Ontology Outreach Advisory Founded

The Ontology Outreach Advisory was officially founded today. It is non-profit organization with the purpose of fostering the application of ontologies in “the real world”. It has grown out of the KnowledgeWeb Network of Excellence. The inaugural executive council consists of Robert Meersman, Theo Mensen and Mustafa Jarrar; first meeting will be in Innbruck beginning of June.

As a founding member I will primarily contribute to the HR chapter, promoting the ontology developments and ontology-based techniques in the HR domain.

Further exploring the concept of Knowledge Maturing: publications at WM 2007

The upcoming Professional Knowledge Management conference WM 2007 at Potsdam will provide the possibility to get a closer look at our ongoing research around the theme of knowledge maturing, which represents a macroscopical phase model for describing interindividual learning processes. The following three publication deal with the issue from different perspective

• The first publication (together with Ronald Maier from the University of Halle-Wittenberg) combines the phase model with an organizational learning model and develops criteria for describing the different phases.Ronald Maier, Andreas Schmidt:
  Characterizing Knowledge Maturing: A Conceptual Process Model for Integrating E-Learning and Knowledge Management
  In: 4th Conference Professional Knowledge Management: Experiences and Visions (WM 07), Workshop on Convergence of Knowledge Management and E-Learning (CKME ‘07), Potsdam, March 2007. PDF
• The second publication, originating from our Wissensnetz project, transfers the idea of knowledge maturing, understood as maturing of knowledge structures in the human mind and corresponding information artifacts, to the level of vocabulary and terminology, i.e., into ontology maturing. This transfer provides interesting insights into real-world ontology-engineering, bridging the tagging and the formal ontology paradigms. Our publication presents a light-weight ontology editor reflecting these ideas in knowledge work processes, but this is only a result at the very beginning.Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt, Valentin Zacharias:
  Ontology Maturing with Lightweight Collaborative Ontology Editing Tools
  In: 4th Conference Professional Knowledge Management: Experiences and Visions (WM 07), Workshop on Productive Knowledge Work (ProKW 07), Potsdam, March 2007, PDF
• The third publication, together with Hans-Jörg Happel from FZI, transfers the idea to software components to software engineering in order to provide new insights into software reuse processes. If we understand these reuse processes as learning processes, this provides the bridge between knowledge management/organizational learning and software engineering practice.Hans-Jörg Happel, Andreas Schmidt:
  Knowledge Maturing as a Process Model for Describing Software Reuse
  In: 4th Conference Professional Knowledge Management: Experiences and Visions (WM 07), Workshop on Learning Software Organizations (LSO 2007), Potsdam, March 2007, PDF

It will be interesting to explore further where the maturing concept can provide new insights and how the different application areas can cross-fertilize one another. If you have further ideas, please send them. I will be happy to collaborate on that issue!

Study Group Competencies

Learning support activities are increasingly recognizing the importance of competencies as abstractions of human capabilities and behavior. This covers traditional human resource development and training, vocational training and even school education, but also e-learning and competence management. There are many interesting approaches that have shown the feasibility of competency-oriented methods, several large research projects investigate competency-related issues (like APOSDLE and TENcompetence), and our research has provided also some insight into the relationship of organizational and individual competencies and how they can be exploited. But before we can deal with competencies efficiently on a large scale, many open issues need to be resolved, culminating in competency-related standards. The Study Group Competencies has established itself as an international special interest group with people like Claude Ostyn, Wayne Hodgins, Eric Duval, Luk Vervenne among several others. I have participated in the first conference call, and my first impression is that although there is still a very long way to go towards a shared understanding of competencies and their usage, such initiatives are important to bring people together – beyond traditional European research projects. Next conference call is scheduled for mid-January.

Workshop on Educational Portals in Tübingen

The Knowledge Media Research Center organized a workshop on educational portals (Workshop Bildungsportale) where I was invited as a panelist for the closing panel on educational portals and Web 2.0 together with Reinhard Keil (Uni Paderborn), Klaus Birkenbihl (W3C) and others. Although the focus was more on portals for schools and universities, it turned out to be a very interesting event on the changing role of portals in Web 2.0. Especially, our view that grassroot Web 2.0 approaches (characterized by blogging and tagging) and more top-down Semantic Web approaches do not contradict, but rather complement one another although it is not clear how both of them fit together.  Also the trend towards portals as service providers (instead of information providers) was common sense among the panelists.

Interesting approaches were presented (among others) by Benjamin Birkenhage (ZEIT online), Richard Heinen (Lehrer-Online), Stephan Mosel (Bildungsblog), Thomas Sporer (University of Augsburg, Knowledgebay) and Stefanie Panke (IWM-KMRC, e-teaching.org).

There will be a book about the workshop which will be published next year where a digest of the different views will be collected. Stay tuned.

Symposium on Competence Management, Potsdam

Right after the ECTEL conference I went to the Symposium on Competence Management (Fachtagung Kompetenzmanagement) at Potsdam on October 5 – together with Christine Kunzmann. We presented our concepts and experiences with systematic human resource development and the relationship to competency-oriented workplace learning support (see our ECTEL contribution).

1st European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (ECTEL 06)

The conference took place October 1-4 near Heraklion (Crete) and was primarily organized by the PROLEARN Network of Excellence. The conference had about 200 participants and was just right in size to allow for efficient community fostering.

Ontology-based User Context Management: The Challenges of Dynamics and Imperfection

Andreas Schmidt:
Ontology-based User Context Management: The Challenges of Dynamics and Imperfection
In: Proceedings of International Conference on Ontologies, Databases and Applications of SEmantics (ODBASE 2006), On the Move Federated Conferences (OTM), Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 4275, 2006, pp. 995-1011
PDF

Socially-Aware Informal Learning Support: Potentials and Challenges of the Social Dimension

Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt:
Socially-Aware Informal Learning Support: Potentials and Challenges of the Social Dimension
In: Proceedings of the Joint International Workshop on Professional Learning, Competence Development and Knowledge Management, in conjunction with the First European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (ECTEL 06), Heraklion, 2006
PDF

Context-Aware Workplace Learning Support: Concept, Experiences, and Remaining Challenges

Andreas Schmidt, Simone Braun:
Context-Aware Workplace Learning Support: Concept, Experiences, and Remaining Challenges
In: Innovative Approaches for Learning and Knowledge Sharing. Proceedings of the First European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 06), Heraklion, Crete, October 2006, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4227, pp. 518-524
PDF

AGENT-DYSL Kick-Off Meeting in Athens

Right after the I-KNOW conference, I attended the Kick-Off meeting of the AGENT-DYSL project, which is about Accommodative Intelligent Educational Environments for Dyslexic Learners and is funded by the European Commission within the eInclusion call (where AGENT-DYSL was ranked no. 1). The project is concerned with the development of new technologies and tools for the support of pupils with dyslexia (5-10% of all pupils suffer from dyslexia). Existing reading assistance software solutions lack important adaptive functions. The projects aims to integrate state-of-the-art technologies from the Semantic Web, speech and image processing in order to support user modeling (covering learning progress and emotional state) and adaptive user interfaces.

Our role in the project is the user context modeling and management as well as knowledge representation (especially for adaptation rules).