Last week the NEPOMUK Social Semantic Desktop Summer School happened. A short summary.

First and most interesting, much material of the summer school is available in the wiki. Second, I uploaded a lot of pictures, and there are more on flickr tagged with nepomuksummerschool2008.



The students were great, and very capable. We had people from all over the world, to randomly pick three: Samur from Rio, Rigel from Chicago, Bernhard from Austria. Of course, as usual I had problems keeping the names and backgrounds :-/



After three days of teaching and hands-on sessions, the students had to do their own projects. Two projects were winning, Chatomuk, a semantified chat-client with tag-cloud and other niceties, and a project showing user interface designs. Both are missing some documentation on the wiki, but Gunnar and Bernhard are working to make Chatomuk downloadable.

It was tricky to present the material in a short time and also involve the students in learning, we tried out different teaching methods (frontal presentation, pen&paper creation of ontologies, hands-on code, directing the students to google quickly for the right info), I hope it was a good mix for everyone.

The school also had a social event, and we organized opportunities for socialising every evening.


A very nice social event was hacking the mini projects on thursday night:


I talked to many people about the idea to create a product from nepomuk that could be so good that people will pay for it and it was interesting to see the possibilities and ideas how to do that.
Well, there were so many coffee breaks, chats, discussions, I can't write much more but say:

thanks for all the participants for attending - blog it (and ping me)!

We just had a laugh when programming Lucene indexing for LuceneSail.

Tomasz was reading this code....

... for ... HitIterator ...


and was shocked because the first impression was Hitlerator. OMG, if there was a class Hitlerating everything... this would be an implementation of Godwin's law.

one of my nephews wobbling down stairs with a snake-like ability. happened years ago, happily provided by my brother, but not uploaded due to excessive lazyness.

I will be speaking at ESTC2008, on 25th September 2008 around 16:45 in the Rittersaal room.

The topics of my talk will be circling around Semantic Desktop, personalized Semantic Web, and how this is used or can be used in company settings

• Why is Semantic Web needed on the desktop?
• How does data fusion work on the desktop?
• What is a personal information model?
• How do existing user interfaces and user experience change?
• Which projects are active and what are their results?

Recently, on 28.7.2008, the Semantic Web company published an interview with Corinna Barth about gender studies and the Semantic Web. I blogged about that.

Stefano Bertolo pointed out in a comment that CYC allows Microtheories and that this allows alternating views.

I asked Corinna about that and she helped me a lot by passing on a few pointers from her vast literature collection about CYC and gender studies, indicating that this fact is known and that she referenced a study by Alison Adam (1995, 1998). I will share the references with you, if you google for gender studies and Semantic Web, it may help you:

• Catherine Sherron (2000): Constructing Common Sense. In: Ellen Balka/ Richard Smith: Women, Work and Computerization. Kluwer, 111-118).
• Geoffrey Bowker/ Susan Leigh Star (2000): Sorting Things Out. Classification and its Consequences. MIT Press)
• Alison Adam (1998): Artificial Knowing. Gender and the Thinking Machine. London and New York: Routledge.
• Adam, Alison (1995): Embodying Knowledge. A Feminist Critique of Artificial Intelligence. In: The European Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol.2, 355-377

(updated on 10.9. based on more information)

as blogged in May, we organize a Summer School on the Semantic Desktop and the NEPOMUK project.

I arrived today in Malta, at 8 in the evening and sitting now together with the other organizers doing last-minute preparation tasks. The others were working all day already.

It is going to be a good week for us, a good moment in the project (NEPOMUK ends in December) and we can pass on a lot of information we learned to other PhD students to keep the ball rolling.

At the airport I met Bernhard Schandl from Vienna, who is part of the Web of data hands-on organization team (btw, sign up there! if the web-form is not online yet, send them a mail). We met before and had a nice chat, good start into the week.