Yves Raimond finished his Ph.D at Queen Mary and moved on to BBC. To lay his hands on the real digital world of music experiences. His baby DBTune is an exciting way to use the Linking Open Data resources with a special focus on music. I thought it would be a good idea to meet him and discuss about the potential for combining DBTune with OPENEER. Around our discussion Yves arranged a seminar talk where I presented OPENEER to a group of BBC engineers and designers.

The next day I did the same thing for the researchers at Goldsmiths. Daniel Müllensiefen, an expert for symbolic music features, is currently expanding his work on melody features towards emotional findings. Again I received valuable expert feedback about features for future releases of OPENEER.

Once again, ALOE will be presented at the CeBIT in Hannover next week. You can find us at the DFKI stand (B45) in hall 9. I will be there from Monday to Thursday - just drop by! In the same hall, MACE (using ALOE as the backbone for community functionalities) will be presented at the Fraunhofer stand (B36), don’t miss this!

Rafael and me are on tour promoting ALOE - he is presenting the paper “Towards the Combined Use of Metadata to Improve the Learning Experience” (authored by Martin Wolpers, Elia Tomadaki, Rafael and me) at the ICALT in Santander, while I am now in Vienna at ED-MEDIA, soon presenting “An Approach to Enable Collective Intelligence in Digital Repositories” (authored by Martin Wolpers, Elia Tomadaki, and me).
Both papers deal with how ALOE can be used as a social layer on top of existing infrastructures, allowing to aggregate metadata generated in various ways.

It’s always nice to go to Berlin, and when it’s because of the re:publica, that’s even better! The re:publica is a conference for bloggers and other net citizens, and this year’s motto is “Die kritische Masse” - “The critical mass”. The ability of the mass to contribute with criticism is a very interesting topic, of course also in the context of ALOE. The quality of metadata will become more and more important in what is often refered to as the “Web3.0″. How can this metadata be genreated? Do we trust the generators? How can we contribute with different opinions? I will also talk about this in two presentations on Thursday and Friday, slides will be available when I’m back from Berlin!

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!

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.