Its official now, and we will soon put it on OSCAF.org, but for my dear readers (Stefano!) I am able to break the news:

Image via CrunchBase

We examined the NEPOMUK ontologies and found that they are a well suited for our plans for the Nokia Maemo platform (www.maemo.org) based next generation internet enabled mobile devices.

We are developing a mobile semantic content storage and retrieval solution that uses NEPOMUK as its base ontology. We are in the process of adapting and extending the ontologies and pushing the changes to be part of the NEPOMUK standards.

The recommendations created as standards by the NEPOMUK project are a solid foundation for the semantic mobile content solutions we are working on.

Kind regards,
Urho Konttori
Project Manager
Nokia - Maemo Desktop Data


Fyi: the NEPOMUK ontologies are managed by OSCAF.org, if you also want to use them in business scenarios and want to join the standardization, jump on board

The NEPOMUK project is ending now, we are delivering the last deliverables and wrapping up the financial parts. Time to go through the repository and clean it of copyright infringements and documenting what else we did... such as this:



a mashup of marco, the business man, and a penguin.

Well, look yourself into the svn logs to know who committed it ... best greetings, Leo

Open Letter to Aperturians and SMILAns

Aperture.sourceforge.net is a great project and DFKI has a lot of interest in it, we are using
Aperture both in nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org and dynaq.opendfki.de.
As I will be starting a business based on the Semantic Desktop soon,
I will step back from my position as DFKI representative of Aperture.

We talked about the transition process within the Aperture Administration team
and within DFKI and found that Christian Reuschling is the right person
to take over. Christian is a senior developer at DFKI developer and
the DynaQ project,which uses Aperture underneath
dynaq: http://dynaq.opendfki.de
Christian's homepage: http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~reuschling/

Please take this chance to welcome him!

As "DFKI representative for Aperture", Christian is

• the DFKI contact person for Aduna and other companies regarding Aperture
• a key person in Aperture architecture discussions
• directing the ongoing engagement of DFKI in Aperture

He is also an experienced Aperture user, and generally an excellent programmer and friend.
Christian was also at the SMILA presentation at Empolis on 3.2.09
and met the SMILA management team.

Myself, I will stay a project member and commit code from
time to time, and answer mails, but the authority to manage the Project
from the DFKI side is now at Christian.
I am currently working on establishing a company to help people remember
facts, based on the semantic desktop and aperture results, watch out
www.gnowsis.com for updates in the coming year.

best
Leo

p.s. Aperture rocks, it is a good tool that is helping us to bootstrap the semantic web,
>10k downloaders can't be wrong.

The open source initiative SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture), which bring semantic search to enterprises, has two new members.
US-based Attensity and German based living-a AG are now joining the Eclipse-hosted SMILA community.

We made an official press release, you find that the news agencies picked it up:

• Heise.de
  
• The english press release at Empolis
• The german press release at Brox (pdf)

This is good news! We need a standards-based, open-source solution for enterprise indexing and semantic search, in fact - many companies are interested to use this. This also shows DFKI's own early involvement into SMILA was the right step, and that brox and empolis are excellent partners. If you are interested to join, read the SMILA wikipage about contributions, or hit the mailinglist.

p.s: and we welcome also the two companies as new Aperture users, which is part of SMILA :-)

Ted Nelson, inventor of hypertext and visionary in computer science publishes a book.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jan/11/nelson-xanadu-geeks

In his self-published new book, "Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way" (available on lulu.com), Mr. Nelson, 71, takes stock of the computing world. The look back by this forward-thinking man is not without its bitterness. The Web, after all, can be seen as a bastardization of his original notion that hyperlinks should point both forward and backward.

controversy! going to press that "buy" button now:
http://www.lulu.com/content/5371507

Although it is old news, it is good news anyway: last year I joined the Eclipse Foundation to improve our support for SMILA, and we have also done a lot in Aperture to help the SMILA project.

Now there is also the Eccenca foundation, the commercial platform where SMILA based products can be sold and bought. It is run by Brox and will be a one-stop "shopping mall" for both buyers and sellers of semantic services based on SMILA. Although not much is public, I know from presentations that they are on the topic - if you are interested, contact them.

Helge Brzoska posted a nice "thanks to Leo" mail on his eccenca blog, so I love to link to it. They also say a big thanks to Aduna, our excellent partners for Aperture:
Now that the license of Aperture is definitely not an issue any more, we can accelerate the IP process dramatically.

On behalf of the whole SMILA-Team and brox: Thanks also to the known folks at Aduna, the other major contributors of Aperture Project for teaming up in such a great manner and helping out with this major issue for SMILAs IP-Process.

Besides the obvious self-gratulation of this post, I hope it helps you, dear reader, to stay up to date about what happens in the topic of commercial semantic services.

My brother has an open position at his EHealth technical college, here the open position:

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren! Liebe Mitstreiterinnen und Mitstreiter im Umfeld eHealth und Forschung!
Für unser mehrjähriges Forschungsprojekt "Healthy Interoperability" dass sich mit der Vernetzung von Daten aus dem Bereich "Personal Healthcare" bis hin in Gesundheitsaktensysteme befasst, ergänzen wir gerade unsere Teams. Derzeit sind wir auf der Suche nach zwei Junior ResearcherInnen, Vollzeit, für die gesamte Projektdauer von bis zu 4 Jahren, evtl länger.

Um geeignete KandidatInnen zu kontaktieren, bitten wir Sie die beiliegende Stellenausschreibung in Ihrem Umfeld durch Aushang oder über Ihre Verteiler bekannt zu machen. Sie helfen uns damit sehr.

Online sind die Ausschreibungen ebenfalls verfügbar:
http://www.technikum-wien.at/insight/jobs/?full=2889

Eine kurze Übersicht über das Projekt finden Sie unter
http://www.technikum-wien.at/insight/institute/biomedizinische_technik___umweltmanagement/projekte/?full=2596

Bei Fragen bitte melden, inzwischen herzliche Grüße,
Stefan Sauermann

Acting Program Director
Biomedical Engineering Sciences (Master)
University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien
http://www.technikum-wien.at

The OrganiK project, where Gunnar Grimnes and I from DFKI are currently working on, is speeding up.

Last year we submitted a paper to the SCPE Journal of Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience Scientific International Journal for Parallel and Distributed Computing. They have a special issue on "The Web on the Move". Our paper is called "A Sociotechnical Approach to Knowledge Management in the Era of Enterprise 2.0: the Case of OrganiK", here is the abstract:

The increasing need of small knowledge-intensive companies for loosely-coupled collaboration and ad-hoc knowledge sharing has led to a strong requirement for an alternative approach to developing knowledge management systems. This paper proposes a framework for managing organisational knowledge that builds on a socio-technical perspective and considers people as well as technology as two highly interconnected components. We introduce a conceptualised system architecture that merges enterprise social software characteristics from the realm of Enterprise 2.0, and information processing techniques from the domain of Semantic Web technologies. In order to deliver a KM approach that could assist in reducing the socio-technical gap, we suggest deploying such a solution using an integrated sociotechnical implementation methodology.

• Bibtex is on bibsonomy
• download link

Tada! Yesterday I submitted my PhD to the University. If you remember, a little more than two years ago I started blogging about my PhD. The last step, the third one, was to write a PhD.

In the last year, the step was to have it reviewed by first supervisor, Andreas Dengel, and second supervisor, Mehdi Jazayeri. Their feedback was healthy for the PhD and challenging me to do some overnight work to include it. At the end, the PhD improved a lot and parts of it were rewritten, a new chapter added, others shortened.

After handing it in yesterday, it will ripen a bit by staying at the university, then the supervisors will review and comment on it, and finally an appointment for the defense will be planned. That will hopefully be before summer, but can also be in autumn this year.

I feel a bit reliefed to finally have it finished writing, and I am happy to get this item from my todo list. It leaves me a few days of joy, until the remaining tasks of nepomuk kick back, work on the OrganiK project kicks in, my work for OSCAF ontologies has to be continued, and our Semantic Desktop Spinn-Off company also starts spinning...

as Linus from the peanuts put it: "That's the secret to life... replace one worry with another...."

My ISWC Talk about long-term Semantic Desktop evaluation is available for online viewing:



Evaluating long-term use of the Gnowsis Semantic Desktop for PIM
I still have to improve and get rid of the many "ah"s and "uhm"s.

Paper at Springer