Sebastian Schaffert » eswc09

ESWC Day 3: KiWi Poster & Demo Day!

wastl — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:30:38 +0000

The third day of ESWC was the day of the poster and demo session. For me the demo session is always one of the highlights (if not the highlight) of the conference, because it is usually about things that are really working and not just about dead paper. Also, it is probably the most interactive session of the conference, with people talking and discussing with each other. In all previous conferences I have always learned most in the poster & demo session.

Of course, the session was also one of the premier parts of the conference for presenting our KiWi results. We had three posters presented by Klara, Steffi and Thomas, which have apparently attracted a lot of attention. And I was giving the KiWi Demo myself, demonstrating the outcomes of our work in the last 15 months. I cannot write much about the posters (because I didn’t have any time to look there), but the KiWi Demo was definately a huge success. I think I talked more than 3,5 hours non-stop during the demo session, and had many interesting discussions and feedback.

[Mit PicLens anzeigen]

P.S.: I’ll add some photos to this post as soon as the Internet is working a bit more reliably.:-)

ESWC Day 2: 4th Semantic Wiki Workshop

wastl — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 07:47:33 +0000

The second day of ESWC09 was the day of the big event, the Semantic Wiki Workshop. Overall, it was really a big success, many interesting contributions, lively discussions, the number of participants just limited by the size of the room. Pictures are just making their way to Flickr over the slow Internet line (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/kiwiknows/).

The KiWi project was very present at the workshop, being one of the few big efforts in the area:

Pavel and Marek started with presenting their ideas and prototype on information extraction; it is really nice to see how results get better and better in this area:-)
Rolf then discussed various approaches to synchronisation of data repositories that are used in the KiWi backend (relational database, triple store, SOLR index)
Fred and Peter presented different recommendation algorithms that they experiment with in the course of KiWi
and finally I did a rather short presentation of the KiWi platform, which I then demonstrated in the afternoon’s Open Space session

The star of the workshop, though, was our cute toy kiwi which you’ll likely see on many photos on Flickr & Co. Again, with minimal effort we have generated more awareness than by sponsoring a reception… Here is one such photo showing the SemWiki organisation team with the KiWi:

KiWis at ESWC – day 1

wastl — Sun, 31 May 2009 08:53:27 +0000

Today is the first day of ESWC09. Since we’ve been here since Friday, we have already been preparing our presentations as well as exploring the surroundings a bit (by bike ). The KiWi has already been at many nice places, as you can see in the slideshow:

[Mit PicLens anzeigen]

Today is still relaxing for us, just a bit of attending workshops and then a meeting with the INSEMTIVES people discussing how we can cooperate. The real work will start for us tomorrow, where KiWi is coorganising the 4th Semantic Wiki Workshop. There will be 4 KiWi presentations there. Then, Tuesday will follow with the KiWi demo and posters. I am really looking forward to these presentations and the feedback we’ll get for KiWi.:-)