KIWI Project Partners, Pt.6: Salzburg Research

Please forgive me that the key player is now getting the last mention in my little ‘KIWI Project Partners’ series: Salzburg Research has actually the biggest share of responsibility within KIWI, as they are home to the Project Office consisting of Sebastian Schaffert (coordination, planning and controlling), Julia Eder (dissemination and communication) and Ursula Atzlinger (administration). But most importantly, they have also developed IkeWiki, which is the semantic wiki system KIWI is going to build upon. As those who have been following this series will know already: A semantic wiki is a wiki that allows users to annotate pages and to enhance links between pages with semantic annotations. IkeWiki is also intended as a tool for knowledge engineers:

The “Ike” in IkeWiki is the Hawaiian word for “knowledge”. That is because the purpose of IkeWiki is to be an easy to use, collaborative tool that guides knowledge engineers in the process from unstructured informal texts over semi-formal knowledge in thesauri and taxonomies, to knowledge represented in a formal language or ontology. Our aim is that domain experts who are not proficient in the rather complicated tools and languages (like Protege and OWL) used on the Semantic Web are nonetheless able to formalise their domain knowledge and make it accessible by other Semantic Web applications. [Source]

You can download the pdf of Sebastian’s article IkeWiki – A Semantic Wiki for Collaborative Knowledge Management here. Another project by Salzburg Research that was recently the subject of revived interest after OpenCalais recommended using it as a desktop RDF explorer is RDF-Gravity. RDF-Gravity is a tool for visualising RDF/OWL Graphs/ ontologies, offering nice features such as graph visualizatio, generating views from RDQL queries, definition of global and local filters, full text search etc. Here is an example of an RDF-Gravity visualization:

It’s really worth taking a look at Salzburg Research’s impressive research project list – ImportNet and QVIZ are, for instance, two more that are relevant to the area of semantic technologies and knowledge management.
Further support to Salzburg Research’s KiWi team is coming from Andreas Gruber, Szaby Grünwald and Rolf Sint. Andreas already contributed to the development of IkeWiki and did further research in the area of semantically enhanced learning tools and open educational resources. Szaby has an interdisciplinary background: He first studied music and then proceeded to study computer science. At Salzburg Research, he contributes to the LIVE – Staging of Media Events project. Rolf is currently finishing his master’s thesis at the Dept. of Computer Sciences at Salzburg University. He completed his internship at Salzburg Research and is going to enhance the scope of KiWi activities in particular in its exploitation phase.

So the last day of the KIWI Kick-off meeting is about to come to an end – thank you, Julia, Sebastian and Ursula for the superb organisation of the event, and thanks to everyone for staying focused during the dawn to dusk sessions!