Sebastian’s Blog & Website

Archive for September, 2009

My research and knowledge workers

Just had a very interesting conversation on how my research could help knowledge workers, e.g., people responsible for producing documentation in large corporations.

I have to say, I am glad that whatever I wrote here helped someone make this association with their work to my research. To be frank, when I invented notitio.us 2 years ago, knowledge workers were among those people I was thinking about.

(more…)


My PhD Viva Voce on Video

Few days ago I found enough time to write about the last stages of my PhD process, namely my viva voce and what followed afterwards.

A friend of mine, Lukasz, told me that he still had the videos he recorded during my presentation. He was so kind to publish them on Vimeo.

Here they are:

Sebastian’s PhD Deffence 1 from Lukasz Porwol on Vimeo.

(more…)


Tutorial on Semantic Digital Libraries at ICSD’09

Last week I have travelled to Trento, Italy.

I was invited by the organizers of the International Conference for the Semantic Web and Digital Libraries (ICSD’09) to give a full-day tutorial on Semantic Digital Libraries.

The key goal of this conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners working on solutions that span together these two worlds: Semantic Web and Digital Libraries. Even though these two research lines have so much in common, getting a joint mind set proved to be quite bit of a problem.

(more…)


My PhD Viva Voce (a.k.a PhD thesis defense)

Few months ago (in May) I had to face the most important point on my way to PhD – the viva voce (i.e., “thesis defense”).
I could not get myself around posting about that, mostly due to many activities related to our startup and to the final procedures related to the thesis itself.

Now, as my PhD thesis manuscript has reached the camera ready version, has been copy-edited (thanks Miechelle and Andrzej), printed, hard-bound (thanks Lukasz and Iza), and submitted (thanks Hilda for taking over from there), I can finally devote some free mind-cycles to a not-so-strictly-phd-related matters, e.g., taking care about my blog, which was not “watered” for quite some time.

As it was getting closer and closer to the this point in time, I felt like I had to finally let you all know how it went. So here is the story; I will take from where I left it in May, a week before the viva voce.

We (Ewelina was with me all the way to support and help me) flew in to Cork and then went up to Galway just before the weekend (May 16th-17th). I longed to see all our friends in Galway, but … first things first – I had to polish up my presentation for the viva (thanks Stefan for your valuable comments).
On Saturday we picked up Daniel Schwabe from the Shannon airport and visited the Bunratty Castle near Limerick. On Sunday, my second reviewer – prof. Henryk Krawczyk, arrived in Galway.

(more…)