Kicking off the KiWi

Today I am in Salzburg, finding myself in amidst a discussion of possibly global impact: The Knowledge In a Wiki (KiWi) project is about to kick off! Andreas Blumauer, Matthias Samwald and I are right now meeting up with Josef Holy and Henry Story from Sun Microsystems. Josef is an interaction designer, working on social and semantic web applications, blogging because he believes in Web. Henry is a researcher, developer and semantic web evangelist – you’ve probably also come across his blog, The BabelFish Blog, before.

Now imagine these two being in the same room as Andreas and Matthias, discussing a project that:

• aims to develop an advanced knowledge management system based on a semantic wiki
• is especially tailored to the needs of the knowledge-intensive industries
• provides special support for managing tacit knowledge (e.g. knowledge about processes)
• manages distributed knowledge (i.e. distributed across different people and different systems)
• is able to manage different kinds of semantically rich content (e.g. source code, tutorials, documentation, etc)
• considers the needs and preferences of different user roles in terms of content and user interface

Quite impressive, isn’t it? Well, that is exactly what the KiWi application (based on IkeWiki) is supposed to be able to do in the end. Here is the output of the first hour – I was mainly following the discussion, yet was pleased to find that all of them are ‘open source thinkers’ to the effect that advanced users (i.e. non-developers) like me are not left behind:-)

Many thanks already to Sebastian Schaffert and Julia Eder from Salzburg Research for organising this kick-off event!

P.S.: You can download the KIWI factsheet here.