Exporting a Word Library to LaTeX/BibTex
Writing a thesis is fun. But you want to minimize the risks that might force you to start over. One of which is the choice of tool. I am a fan of MS Word and started writing it there. But apparently I am facing it’s limits…
My thesis currently has around 100 pages, yet a few chapters to come. It is constructed through several different documents that are included into one. All that worked fine so far, but I started noticing some hick-ups. The creation of the complete document and its indexes takes longer and longer. And one time, the structure messed up and I had to rework the master document.
Finishing my thesis with word is surely possible. But I don’t want to risk troubles. I therefore began having a look at Latex. Seems legit. It’s always good to have options.
Now, I have to confess, that I never worked with Latex until recently. Converting my Word-documents into Latex-files took some effort. The main problem for me was the library of my references. I handled the sources of my work in Word. There are probably better solutions, but it’s easy to use and provides everything I need.
Except for an export feature…
No way I would create all the entries manually for my Latex bibliography. Instead I wrote a stylesheet that makes Word create a bibliography in BibTex format (Details regarding the Bibliography Management). Now I can simply copy and paste my library from one system to the other. The only problem is, that the library is full of characters that have to be escaped in Latex. Because I didn’t want to do that manually either, I created a script for that, too.
Here’s how you can export your MS Word sources and references and import them to a BibTex library:
- Download this stylesheet: Word2Bibtex
- Save it here: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\Bibliography\Style
- Start Word and change the style of your bibliography to “Bibtex Export”.
- Copy the bibliography that word creates for you.
- Substitute the special characters using this script: The Substitutor
- Use the result for your BibTex library.
- Done.
I hope it helps you, as it helped me. Find both also on my stuff-page.
The Wiki Way
Ward Cunningham was searching for a new way of collaboration while he was cooperating on the Design Patters book by the Gang of Four. He came up with a very simple web application for collaboration. Legend has it that Cunningham attended a conference in Honolulu while he was working on his system. And when the shuttle bus at the airport arrived, he had a name for it. The bus transfer is called “wiki wiki”, after the Hawaiian word for very quick.
That’s how he called his system: The wiki wiki web.
Anyhow, a wiki system, as it is called now, allows users to add and edit content of web pages in a very easy and quick way. The users however do not have to be afraid that any changes might delete content. Every saved version of a page is stored in a history and users can easily step back to an older state of the page.
This carefree editing became known as the wiki way, a term that stands for simplistic collaboration without demands of page ownership or other restricting principles.
While the original wiki is still online (the WikiWikiWeb), other people and organizations published systems on their own and developed the idea to further levels (find an overview in the wiki matrix). Especially in the open source community wikis were often used for group collaboration. But soon the industry discovered the power of this simple tool. Today, wikis are commonly used for knowledge sharing and information exchange in many organizations. There’s a nice introduction to wikis in the workplace, even best practices are described in wiki patterns.
When I talk to people about wikis, coming from industry, one concern is formulated way more often than anything else. The management level is often really afraid of wiki vandalism, i.e., users posting wrong information. There are usually two replies to that:
- Users in a corporate wiki have to log in. Hence every change carries the name. And usually people don’t like being spotted as vandals.
- Different studies (e.g., by IBM Research) on the english Wikipedia show that other users fix wrong information on pages, within minutes.
Especially the first argument shows that wikipedia is not a good example for a wiki in an organization. It is by far the most popular one, but hardly any of the users have ever edited a page. The second one however shows that the community effect is strengthened through a wiki. And even though statistics show that Wikipedia is of higher quality than traditional dictionaries, there is always a degree of uncertainty. I want to tell the story of one of these, beacause I actually find it hilarious. It also describes the danger of wikis that is sometimes overlooked.
Berolinism is more than just a dialect, it covers also specific words for buildings or sign, like “washing machine” for the chancellor building or the “palace of tears” for the buildings of the border crossing Friedrichstraße. Many of these, claiming insiders, are used by the tourism industry only. One of these insiders is Andreas Kopietz, journalist for the Berlin news paper “Berliner Zeitung”.
On February 16, 2009, his “second glas of red wine” entered the following fact:
Before the Berlin wall came down, the Karl-Marx-Allee was known as Stalin’s Bathroom, due to its significant tiles.
He decided to leave the joke and observes what happens. It got approved by a content administrator from another part of Germany and since then the term began to spread. In the beginning it was mostly tourism companies that used it, later blogs and travel guides jumped in. Then in 2010 even the bigger news portals mentioned the term. But when his own paper used it in early 2011, the author tried to correct his hoax, it was not allowed. Wikipedia admins undid his changes with the reason: That term can be found everywhere, it is true!
His article in the Berliner Zeitung: Wie ich Stalins Badezimmer erschuf German
The Wikipedia page: Karl-Marx-Allee German
There is a nice cartoon summing up the process: xkcd – Citogenesis
The Experience Factory
During the literature study of my Ph.D. thesis I came across an interesting concept, which I would like to briefly write about here. Even before the term knowledge management became popular, Victor R. Basili presented his experience factory [1].
The principle behind that is that a software developing organization should gather the gained experience and make it accessible to learn from it in the future. To archive that, the whole idea builds upon a division of responsibilities. On the one hand there is the project organization, which covers the project work and tasks. On the other hand is the experience factory, which encapsulates the whole experience recording and leveraging for the whole organization.
In the experience factory all kinds of experience that can be externalized and made available are analysed and synthesised. That includes the outcome of project reviews or documentation. This is then taken and bundled into standardized packages, in order to make the experience easier to access. Developers can thus access these experience packages in the experience base, once they feel the need for further input. At the end of every learning process, the developer has to feed the gained insights back into the experience base, to make it richer. The methodology thus applies the two basic activities in knowledge management: collecting experience and learning to improve.
The experience factory is a widely known concept and implemented in different organizations. The most famous one is the Software Engineering Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which documents a dramatic increase of reuse across different projects [2]. It can be seen though, that it is difficult to implement and contains a huge organizational overhead. But the principles applied make a lot of sense. It is worth thinking about it, I suppose.
[1] Victor R. Basili. »Software Development: A Paradigm for the Future«, Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 89), 1989.
[2] Victor R. Basili and Gianluigi Caldiera. »Improve Software Quality by Reusing Knowledge and Experience«, Sloan Management Review, Fall 1995.
The KiWi Project
My PhD studies were held within a project, funded by the European Commission: The KiWi Project – Knowledge in a Wiki
Within this project the participants created a wiki-based collaboration system, utilizing the theories of the semantic web. The consortium consisted from Brno University of Technology (Czech Republic), Logica (Aalborg, Denmark), Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (Germany), Oracle/Sun (Prague, Czech Republic), Salzburg Research (Austria), Semantic Web Company (Vienna, Austria) and Aalborg University (Denmark). The project was organized in the developing branch and two use cases, where the possibilities and benefits in two companies should be investigated. My research was located in one of these, the Use Case on Software Project Management Knowledge with Logica.
Parts of the KiWi core development were the so called Enabling Technologies. These provide certain features to the KiWi platform, namely Information Extraction, Personalization & Adaptation, Querying & Reasoning and Reason Maintenance.
Since March 1st is the project over. The KiWi has landed. I was part of the consortium’s representatives at the final review meeting on Monday at the European Union’s buildings in Luxembourg. And even though their final official statements will be part of a report that is yet to come, I believe that generally the project can be valued quite positive and successful.
Not only has the KiWi project been very exciting, it also provided a lot of opportunities. I was able to meet and work with all these interesting people across Europe. And I also got in touch with (for me) new and fascinating topics. I’m grateful for that and say: Thank you KiWi!
The KiWi however is far from dead. During the project a community began to be formed. Moderated by the people at Salzburg Research the KiWi system takes off to its second version soon. If you want to participate in the open source world, have a look at the KiWi Community.
Knowledge… what is that?
You can’t really be involved with knowledge management without asking: What is knowledge? Well, knowledge is probably one of the oldest concepts of mankind. Ancient philosophers already tried to define it and built a whole theory (epistemology) around. I would like to point out a very nice description by Davenport & Pruzak in their book “Working Knowledge” [1]. This blog post however is my own explanation of knowledge.
In the field of my studies, knowledge is hardly defined, but described and delimited from information and data; you can’t really separate one from the other. That is also why it is commonly referred to as the pyramid of knowledge, as one builds up to the other.
Data is raw information. When you fill out a form, you insert data; numbers and values. Data is usually handled in tables or lists, be it in databases, in spread sheets or form-based applications. Note that data is always pure. It can be the measurement results, without being aware of the context. The data itself does not contain any hint on what was measured, how or why that was done.
Information is data in a context. When you draw a diagram utilizing data, you create information; data sets with their connection and meaning. In order to make sense out of data a background or a context is needed. This correlation can be expressed in articles or diagrams, but also speeches. Note that though the content of a piece of information might be subjective, information as such is the same for anyone and thus objective. It presents description of the data.
Knowledge is processed information. When you access information and understand it, you create knowledge; personal insight. Knowledge is always something individual, which you sometimes cannot even express (tacit knowledge). Relating information to personal experience or understanding creates new knowledge, this process has names like learning, practicing, organizing or judging. Note that knowledge always happens within or between human beings. It is therefore always subjective and cannot be shared or transferred directly.
The data-information-knowledge chain can be accessed in both ways. Contextualizing will get you from data to information and from information to knowledge, while abstraction will get you back.
Generally is the use of language restricting, when we use the concept of knowledge. The English grammar forces us to use knowledge as something you can own. But knowledge should be seen more as a process that needs to be used.
[1] Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Pruzak. »Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know«, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998.
KiWi Release Party
The 14th of October 2010 was a very special date for the KiWi project: After more than two and a half years of development version 1.0 of our collaborative knowledge management software was published. To celebrate that, the project organized a release party in the planetarium in Vienna, Austria.
It was a very nice evening that featured speeches of Ross Gardler (Vice President Community, Apache Software Foundation) and David Ayers (Free Software Foundation Europe), followed by a demonstration of KiWi by Sebastian Schaffert (KiWi Project Lead). After the official part, the guests and the project participants mixed and there was time and space for many interesting conversations.
KiWi is a wiki that combines technologies like the semantic web, information extraction, a recommendation component and a rules engine. The project’s target was knowledge management for software companies; the system addresses the domain problems and assists in solving common problems. But during the development KiWi became much more than that. It is now an open-source development platform for building semantic social media applications.
To make sure, that KiWi does not die, once the funding is over, the project makes some effort to form a community. The release party was thus also an opportunity to get in touch with the project team. We want everybody to be part of KiWi. So, if you feel like, use your creativity and skills to make that bird fly or simply use it, we are here to motivate and support you.
Engaged Scholarship
During the summer school and the conference I recently attended, the topic was engaged scholarship. Since Van de Ven published his book [1] in 2007, this topic has been broadly discussed, especially in the Scandinavia information systems community. Reason enough for me to take a closer look at the book and a brief explanation, why it makes a lot of noise in northern Europe.
Any researcher’s target is to advance the body of knowledge, but also to enlighten practice of a profession. The gap between theory and practice is a sign that this did not always work satisfactorily. With engaged scholarship Van de Ven describes an approach that should help this dilemma. He wants to support the collaboration between researchers and practitioners. Engaged scholarship does not understand research as a solitary exercise, but as a combined effort.
the more complex the problem or the bigger the research question, the greater the level of engagement is required of researchers from different disciplines and practitioners with different functional experiences.
Page 18
Four research activities should take part during a research, according to his ideas: problem formulation, theory building, research design and problem solving. He points out that these are not held in any specific order. Sometimes, it even makes sense to have a two in parallel. Additionally it can be beneficial or even required to conduct several iterations and revisions of the research activities.
As space is very limited here, I can only provide a brief overview and point out to read the book. It’s worth it!
Problem Formulation. To describe the problem properly is a vital part of every research. The target of any problem formulation should be the research question. It provides the implications for the next steps and can be used later to evaluate the work. Not only is this commonly the first task in the engaged scholarship process, but also influences it the following ones strongly.
Theory Building. As the theory in engaged scholarship has to be connected to reality, it is very important to choose a fitting one. This usually involves three activities: Conceiving or creating a theory, constructing or elaborating a theory and justifying or evaluating a theory.
Research Design. It is important to understand, that the theory is not the same as the model. A research model instead acts like an instrument to link data with the theory. As theory cannot be observed directly, a research model is designed instead. Dependent on the research question two basic epistemologies can be used. One is the variance model, which is outcome-driven, and the other one is the process model, which is event-driven.
Problem Solving. The researcher’s present is organized that every research leads to a form of written and/or presentation. It is assumed that work will be used, if it is good/influential enough. It can be observed, that much research is hardly used by other researchers (low citations is common) and in practice (difficulties to find and to adopt). The important thing is thus to find appropriate ways to communicate the findings of a research by engaging the intended audience.
While the kind of research that Van de Ven describes as engaged scholarship might be a bit revolutionary for the American information systems research community, this is actually common practice in Scandinavia. Lars Mathiassen and Peter Axel Nielsen analyzed the articles in the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS) and compare their research process to the engaged scholarship process [2]. They found that the Scandinavian IS research tradition is in line with engaged scholarship and many papers applied its values and principles long before the book was published. For further information I would like to refer to the author and his blog entry.
Personally, I enjoyed reading the book. Not only because I noticed to be in an engaged scholarship myself, but also because Van de Ven describes the details of conducting the process in depth and comprehensive.
[1] Andrew H. Van de Ven. »Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research«, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
[2] Lars Mathiassen and Peter Axel Nielsen. »Engaged Scholarship in IS Research«, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, Vol. 20, No. 2, Pages 3-20, 2008.