Sebastian Schaffert

Schweden 2010

wastl — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 20:51:45 +0000

Heute ist unser (Anna, Elisa und ich) letzter Tag nach drei Wochen Urlaub in unserem Sommerhaus in Schweden, meinem zweiten Zuhause. Und viel erlebt haben wir: mit dem Kajak entlang der Fjorde und zwischen den Inseln, mit dem Zelt und Feuer auf einer Insel übernachtet, Windsurfen bei Windstärke 6, Segeln mit dem Kajak, auf der Sail 2010 in Karlskrona, im Marinemuseum (2 mal), Besuch der Familie Müller, Besuch der Moserlinge und von Rose, Pilze und Beeren aus dem Wald, Wikingerburg Eketorp und der Långe Jan auf Öland, Radtour zu Torhamns Udde (Südostspitze von Skandinavien), und zum Abschluß noch mal eine ausgiebige Tour mit dem Kajak. Und langweilig ist uns immernoch nicht – wir könnten gut noch ein paar Wochen bleiben. Aber wir freuen uns auch wieder auf die Berge.

[Mit PicLens anzeigen]

D’Alm is mei Freud!

wastl — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:04:50 +0000

Ein schönes Frühlingsgedicht in Pinzgauer Mundart, gefunden in der Gaststube der Hochalm am Sonntagshorn (wo ich heute mit Georg und Max war):

A Lüftal so lau ums Haus umaziacht,
a Fliagn no gonz damisch üba
d’Stadlwand kriacht.
Da spür i a Sehnen und s’Herz
werd ma weit “I werds wieda packn!”
Denn d’Alm is mei Freud!

Da Summa auf da Alm
im letztn Jahr war so hart.
Aba den ganzn Winta dahoam
hab i auf dös lau Lüftal scho gwart.
Da letzte Schnee auf dö Berg
werd kleana, s’werd Zeit,
daß is zammpack mei Zeug,
denn d’Alm is mei Freud!

Ob i gsund bleim im Summa?
Dö Angst werd vadrängt
Mei Sorg ghört dö Viecha
an deni so häng.
Mei Glück san dö Berg,
von dö Glock’n dös Gläut,
meine Sorgen wern kleana,
denn d’Alm is mei Freud!

Um an Herrgott sein Segn,
a innigs Gebet, daß da Summa
a dösmoi so guat umageht,
daß gsund bleibm auf da Alm,
dö Viech und dö Leut,
drum bitt i di Herrgott,
denn d’Alm is mei Freud!

Und zum Abschluß noch ein Bild von unsererm Skitour-Abschluß auf der Hochalm:

KiWi Annual Meeting 2010

wastl — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:01:12 +0000

March is time for KiWi annual meetings. This year’s meeting took place from 10th-12th March in Mattsee close to Salzburg, again at a very nice location. The Annual Meeting was focussing primarily on the use cases (which are supposed to start with evaluation now) and the dissemination and exploitation activities (which now go into the last phase). Here is a short summary of the meeting:

Core KiWi System

As usual, the annual meeting began with a presentation of the current state of the core KiWi system. Rolf presented the novel implementation of Semantic Forms (based on RDFa) in KiWi. KiWi’s Semantic Forms can be used as alternative editors for a content item and directly update the RDF metadata inside the KiWi system. Planned improvements of Semantic Forms are the support of RDFa object properties and the automatic generation of Semantic Forms out of types specified in an ontology.

Thomas then briefly presented the latest version of the TagIT implementation on top of KiWi. TagIT is accessible at http://tagit2.salzburgresearch.at and will go into a productive use by end of March (accessible under http://tagit2.salzburgresearch.at). Arpad concluded the Salzburg Reseach part with a presentation of the new vocabulary management tool for KiWi, which is at the same time a first experiment for using GWT (Google Web Toolkit) in conjunction with KiWi.

Peter Dolog summarised the various personalisation features that have been implemented in KiWi. Personalisation is available at several levels in KiWi: it can recommend related content to the currently displayed page based on the user’s preferences, it can recommend content interesting to the user based on his activities in the system, and it can be used for personalising the ranking of search results in KiWis search interface (so-called personalised search). In all cases, it is a prerequisite that there is sufficient data for the personalisation from previous (tagging-) activities of users.

Klara then presented the latest progress in using the query language KWQL in KiWi. Beyond ordinary search, KWQL is capable of issuing structured queries to the documents contained in the KiWi system. KWQL is available as part of the core KiWi system for some time already and can be used as an alternative to the default search mechanism.

Jakub showed the new explanation service for the reasoner in the KiWi system. The explanation service allows developers to inspect the justifications why the reasoner has inferred a triple in a graphical manner. It can also be used to show explanations to the user for certain kinds of behaviour (currently inferred types and incoming/outgoing relations).

Marek concluded the presentation of the KiWi core system with a demonstration of the various information extraction functionalities in the KiWi system. Currently, information extraction is used for tag recommendation. He is currently also working on using it for automatically recommending RDFa annotations for the textual content of a document.

Sun Use Case (Software Knowledge Management)

KiWi’s Sun Use Case is concerned with knowledge management in the SunSpace intranet of Sun Microsystems, now part of Oracle. Josef Holy and Peter Reiser started with presenting the three storylines they aim to evaluate as part of the use case: concept model management (i.e. how to manage the company’s internal thesaurus using KiWi and PoolParty), Text Extraction and Tag Recommendation (both, based on the company thesaurus and using free tags), and Searching and Browsing through the SunSpace intranet using KiWis Semantic Search functionality.

Sebastian and Mihai continued with a presentation of a reimplementation of the Community Equity system in KiWi. The new implementation uses a much simplified implementation as compared to the currently used system and gives at the same time more flexibility to admins and developers. Still unclear is how well the system scales in the presence of huge activity logs.

Further steps concerning the implementation and evaluation of the Sun use case are the connection of Confluence with KiWi using a plugin to “augment” Confluence with KiWi’s semantic technologies, the connection of KiWi and PoolParty, as well as the migration of content, particularly activity logs, from SunSpace into the KiWi system to preseed the system for evaluation.

Logica Use Case (Project Knowledge Management)

Daniel Grohlin, Karsten Jahn and Peter Axel Nielsen presented the implementation and scenarios of the Logica Use Case, which is concerned with managing project knowledge. The evaluation will cover the scenarios “project planning”, “project monitoring”, “development or project work”, and “process design”. All four scenarios will be evaluated using a combination of the KiWi system and the proprietary Logica application that complements and accesses KiWi using web services. The use case will be evaluated using an “agile evaluation” that refines the tests and implementation in several evaluation cycles (probably three). Particularly noteworthy is the feature matrix developed as part of the test plan that will be extended by the other partners and used for the Sun Use Case as well as as input for the dissemination and exploitation activities. The feature matrix is also useful to verify to which extent the KiWi technologies are covered by which of the scenarios.

Dissemination and Exploitation

The last of the very important topics of the KiWi Annual Meeting was the discussion on dissemination and exploitation. While dissemination was quite successful in the first two years running with only little resources, the project now moves on into the third phase where it is important to increase the resources spent on making the project known and “selling” its results to the outside world. To this aim, John started with presenting a timeline for the next year, highlighting the most important milestones of the dissemination and exploitation activities. As a major step, KiWi will relaunch its websites and split them into a “research project page” targeted primarily at researchers (as it is now), a “system page” targeted primarily at decision makers as well as a “community page” targeted at developers that want to make use of the KiWi technologies. Further steps in the dissemination area are still confidential, but stay tuned on updates! And don’t miss the KiWi release party for version 1.0 – it will probably take place in September!

Bayerisch-Österreichische Unterschiede

wastl — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:08:47 +0000

Wie ja die meisten wissen lebe ich in Bayern und arbeite in Österreich (Salzburg). Da findet man sehr viele Gemeinsamkeiten (viel mehr als beispielsweise zwischen Bayern und Baden-Württemberg oder noch schlimmer: Berlin, Hamburg, …), aber auch ein paar Unterschiede. Der lustigste Unterschied ist mir heute untergekommen, und zwar in den neuen Zügen der Berchtesgadener Land Bahn – gleichzeitig die S-Bahn Linien S3 und S4 des grenzüberschreitenden Salzburger Verkehrsverbunds. Hier habt Ihr ihn:

Oder wie mein (Pongauer) Kollege Rupert auf Facebook kommentiert hat: “In Bayern braucht ein Mensch 1er Klasse vor allem Geld. In Österreich muss er den Mund halten können”.:-)

Frühlingsausritt auf den Hochberg

wastl — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:52:23 +0000

Gestern war mal wieder ein traumhafter Föhntag, und anders als im Inntal macht bei uns der Föhn meistens kein Kopfweh sondern nur schönes Wetter. Das Traumwetter hat schon morgens angefangen, als folgende Aufnahme von der Weide vor dem Hof meiner Eltern entstanden ist (Kamera einfach auf den Schnee gelegt):

Verschneite Weide

Nachdem ich für die Skitour etwas zu spät aufgestanden bin (mein Vater war schon weg …) und es so schön warm war, hab ich mir stattdessen vorgenommen mit Mariposa über Bucheck, Abstreit und Hinterwelln bis zum Hochberg zwischen Traunstein und Siegsdorf zu reiten, einem schönen Aussichtspunkt am Rand der gleichen Hügelkette (Gletscherendmoräne um genau zu sein) wie der Hof meiner Eltern. Denn wir (naja, ich) wollten diesmal auf den Chiemsee runterschauen.:-) Gleichzeitig der weiteste Ausritt dieses Jahr, denn bisher war es einfach zu kalt. Das nächste Bild zeigt Mariposa in Bucheck, im Hintergrund die Chiemgauer Berge:

Bucheck

Ab Abstreit gings an der Langlaufloipe entlang, mit tausenden Langläufern, und dann durch den Wald nach Hinterwelln. Bei uns liegt trotz Föhn noch sehr viel Schnee, so dass das für Mariposa teilweise harte Arbeit ist. Nach zwei Stunden waren wir dann endlich an unserem Ziel – dem Hochberg. Leider hab ich das Geld vergessen, so dass aus dem geplanten Radler nix geworden ist, und so gab es für das liebe Pferdchen nur ein paar Stücke trockenes Brot. Aber ordentlich angestrengt hatte sie sich. Das nächste Bild ist das “Pausenbild” am Hochberg. Mariposa ziemlich verschwitzt im Vordergrund, links im Hintergrund wieder die Chiemgauer (Hochfelln und Hochgern) und rechts der Chiemsee.

Pause am Hochberg

Nach der Pause gings dann auf einem anderen Weg wieder zurück (Holzleiten, Kirchleiten, Abstreit, durchs Moor nach Preising). Zu Hause in der Nachmittagssonne durfte Mariposa dann zusammen mit all unseren anderen Tieren die verschneite Weide geniessen:

All unsere Tiere - Idylle in Knappenfeld

Ein wunderschöner Föhntag. Die Vögel sind bereits wieder da, der Schnee ist noch da, die Sonne ist warm und der Himmel blau. So wie es sich in Bayern gehört.:-) Und der Tag endet mit einem tollen Sonnenuntergang (mit Schneemann):

Schneemann im Sonnenuntergang

Die vollständige Bilderserie gibt es in der Gallerie:

[Mit PicLens anzeigen]

Digital Social Networks – Perspectives Workshop at Dagstuhl Castle

wastl — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 10:07:16 +0000

Social Media are one of the revolutionary trends of our time. Up till now, they have been largely driven by practitioners. Research on the field has been either computer science or social sciences and is mainly observing the trend without taking really part. One could argue that this is a good thing, but as a researcher I am of course convinced of the opposite. Last week, we therefore had a “perspectives workshop” at Dagstuhl Castle near Saarbrücken in Germany where we discussed what research can actively do to accompany the social media revolution, “smoothening” its negative effects and emphasising its positive effects on society and economy, and helping in educating currently unaware parts of society, economy, and science. The workshop was organised by Clemens Cap (Rostock University), François Bry (Munich University), Julia Maintz (Microsoft, now freelancer), and myself (Salzburg Research).

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

Wo Bayern am schönsten ist …

wastl — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 16:51:17 +0000

… das ist im Chiemgau und im Berchtesgadener Land, zwischen Tiroler Ache und Salzach, wo ich daheim bin! Das bekommt man bestätigt an einem Traumtag wie heute – wie eine andere Tourengeherin gesagt hat: “so schee dass ma rean mecht”! Zuerst war ich mit Werner eine schnelle Tour aufs Hirscheck, meiner Meinung nach einer *der* Aussichtspunkte im Berchtesgadener Land. Und droben gibt’s ein Weißbier, dank der ansonsten wenig genutzten Hirscheckbahn. So schaut’s dann aus, blau-weiss wie die bayerische Fahne und golden wie der bayerische Löwe vor der sagenhaften Kulisse des Watzmanns:

Und nachdem die Vormittagstour eher kurz war (Werner hatte nachmittags noch was vor) und das Wetter so schön, hab ich am Nachmittag noch das Radl ausgepackt und bin zum Listsee und Thumsee hochgeradlt, wo u.a. folgendes Bild entstanden ist:

Ein Hoch auf die Heimat, so schön wie bei uns ist’s nirgendwo. Das hat auch schon Humboldt gesagt, und der hat viel gesehen!

Hier gibt es ein paar mehr Bilder:

[Mit PicLens anzeigen]

Sonnenuntergang am Jenner

wastl — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 21:03:17 +0000

Der Jenner ist ja eine meiner Standardtouren und ich hab schon öfter drüber geschrieben. Ich geh übrigens am liebsten “hinten rum” oberhalb der Königsbachalm, da hat man Einsamkeit abseits der Piste, kann aber trotzdem bequem und sicher über die Piste abfahren (inzwischen wegen der Beschneiungsanlage den ganzen Winter bis ins Tal). Der Föhn letzte Woche hat uns ja in Südbayern ziemlich getroffen, so dass auch in hohen Lagen kaum Schnee ist; deswegen war für mich die Tour auf den Jenner die Variante bei der man die Ski nicht kaputtmacht; ausserdem kann man den Jenner auch noch am späten Nachmittag gehen und dann denn Sonnenuntergang am Gipfel geniessen. So bin ich am zweiten Weihnachtsfeiertag nachmittags losgestapft; viel gibt’s nicht zu erzählen, aber das Bild vom Sonnenuntergang hinter Watzmann und Großem Hundstod wollt ich Euch nicht vorenhalten; gemacht übrigens nicht mit meiner Spiegelreflexkamera (Canon EOS 400D) sondern mit der “kleinen” Canon SX200:

Heute war ich mit Werner übrigens nochmal die gleiche Tour auf dem Jenner – mangels ordentlicher Alternative. Wir haben entschieden dass das wegen des wenigen Schnees eher eine Winterwanderung ist.

KiWi Prototype Release 0.7 (Milestone 3)

wastl — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:24:22 +0000

Development activity in the last months has been so active that we didn’t manage to issue a KiWi release of acceptable stability. Now we are very proud to announce the availability of the next prototype prerelease! The changes and new features are too abundant to name them all (you can get a list of fixed issues in the Jira Changelog for version 0.7). Here are the highlights:

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.

Skitour Saisonstart (am Roßfeld)

wastl — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 18:53:10 +0000

Nachdem es jetzt schon einige Zeit schneit haben wir (Werner, Michi, und ich) heute endlich die Ski bzw. Schneeshuhe+Snowboards ausgepackt und uns zu einer kurzen Tour aufs Roßfeld aufgemacht. Zum Aufwärmen – die längeren Touren gibt’s dann wenn etwas mehr Schnee liegt. Aber dafür oben mit Gipfelbier von Wieninger und Nürnberger Lebkuchen, passend zu Weihnachten. Nachdem Werner eh einen Blogpost angekündigt hat und die Photos von ihm sind, gibt es nur ein Bild vom Gipfelbier:

Ich freu mich schon auf die nächsten Skitouren – Winter ist einfach eine der schönsten vier Jahreszeiten!