That was a quick one. I hardly say “Semantic” and we are first month down the road with daily posts at our Semantic School blog.

We have published 21 articles so far. We went from reviewing Semantic Layer Cake to introducing OWL yesterday.

It is to early to tell, but we already heard voices of appreciation. Hopefully, over the next month or so we will gather and teach a large community of people interested in semantic technologies.

If you have not been to Semantic School so far, be sure to visit http://www.semanticschool.com/

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.

Why ? Simply – back than http://notitio.us/, and now http://digi.me/ provides three important features:

1. Users can classify their knowledge using controlled vocabularies (not just tags!).
2. They can create local taxonomies representing their knowledge, using categories they created themselves or that were created by their friends.
3. Users stay up to date by getting recommendations through classifications maintained by others; system also recommends classifications users would not otherwise find within their social network.

In case of producing documentation, a knowledge worker has to (among others):

1. Find appropriate information items that would make up the content of the document being produced.
2. Be aware of related information items to provide accurate references.
3. Be able to find experts (or at least some notes they prepared) in order to solve certain problems described in the documentation.

How do solutions like digi.me can help ?

1. They help knowledge workers organize their knowledge in a more collaborative and structural way.
2. They help to find requested items more easily, including related information.
3. Using recommendations and the social semantic collaborative filtering technique users can find experts  in certain topic.

Where they cannot help ?
The only problem I see at the moment is that digi.me was built to help organize linked content. It is not a CMS solution like JeromeDL. At the same time if a knowledge worker wants to easily tap onto notes produced by a field expert, he/she will need something more than just CMS. I am thinking about Semantic Desktop solutions, especially Nepomuk.

Where can we go from here?
I hope I will be able to investigate this topic much further. It would be very interesting to see a custom build of digi.me, combined with a Nepomuk (or a similar engine) and various user interface components (some of which we have developed within Corrib.org) to improve discovery and managing of information items.

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.

Sebastian’s PhD Defence 2 from Lukasz Porwol on Vimeo.

Sebastian’s PhD Defence 3 from Lukasz Porwol on Vimeo.

Sebastian’s PhD Defence 4 from Lukasz Porwol on Vimeo.

Sebastian’s PhD Defence 5 from Lukasz Porwol on Vimeo.

Sebastian’s PhD Defence 6 from Lukasz Porwol on Vimeo.

Sebastian’s PhD Defence 7 from Lukasz Porwol on Vimeo.

Sebastian’s PhD Defence 8 from Lukasz Porwol on Vimeo.

Sebastian’s PhD Defence 9 from Lukasz Porwol on Vimeo.

Now, you can grill me ….

If you are interested in doing a PhD yourself check a collection online PhD programs.

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.

I have been promoting the idea of Semantic Digital Libraries for 7 years, which is almost as long as any attempts where made in that subject. No wonder, this conference was an important milestone in my research (and evangelization) agenda. Together with my team, I built one of the first (if not the first) prototypes of a semantic digital libraries – the JeromeDL system, gathered a small community around it, presented a series of tutorials on the subject and eventually, published a book on Semantic Digital Libraries. Invitation to this conference was a very nice closure to my PhD research, an important period in the life of each researcher.

I am very pleased with the overall outcome of this edition of my tutorial:

• The turnout for both sessions (presentation and hands-on) was quite nice.
• The questions were very interesting and encouraging.
• I was surprised how smootly the hands-on session went: usually we had all sorts of problems trying to set up JeromeDL/BRICKS/Fedora in such a short time.

I wish there was a video recorded (maybe next time ?), but I hope the slides will do.

Tutorial on Semantic Digital Libraries at ICSD’09

Glosujemy na stronie http://www.xxv.jesienne-spotkania-pti.org/md/proposals/&key=proposals&ord=9 (trzeba sie uprzednio zarejestrowac/zalogowac)

W zeszłym roku moja prezentacja o Zarządzaniu wiedzą w Web 3.0 cieszyła się dużym powodzeniem.

W tym roku szczesliwe numerki to:

• 40 – Wprowadzenie do Web 3.0 (Semantyka i Społeczeństwo)
• 42 –  Szukanie odpowiedzi z wykorzystaniem wyszukiwarek trzeciej generacji
• 46 – Znajdowanie odpowiedzi z wykorzystaniem serwisów społecznościowych

Z góry dziękuję za oddane na mnie głosy.

[UPDATE]

Powyższe 3 tematy uzyskały największą liczbę głosów. Tym samym zajęły pierwsze trzy miejsca. Mam nadzieję, że organizatorzy nie mają mi za złe małego marketingu