Archive for category Trips
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.
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.
EuroSPI 2010
Last week (September 1 – 3, 2010) I have been in Grenoble, France. That was the location for the 17th Conference of European Systems & Software Process Improvement and Innovation (EuroSPI² 2010). The organizers focus on embracing industry, with speakers and audience equally being researchers and practitioners (Keynotes by Ivar Jacobson, Andreas Riel and Cristina Romcea).
At this conference I presented a paper that I wrote together with my supervisor: Codified vs. Personalized – A Vertical Approach to the Dilemma of the Knowledge Management Strategies.
We introduce the principle and a prototype (based on KiWi) to make use of both knowledge management strategies in the same company, but each on different vertical organizational layers. While the top management level follows a codified knowledge management strategy is the development team able to apply a personalized approach [1].
It was my very first paper, so I was a bit nervous. This might also be the reason why I unintendedly extended the scheduled ten minutes for the presentation (see the slides below) slightly. The 32 people audience however seemed very interested and we had a nice discussion about the feasibility of a Wiki in a professional context afterwards.
The conference in general was a success for me. Not only gained I important experience of my first paper presentation for my PhD, but I also got to know many interesting people and had a number of fruitful discussions. Plus I had the opportunity to see the sun again.
[1] Karsten Jahn & Peter Axel Nielsen. »Codified vs. Personalized – A Vertical Approach to the Dilemma of the Knowledge Management Strategies«, 17th EuroSPI² Conference Industrial Proceedings, pages 3.11 – 3.20. Delta, 2010.
SCIS & IRIS 2010
The last few days (August 20 – 24, 2010) I spent participating the Scandinavian Conference of IS & IRIS Seminar in Rebild, a few kilometers outside Aalborg, Denmark. The time was divided into two parts, the first two days were the 1st Scandinavian Conference of IS (SCIS 2010), while the rest of the time was the 33rd IRIS Seminar (IRIS 2010). Even though many people participated both, the two parts were quite different in many aspects.
SCIS
The 1st Scandinavian Conference of Information Systems had the focus on engaged scholarship and was held in single track. Keynote speeches (by Brian Fitzgerald and Jan Pries-Heje), a panel discussion and paper presentations. For each presentation there was an opponent, that prepared comments and a discussion. Papers.
IRIS
The 33rd Seminar for Information Systems Research in Scandinavia (IRIS) was divided into workgroups. Each participant had a paper handed in which was then discussed in the groups, consisting of one (or more) senior and the authors of six papers. Each paper was then discussed by a main opponent followed by a group discussion. Additionally, there were the experiences of recent PhDs presented. These provided a great insight into the doctoral-studies from the other side of the big deadline.
Proceedings.
Personally, I really appreciated the combination of a conference and a workshop like done here. As a junior researcher, that needs a lot of feedback, but also new input from different topics and views, I could obtain both, from the same community and in a short period of time. These four days were filled with interesting input, discussions and views. I got to know many interesting researchers from across Scandinavia and beyond, gained many new insights to and on the field of information systems and received a lot of feedback on my work.
DaRSIS Summer School 2010
I spent the last week (May 2- 8, 2010) as one of 20 PhD students from Denmark, Greece, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Sweden and Germany in a former monastery called Magleås, not far from Copenhagen, Denmark. It was a summer school organized by the Danish Research School for Information Systems (DaRSIS).
The fact that we were too far from the city to leave our very nice place for a few hours made that week rather intense. Our program included lectures in the morning and group work afterwards. During these group sessions everybody’s project was discussed in detail. Additionally we could sign up for one-on-one discussions with the faculty members in the evening.
The two guests were Geoff Walsham (Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge) and Robin Williams (Research Centre for Social Sciences, The University of Edinburgh). Apart from their lectures (two each) they mixed with the rest of the faculty members, namely:
- Kim Normann Andersen (Center of Applied IT, Copenhagen Business School)
- Keld Bødker (Department of Communication, Roskilde University)
- Erling Havn (Department of Management Engineering Work, Technology and Organisation, Technical University of Denmark)
- Tina Blegind Jensen (Department of Informatics, Copenhagen Business School)
- Finn Kensing (Center for IT Innovation University of Copenhagen)
- Pernille Kræmmergaard (Center for IT-Management, Aalborg University)
- Peter Axel Nielsen (Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University)
I managed to talk to most of the faculty members and the other students in detail. The feedback that I gained was quite enormous and I actually learned a lot during that time.
One of the core statements that followed us for the whole week was a question asked by Geoff Walsham on the first day: So what?!
Researchers should always be able to justify their choices and be able to point out their contributions. Based on these thoughts were we discussing about methods and theory. I gained a lot of insights from different perspectives. The whole course led to a rather long list of fascinating topics, many interesting contacts and conversations and, not to be forgotten, to the idea of this blog.
Now I will work my way through the notes I made through the last week and start reading…