Posts Tagged community
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.