eLITE Project Blog

Socialtext, a startup that offers social software to help people communicate, collaborate, and build have just recently launched an educational kit on enterprise Web 2.0. Use this kit to “gain access to industry analysts’ perspectives on the market, hear from customers about how they are using Enterprise 2.0 technologies today, plus learn more about the technologies that comprise Enterprise 2.0, such as wikis, blogs and RSS”.

http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2008/02/enterprise-20-w.html

Also just a brief reminder that all these links are stored on my delicious page at http://del.icio.us/tadhgnagle. All items relevant to eLearning will be posted under the eLearning tag. You can subscribe to an rss feed of this tag to cut down on irrelevant posts outside of the eLearning scope. If you have any problems implementing this rss feed let me know.

Tadhg

From the 18th of September I participated in the 2nd European Conference on Technology Enchanced Learning, EC-TEL 2007. It took place in Sissi, Crete, Greece.

18th of September was a workshop day. I took part in SIRTEL (Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning) workshop. It was focused on utilising tools like social bookmarking and social networks in e-Learning. Talks were interesting and some of them was relevant to what I’m currently working on (e.g. visualisation of social bookmarks, recommender systems). What is important from DERI and eLite point of view - participants of the workshop was very often mentioning a need of strong semantic background in their research.

Two next days (19th and 20th of September) were a conference days. I gave my presentation in the first of the sessions. I’ve been presenting the paper: “E-Learning on Social Semantic Information Sources” written together with Sebastian, Bill and Jarosław Dobrzański (our former intern) and Tomasz Woroniecki. The presentation went well, there was some interest of the technologies that I’ve presented (proof…).

In other sessions I have always found something interesting. A lot of papers describe collaborative, social and web 2.0 approach to Technology-Enhanced Learning, which was particularly interesting for me. With respect to key notes - they have been given by: Bruce Sterling American since fiction writer and Herman Maurer - Dean of Faculty of Computer Science, Graz University of Technology which is also which is also a s-f writer. The topic of both talks was similar and was quite a visionary. They were considering how will the world and teaching look like in next 5, 10, 20 years. What threads we (as human beings) are and will be facing, how the technology can help/trouble us. At the end, I must admit that this talks were quite unusual for the international TEL conference, but in the other hand that make it very interesting.

Below, I present two photos. One is from a Coffee break and second from Herman Maurer’s talk.

To summarise, making long story short - Good conference with a lot of interesting talks in very nice location.

Adam

On 21 September I had a pleasure to attend the 6th Networked Knowledge Organization Systems and Services (NKOS) Workshop at the 11th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2007) in Budapest.

The workshop was divided in four main parts which focused on different aspects of Knowledge Organization Systems domain:

- The first one concerned Social Tagging. The most interesting presentation in my opinion was the one delivered by Markus Heckner and titled Tagging tagging. A classification model for user keywords in scientific bibliography management systems. It contained many interesting conclusions about the patterns in tags usage from different points of view - e.g. what parts of speech are most often used?; how much of tags are subject related and how much are not? Concrete results of tests that answered these and other questions were really informative.

- The second part was a panel discussion about ISO NP 25964 standard, that is currently being prepared by a group of people really devoted to this project. First, there were some short presentations made by these people then followed by discussion with the participants.

- The third part was called “Implications of online KOS applications”. I was particularly interested in the presentation titled Towards the “webification” of controlled subject vocabulary: A case study involving the Dewey Decimal Classification spoken by Michael Panzer as it concerned some problems with DDC I experienced myself during my work on JOnto

- The fourth and last part concerned mapping and, as I was among the speakers in this part, it was the most important from my point of view. Phillip Mayr showed noteworthy results from a German terminology mapping effort - the project that has been developed for three years now. The researchers working on it made really an outstanding job, as it included finding manually mappings between 124.000 concepts from 25 vocabularies. I hope that one day I would be able to say something similar about JOnto (though in JOnto we use completely different approach as we want to utilize users’ involvement and build mappings automatically). I suppose I wasn’t the only one that was astonished by Phillip’s work, as he was asked the most questions of all speakers. The second presentation in this part was Bernhard Haslhofer’s Uniform SPARQL Access to Interlinked (Digital Library) Sources. Last but not least - it was my turn. I presented results of work made so far with JOnto. Unfortunatelly, these were not any concrete evaluation conclusions, but rather extending JOnto with new taxonomies support, refining its interface and defining the mapping algorithm’s steps. I felt that the presentation was received favorably. Only two questions I was asked were to made me explain some details of the algorithm.

Detailed programme of the NKOS workshop can be found here . You can also download from there all the presentations that was delivered during it.

This was the first international conference I was participating in and as such I experienced it as a great event. The organization of the workshop was great and I would like to thank all the people responsible for it. As well as I would like to thank DERI that it gave me an opportunity to attend this workshop.

I am happy to inform you that the following papers have been accepted for the Semantic Web Challenge 2007 in conjunction with ISWC 2007:

* Gzella and Kruk: notitio.us - Semantic Information Discovery, Browsing and Sharing
* Kruk, Woroniecki, Gzella, Dąbrowski: JeromeDL – a Semantic Digital Library

In other words, it means that our research prototypes achieved stage at which they are recognized as a worth-to-promote applications of semantic web technologies.
We will present both in November, at ISWC 2007 in Korea.

There is no doubt that innovation, innovation, innovation has become the new mantra of businesses today. But why is this so? Is this just one of the many fads that has been hyped up by consultant rhetoric as a marketing ploy for their services, or is it something that businesses should take as serious as their next quarter revenue forecast? Anecdotal evidence suggests that innovation has always been an important issue. All one has to do is cite the Commissioner of the U.S. Office of Patents in 1899 (“Everything that can be invented has been invented”), to show that innovation is not a new phenomena but also the tendency for people to underestimate its potential. Today, businesses recognise innovation as a key weapon in their competitive strategy. Evidence from a 2006 IBM study of 750 CEO’s highlighted that 65% of the CEO’s were planning significant change in their businesses with 22% planning to implement moderate changes. The question that arises is, why all the fuss now? As we have seen innovation has always been an implicit driver of business, so why should business leaders stand up and push innovation as a strategic issue instead of just letting it happen organically as it has done in the past. The answer to this lies in two interconnected factors, technology and globalisation.

One cannot but succumb to the “global village” impact of today. Businesses, customers and employees alike are fully aware that the markets they operate within are far from local. Fuelled by the information and technological revolution of the internet, we have the potential to expand our market and tap the world’s supply of customers. Consequently, we no longer compete with our geographically close counter-parts, but also with the planets best and brightest. As Gary Hamel, one of the leading thinkers in innovation put it, “out there in some garage is an entrepreneur who’s forging a bullet with your company’s name on it. You’ve got one option now – to shoot first. You’ve got to out-innovate the innovators.”

The most obvious way of shooting first is adopting new technologies to create new or better products. With such technological change occurring in industry today, new technologies are documented everyday on the web with their business model implementations (eg. See this article). What is interesting is the use of the business model as a communication medium. It easily outlines the potential of a new technology by wrapping it in a complete business case exposing all the benefits plus potential chinks in its proposition. As an advocate of the business model, I not only think it can shed light on opportunities for new technologies but also create a vision between technology and business domains. Its main benefit is that it will act as a guide through the many decisions needed in bringing new technologies to market but also minimise the guaranteed misconceptions between technology and business camps.

I’m happy to announce that MarcOnt team managed to release MarcOnt Portal version 1.0. The main focus of this release was to provide a stable version of MarcOnt Portal for the users to test. The application can be accesed here. The source code is available on the sourceforge.

MarcOnt Portal is application dedicated for woroking groups. It allows collaborative development of ontologies, thus providing easily accesible (web portal) features for collaboration and development of ontologies.

MAIN FEATURES:
1) Ontology editor
- Editing uploaded ontology
- Creating an empty ontology model

a) Functionality concerning classes provides features such as:
- managing classes
- managing hierarchy of classes (adding/editing/removing superclasses)
- adding/removing comments to classes
- adding/removing disjoint or equivalent classes

b)Functionality related to properties:
- managing properties (adding/editing new properties)
- adding/removing domains of properties
- adding/removing ranges of properties
- adding/removing superproperties
- viewing inverse properties

c) Functionality involving adding and removing various namespaces

2) Ontology mapping tool (Rulegenerator)
- view of source and target ontologies (classes and properties)
- view of mapping rules
- upload of files with mediation rules
- editing premises and consequents of mediation rules
- support for regular expressions

3) other features
- Upload of ontologies built by users in external editors
- Ontology visualizations - every ontology can be visualized as an interactive graph.
- view of ontology source code (OWL, N-triples, N3, RDF-triples)

4) Ontology versioning
- every change is tracked and stored in versioned repository
- user can browse ontology repository
- version are stored in a manner similar to forum (threads, versions, suggestions - hierarchy)
- user can perform diff (semantic and sintactic) on two ontologies chosen from repository tree

5) Ontology visualizations
- every ontology can be visualized as an interactive graph.

6) REST- based Service Oriented Architecture with semantic descriptions of Web Services
- Representational State Transfer compatibility (non-SOAP Web Service approach)
- Semantic Web Service description provided by OWL-S ontology file for each service.
- Four HTTP methods supported due to REST, requests body content supported with RDF format
- Easiness of building new services
- Easiness of service-service dialog and service discovery
- Reference to SOA documentation http://wiki.marcont.org/REST/

Maciej Dabrowski.

I am very pleased to announce the FOAFRealm 2.0.
The installation package should are available at the project web site at sourceforge.net.



Release changes
• You can create an invited only network (Orkut style).

• Improved web-browser compatibility issues.

• In contrast to the beta version, this release works with IE5++ and Opera 9++

• Added simple foafbrowser

• The code of the simple captcha is slightly rewritten, so now it can work on linux servers.

• 3 to 5 times shorter loading time because dojo is removed.

Minor problems

• Problems with the SMTP server
• The none picture now work

• Improved DIVs at the login page

• New layout of the buttons (now dojo is only for validation purposes)

• Added refresh captcha (still not perfect)

• After save you have to wait 10 seconds for another try

• The friend profile is updated after a change

Developers info
• The main part of the db module is rewritten.

• No more dependent on a tomcat/lib/(sesame jars)

• Now it uses own sesame jars and thus to make it work, 

• Most likely you have to remove all sesame jars from tomcat/lib

Installation notes

1. Download the installation package.

2. Extract the war files: dfoaf-ui.war, dfoaf.war

2.1 Put those files to your tomcat/webapps folder

2.2 Download foafrealm.jar and foafrealm-toolbox.jar and put them to your tomcat/lib folder

3. You need also an RDF repository. The system was tested with sesame 1.2.5. If you decide to use sesame, you also need to put sesame.war to your tomcat/webapps

4. Run tomcat the wars will be automatically extracted.

5. The webapps need some customization.

5.1 You have to set up the repository. 

e.g you can add the following entry to your sesame/WEB-INF/system.conf file:
 



<repository id="foafrealm-repository">
     <title>Native RDF repository</title>
         
     <sailstack>
        
          <sail class="org.openrdf.sesame.sailimpl.sync.SyncRdfRepository"/>
           
          <sail class="org.openrdf.sesame.sailimpl.nativerdf.NativeRdfRepository">
          
                 <!-- The directory for storing the native SAIL's data files. -->
                
                 <param name="dir" value="/tmp/nativerdf/"/>
                
                 <!-- The triple indexes that should be used -->
                 
                 <param name="triple-indexes" value="spo,ops"/>
           
          </sail>
        
     </sailstack>

     <acl worldReadable="true" worldWritable="true">
              
              <user login="testuser" readAccess="true" writeAccess="true"/>
       
     </acl>

</repository>  

5.2 Now you can change to default settings, if you use a different port than 8080 and/or address than localhost the soa service address is in foafrealm.jar which is in your tomcat/lib foafrealm.db, dfoaf-ui/WEB-INF/classes/foafrealm.properties - dfoaf-ui 
 
You have to have a look at the application parameters and set them to correct values.

storageDir=/tmp/dwn2/

inviteFriends=true

inviteOnly=false

SOAaddress=http://localhost:8080/dfoaf/soa/
confirmRegistration=true
localShowPictureAddress=http://localhost:8080/dfoaf-ui/ShowPicture
registerCredentials=cmVnaXN0ZXJAZm9hZnJlYWxtLm9yZzpjaGFuZ2VpdCEh

• Create the storage dir at the path that storageDir variable points to.

• Make sure that the ShowPicture servlet address is correct.

• The SOAaddress should point to the dfoaf.war extraction point.

• The other parameters allows you to control the registration process.



5.3 SMTP configuration.
To make confirm registration and forgot password work you have to edit the SMTP parameters. The parameters are in the mail.properties file located in the foafrealm-toolbox.jar


6. Now you can visit http://localhost:8080/dfoaf-ui/

7. Using FOAFRealm in your own tomcat application is pretty easy.
You can just extend the dfoaf-ui project, or copy-it to your web-application.

You should use it by calling jsp-tags:

-profile - to access the user’s profile e.g.


<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"%>

<%@ taglib prefix="foafrealm" tagdir="/WEB-INF/tags"%> 

<foafrealm:profile />

-logout - to expose the logout button


<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"%>

<%@ taglib prefix="foafrealm" tagdir="/WEB-INF/tags"%> 

<foafrealm:logout redirect="index.jsp"/>

 -tomcat - to perform the tomcat authentication e.g.


<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"%>

<%@ taglib prefix="foafrealm" tagdir="/WEB-INF/tags"%>

<link href="${pageContext.request.contextPath}/css/foafclient.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />

<foafrealm:tomcat />


You need to edit your web-application context in the tomcat/conf/server.xml file
and add realm and valve, for example:
 


        .....
           
          <Context className="org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext" cachingAllowed="true"
              docBase="myapp" path="/myapp" 
                        
              privileged="true" reloadable="true" > 
                                   
            <Realm className="org.foafrealm.realm.FOAFRealm" debug="99"/> 
                                   
            <Valve className="org.foafrealm.realm.FOAFValve" debug="99"/>
           
          </Context> 

        .....
     
      </Host>
   
    </Engine>
 
  </Service>

</Server> 

8. Enjoy,

I would like to thank all the people who gave me their feedback, especially Adam (SOA, comments on UI), Władek (RDF2Go), Peyman, and the everyone from Corrib and FOAFRealm groups.

Sławomir and Sebastian

I’ve just release the latest version of Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering component. It is available to download from the sourceforge.net.
The web application in this package is very similar to the bookmarking service that is part of the notitio.us service (http://notitio.us/bookmarks).

Main features available in this SSCF release:

• bookmarks are organised in a hierarchical tree
• browsing friends bookmarks
• copy/paste/cut for bookmarks and directories
• setting policies for each directory
• semantic annotations for each directory
• support for web bookmarks, bibliographic bookmarks (from JeromeDL), MBB search bookmarks and SIOC formatted data
• del.icio.us bookmarks import and display support

The short description of SSCF installation process is available here on Corrib wiki

adameq

I am very pleased to announce that our article on “MultiBeeBrowse - Accessible Browsing on Unstructured Metadata”, co-authored by Sebastian Ryszard Kruk, Adam Gzella, Władyslaw Bultrowicz, Filip Czaja, Ewelina Kruk has been accepted as a FULL paper to ODBASE’2007 conference.
It was selected as one of 19 from 81 submissions, which gives the conference a pretty good acceptance rate.

We will brush up the paper soon next week (only minor changes required) and publish it to http://library.deri.ie/, and let you know about its location.

I would like to thank everyone who have contributed to this article, especially, our patient and understanding colleagues who helped us with usability testing of MultiBeeBrowse.

–
[12 September 2007 13:55]

We have just published this article at http://library.deri.ie/resource/liDtVo9N

I’ve just added presentations from the eLITE Open Day.
They are available now on the eLite web site: elite.deri.ie. You can access them when logged in.

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