be a simple rule-language with forward chaining based on RDF, on top of which more complex ideas would be evaluated.

Next came a discussion on information extraction, based on what Marek presented in the morning. It was agreed that information extraction would be used (1) in the editor to support the user in semi-automatic annotation, and (2) in the importing functionality to automatically extract metadata and perform annotations. The information extraction component works by incremental training with positive and negative examples.

We concluded the afternoon session with a discussion on personalisation. Personalisation in KiWi means primarily recommendations, and secondarily user interface customisation. Peter introduced us into the multifactor recommendation algorithm the group in Aalboarg has been working on in the last year, and we discussed the different factors that might be used, including Sun’s Community Equity. We also discussed where recommendations might be useful.

Logica Use Case

Friday morning started with a presentation of the current state of the Logica use case by Karsten. Karsten introduced into a “formalisation cycle” that moved from collaboratively created unstructured text in the KiWi system to structured data in the Logica Risk Management system and from there back to unstructured text in KiWi. What is currently already implemented is the export from the Logica system to KiWi using a custom templating mechanism. We discussed that we should try to replace this templating mechanism by RDFa only and that we should also investigate RDFa for forms (e.g. RDForms). The connection between unstructured text and forms will then be realised using the RDFa annotation mechanism implemented by Marek.

SunSpace Use Case

The second half of Friday was dedicated to discussing the Sun Use Case, and the technologies and services we would need to integrate there to support the already existing SunSpace intranet. We agreed that it was unreasonable and unrealistic to expect that Sun would replace the existing Confluence installation in favor of KiWi, because the aim of KiWi cannot be to create yet another Wiki engine that competes with what is already there. Instead, in the SunSpace use case, the KiWi system will be more like an intelligent index that integrates content and data from already existing sources and offers additional value in the form of advanced services (e.g. search, tagging, …) and widgets that can be included on the user interface level (e.g. recommendations, tagging, metadata, …). The data integration will make use of existing technologies like Linked (Open) Data. We decided that we would contribute particularly to the update mechanism of Linked Data since this seems to be an issue that is yet not resolved.

A second major point of discussion was the integration of Sun’s Community Equity (CE) with KiWi. We decided that we would head for a rather tight integration at the EJB level rather than at the Web Service level, because then we will be able to use CE more easily for e.g. recommendation and search. This integration will take place until end of August.

Finally, we briefly discussed single sign on for KiWi and correspondingly, Henry‘s suggestion for FOAF+SSL, which Steffi has already mostly implemented in KiWi. Also, an issue still to be solved for the SunSpace Use Case is how to handle permission management in KiWi.

We closed the meeting on Friday afternoon. Most said it was the most productive KiWi meeting we had yet and that we have moved much forward. I just hope that we can also hold the pace.:-)

Note: I will upload figures and pictures as soon as I have them.

• KiWi now has a tag recommendation system based on Semantic Vectors as a “look forward” to the information extraction that is still to come; to enable it, go to the admin interface and search configuration and click “rebuild semantic vectors”
• KiWi also now has (simple) recommendations personalised for the user; they are shown for each content item separately and also on the Dashboard
• the revision system is now functional and has been extended to cover upcoming “compound content items”; it also allows to display the content and metadata changes in a revision
• KiWi now supports dynamic pages rendered based on a embedded query; we also have the beginnings of a visual query editor that allows to compose embedded queries based on the search function
• TagIT is now able to represent not only points but also routes; route information is stored in RDF, naturally

As always, there are several ways to access the new KiWi release:

• you can simply try out our Showcase at http://showcase.kiwi-project.eu/KiWi/ – it has been set up from scratch again with a large amount of media data from various sources so that you can play around with the system;
  particularly noteworthy is the new search functionality which you can try out by searching for “tag:flickr” and then looking at the facets on the right, some of which are based on automatically gathered EXIF data
• you can download the binary version bundled with JBoss or the source version from http://kenai.com/projects/kiwi/downloads;
  the JBoss version comes ready-to-run (start.bash or start.bat) but requires JDK 6; if you want to play around in earnest and want some better performance, you should change the property hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto in server/default/deploy/KiWi.ear/KiWi.jar/META-INF/persistence.xml to “create” before you do the first start of the system and change it back to “update” or “validate” before you start a second time; in this case, the system will properly create database indexes to speed up data access
• you can check out the latest source code from our Subversion repository at https://svn.salzburgresearch.at/svn/kiwi/KiWi

Regardless of which way you choose to download the third KiWi prerelease, we hope you enjoy it and see its potential. But please be aware that this is still a pre-release and not meant for production use! Don’t forget to report all bugs that you may encounter to our JIRA system!

• the new SOLR based (semantic) search functionality that allows you to efficiently combine full-text search and facetted search over tags, types, persons, and configurable RDF properties
• the improvements in the Dashboard where you now have some (simple) personalised data like last visited pages, last edited pages, tag cloud, …
• the improvements in TagIT, which is now in a state that it can really be tested by users
• the improvements in the Wiki editor, which now supports RDFa annotations and annotation of page fragments.
• new, generalised importing functionality which particularly allows you to import arbitrary RSS feeds, including MediaRSS (Flickr) and GeoRSS (Geonames) into the system

Besides this, there have been numerous small improvements. Also, we started work on a context-based templating mechanism (D3.3 – advanced visualisations and editors), on the permission management, and on information extraction.

As always, there are several ways to access the new KiWi release:

• you can simply try out our Showcase at http://showcase.kiwi-project.eu/KiWi/ – it has been set up from scratch again with a large amount of media data from various sources so that you can play around with the system;
  particularly noteworthy is the new search functionality which you can try out by searching for “tag:flickr” and then looking at the facets on the right, some of which are based on automatically gathered EXIF data
• you can download the binary version bundled with JBoss or the source version from http://kenai.com/projects/kiwi/downloads;
  the JBoss version comes ready-to-run (start.bash or start.bat) but requires JDK 6; if you want to play around in earnest and want some better performance, you should change the property hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto in server/default/deploy/KiWi.ear/KiWi.jar/META-INF/persistence.xml to “create” before you do the first start of the system and change it back to “update” or “validate” before you start a second time; in this case, the system will properly create database indexes to speed up data access
• you can check out the latest source code from our Subversion repository at https://svn.salzburgresearch.at/svn/kiwi/KiWi

Regardless of which way you choose to download the third KiWi prerelease, we hope you enjoy it and see its potential. But please be aware that this is still a pre-release and not meant for production use! Don’t forget to report all bugs that you may encounter to our JIRA system!

• KiWi now supports very fast and very flexible facetted search, already tested with tens of thousands of articles; KiWi’s facetted search builds upon Apache SOLR, but also allows many “semantic” search features, as we add much of the RDF metadata to the index (thanks to Solr’s flexibility); the new search function is also the base for the geographic queries in the TagIT application, which are now incredibly fast!
• the TagIT application (actually developed as part of another project on top of KiWi) is moving into a state where it is good enough to be really used; we are currently running with around 15.000 news articles without any significant performance problems
• the Dashboard has been further improved with a history widget and a tagcloud widget; we are also currently working on the user profile functionality and hope to be able to include it in the next release
• the KiWi editor now features a first implementation of an RDFa plugin that allows to annotate parts of the text with RDF metadata
• many serious bugs have been fixed, so that the overall system stability is now better than ever and there are less unexpected issues

Besides these core changes that will also be available in the binary release, there has been quite some work in the extension part. Particularly, the work on information extraction is currenly progressing in an experimental extension  called ieeval, the logica use case is developed in an extension called logica, and we are currently experimenting with routing functionality for the TagIT application. Christoph Lange has also begun to port his work on SWiM to the KiWi platform, so we might see the first KiWi application developed outside the project soon!

While the 0.3 prerelease is not (yet) available for download (we are still working on some issues), you can try out the latest changes with some live data – as always – on http://showcase.kiwi-project.eu/KiWi/.

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.

To me, the ontolog series was interesting for several reasons: (1) it showed that the topic of Semantic Wikis is moving from the outskirts to the mainstream Semantic Web research and is now recognised as important where many people smiled at us 3 years ago; (2) it provided interesting insights and ideas on the Semantic Wiki topic, its applications,  relevant technologies, and the future; and (3), it structured the community even beyond Europe.

Instead of telling you too much, I’d simply like to refer you to the ontolog series pages; all presentations are available with slides and audio transcript, and the chat sessions have also been logged:

• Session 1: A Survery of the Landscape and State-of-the-Art in Semantic Wikis
• Session 2: Semantic Wiki Technology 1
• Session 3: Semantic Wiki Technology 2
• Session 4: Semantic Wiki Applications & Use Cases (1)
• Session 5: Semantic Wiki Applications & Use Cases (2)
• Session 6: The Future of Semantic Wiki: Trends, Challenges and Outlook

Li Ding has also provided a short summary over the last session.