After lots of coding, extensive testing (thanks a lot to all the beta testers in the KM group of DFKI!) and unexpected last minute problems (as expected, of course) we launched C-LINK today!

C-LINK is a web based tool that allows attendees of the KI 2008 conference to organize their conference.

Amongst others, features are:

• Individual conference planner (create your personal conference schedule)
• Personalized recommendations of presentations
• Meet the participants (profile matching with regard to research interests)
• Chat, Whiteboard
• Sharing digital resources (documents, presentations, etc.) among participants

As you can imagine (why else would you find this post here!?), it is based on ALOE. For the recommendations, DynaQ is used in a combination with myCBR.

We’re very excited and look forward to what happens now!

Shame on me, I didn’t blog for such a long time, although (or maybe: because) such a lot of things happened. E.g., we are partner in
the European project MACE for several months now - they use ALOE as a social layer to allow commenting, rating, tagging, and personal collections of resources. Furthermore, ALOE is used as the basis for the C-LINK system (a web based tool to support conference attendees) that will be released in two weeks. The refactoring is almost done, so a new ALOE version will be available very soon. And so on, and so on, and so on…

In the moment, I’m attending the TRIPLE-I in Graz, where I will present some work done by Rafael Schirru, Michael Kockler and me. It’s called “Providing Multi Source Tag Recommendations in a Social Resource Sharing Platform”. Slides will be available soon, as well as detailed information about MACE, C-LINK, the refactoring…so stay tuned!

Exciting times ahead! Tomorrow we leave to Berlin for this years re:publica. Giving talks, hanging out with the German digital intelligencia and having serious fun. An excellent opportunity to attract the early adopters to try out OPENEER. The first Open Collection for Extrem Emotional Reactions to Music, a Web2.0 style platform gathering personal experiences with music on a worldwide scale. Why? If you think about designing and implementing the next generation Uber-recommenders you encounter a major bottleneck: There is few knowledge about the reasons for chills, thrills, strong emotional reactions when listening to contemporary music including the alignment of personal episodes to the lyrics. Although some good research in musicpsychology has been undertaken to decode these effects with respect to structural features in classical music, we still miss a large scale knowledge base.

With OPENEER we want to offer the possibility to volunteers to share their personal experiences in order to enable research based on this groundwork. Call it crowdsourcing or collective intelligence, we dont mind, we GO FOR IT!

OPENEER is here! Play around with it!

http://openeer.dfki.de

Last Friday, our intern Martin Uhlíř left us after spending 6 months in the ALOE team.

Martin did some great work for ALOE, we thank him a lot and wish him all the best for his time in Cordoba!

ALOE will be presented at CeBIT 2008 in Hannover this week! You can find us at the DFKI stand (B37) in hall 9. Rafael Schirru will be there from Monday to Wednesday, and you can meet me on Friday, where I will also give a talk about some of the ideas behind ALOE as part of the so called “future talks” in the CeBIT future parc. The talk will be in German and is called “Schöne neue Metadatenwelt - Experten, Computer und User Generated Content”. It will take place on Friday from 4.30-5.00 pm.

By the way: A CeBIT instance of ALOE with resources about the DFKI exhibits, future talks and much more can be found here. Check in!

The current version of ALOE provides new functionalities on the user interface side as well as on the application programming interface side. For the user interface the support for closed groups has been implemented. Whenever a user wants to join a closed group she has to request authorization for the membership from the group administrator. Group administrators can then decide whether they grant or deny access to the group. Further resource previews have been enhanced by status bars which show the user how often a resource has been viewed and how it has been rated in average.

In order to avoid misuse of the system a user has to confirm her e-mail address which she has provided with the registration. For this purpose she receives an e-mail with a confirmation link which she has to click. Her account will then be activated subsequently.

On the application programming interface side possibilities have been provided to reference licenses which are associated with published resources via URI. For the Creative Commons licenses which are supported by the system shortcuts are provided additionally. If you plan to make use of this new functionality please consider our javadoc documentation of the Web service interface. In order to make our Web service easier to use for arbitrary clients the validation of input parameters has been improved. Optional parameters which have been omitted will be set to appropriate default values.

One of the next steps which has to be performed is the integration of the ALOE bookmarklet that has been implemented by our intern Martin Uhlir. Contributing resources to ALOE will then be even easier than today

Tomorrow (28th November at 11:30am GMT) I will give a talk in Milton Keynes where I’m currently working as a “visiting researcher” at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University UK. The talk is titled “ALOE - an Open and Social Resource and Metadata Hub.” And here’s the abstract:

In this presentation the requirements of a framework for sharing digital resources and metadata to meet the needs of open, flexible e-learning solutions will be discussed.
The changing nature of the Web and its users as observed in recent years clearly establishes the need for new approaches and technologies to fully exploit the potential for working with existing digital resources.
Formal metadata about the resources can be combined with information created in lightweight and user-centric approaches in order to significantly enhance resource descriptions and enable more efficient access to existing knowledge. The ALOE system, currently in development at DFKI, is one such solution and will be presented as a realization of an appropriate framework.

It seems that there won’t be any recording or webcasting, but check out this link, just in any case.

The last two weeks we spent adding (smaller) functionalities to the system and fixing some bugs that were reported by our beta testers. We also changed the encoding in our database which caused us so much trouble in the last weeks. Thanks a lot to David Haase who spent a great amount of effort and care to fix our database problem and save our data. We also integrated the new Ajax functionalities which were implemented by our intern Martin Uhlir.

The new Ajax functionalities are:

• Automatically refreshing number of unread messages on the welcome page.
• Sand glasses on the contribute pages which appear after the contribute button has been clicked.
• Check nickname availability on the registration page.

Furthermore, the following functionalities have been added:

• Stay logged in via cookie.
• Resources can now also be inserted into sets in the contribute step.
• In the lists “Highest Rated” and “Most Viewed” the according values (average rating value and number of views) are displayed.
• Different ranking options for “My resources” and “My favorites”.
• User-definded metadata sets may be deleted by their contributors.
• Users can choose among three different privacy levels for profile details (public, contacts, private).
• New display of member lists.

In the current version of ALOE the group and visibility management have been improved. Still one of three visibility levels can be assigned to a resource (public, group or private). The new feature is that any public resource can be posted to a group. This makes it on the one hand possible to share a resource with members of a certain group and on the other hand the resource is also retrievable for users of the system which are not a member of the according group.

Associating an additional metadata set to a resource in the past required the upload of a file. In ALOE V0.6 such metadata sets can also be associated by referencing a URI. Both kinds of additional metadata sets (files and bookmarks) are displayed on the detail view page of the according resource and can also be accessed from there.

Additionally smaller bugs have been fixed, e.g., the forms in the system can now be navigated easily by using the tab key.