SemanticMetadata.net

Going to the Summer School

Next week I’m on the PROLEARN Summer School in Frejus (France). I’m co-organizer of a workshop of Ralf Klamma: Hands on Social Software. We also installed a blog for workshop and summer school related blogging here. We’ll try to generate as much multimedia content as we can and put it online on YouTube and Flickr (e.g. here). Stay tuned for updates

MEDICHI Notes: Complex Systems

Yesterday and today the MEDICHI Workshop on the Methodic and Didactic Challenges of the History of Informatics takes place here at the Klagenfurt University. Yesterday Michael S. Mahoney opened the workshop with a keynote talk about the history of software. The talk of Niklaus Wirth has been read by Ann Dünki, as Niklaus Wirth couldn’t come. Both talks were very interesting and recordings will be available on the Klagenfurt University Campus TV. However Ann Dünki said something very interesting: She tried to distinguish between complex and complicated systems:

Complex systems can be defined as systems that have emergent properties, which we observe but cannot understand easily.

My question: Social Software also has emergent structures and properties. So can we define social software as complex system?

WWW 2006 Tagging Workshop Proceedings

At the WWW 2006 a workshop on the topic tagging took place. There were several papers especially on folksonomies and emergent semantics. The proceedings are available online at: /hosted/taggingws-www2006-files/taggingworkshopschedule.htm The proceedings are hosted here as the original site is no longer available. (Many thanks to Frank Smadja, who provided the files and allowed to mirror them)

Continue reading WWW 2006 Tagging Workshop Proceedings…

Hands on Social Software

On the 3rd PROLEARN summer school I’m going to be lecturer on social software topics together with Ralf Klamma. We are going to give a “Hands on Social Software” workshop directed by the interests of the students (who will be hopefully interested). If you are interested … you can find the blog at http://prolearnsummerschool.wordpress.com/.

CfP 4th International Workshop on Text-Based Information Retrieval

Like in previous years Benno Stein organizes the TIR, the Workshop for Text Information Retrieval. This year the workshop takes place in conjunction with the 18th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2007) in Germany in September.

Call for Papers (see also here):

Intelligent technologies for information mining and retrieval have become an important and exciting field of research in our information-flooded society. Methods of text-based information retrieval receive special attention, which results from the fundamental role of written text, from the high availability of the Internet, and from the rising importance of the different forms of Web communities.
Continue reading CfP 4th International Workshop on Text-Based Information Retrieval…

Report: The Results of the MMC-Workshop in Aachen

Unfortunately the Multimedia Metadata Community Workshop is over, but I’m looking forward to the next one. This time a Best Paper Award was announced and it was given to the paper “A formal framework for multimedia adaptation revisited: a metadata perspective” of Cezar Plesca, Vincent Charvillat & Romulus Grigoras from IRIT-ENSEEIHT (France). The picture shows  while his presentation. The research as well as the paper are really good work and absolutely worth reading.

In the open community discussion, which was about social software and privacy, a lot of different approaches and opinions were discussed. As always Ralf Klamma surprised us with his “broader than the average view” and contributed general aspects and the history of the concept of privacy. Michael Granitzer from the Know-Center pointed out the possibility of cross site data mining, which could reveal more about users than they might imagine.

Report: Context & Digital Photo Collections (MMC-Workshop in Aachen)

Today the Workshop on “Multimedia Metadata – The Role of Semantics” started in Aachen, Germany. Currently the keynote presentation of Susanne Boll from Oldenburg University takes place. Susanne speaks about the necessity of taking the context of digital photos into account while analyzing photos and extracting metadata. She also gave examples: While indoor / outdoor classification is quite a challenging task, the combination of EXIF information (context dealing with flash, shutter speed, shooting mode, focal length, etc. ) with the content analysis yields quite good results.

The talk of Susanne shows the direction where multimedia research should (also) go. The integration of the user is necessary as it is the driving force of the quite successful Web 2.0 movement.

Web 2.0 and Multimedia Research

Recently the IEEE Multimedia has published a very interesting article of Susanne Boll [pdf here]. She has moderated the panel discussion “Multimedia and Web 2.0: Hype, Challenge, Synergy” at the ACM Multimedia conference 2006. From the outcomes of the discussion and her own experience she reflected the state of the recent Web 2.0 development in relation to multimedia research … recommended reading!

Application of Interest: Retrievr

Content based image search in Flickr? Well someone (to be specific System One) already had the same idea. Based on a scientific project from 1995 Flickr images are indexed using signatures generated from a wavelet transform.

The resulting application is named Retrievr and can be used to draw query images, which are then used to find matching Flickr images. The system works quite smooth, so  give it a try! A description has also been published at slashdot.

Report Barcamp Kärnten : Review

Today I attend(ed) the Barcamp Kärnten, which is a Barcamp taking place in Carinthia, Austria. Basically the idea of a Barcamp is very interesting. The outcome however depends on the participants. Don’t kill me ’cause of the criticism, but one bad thing about Carinthia is, that few people live there (compared to Vienna or Berlin for instance). So the actual number of participants was small.

However some presentation were interesting: The presentation of Thomas Metschke about meinProf.de was cool and interesting, the phpWiki talk of Reini Urban was great fun and the talk of Beate Firlinger, Brigitta Aubrecht and Maria Putzhuber about the need for accessibility was very informative and I learned a lot (especially about participants, who stated, that we can safely ignore accessibility, because disabled people are not the target group! I really got angry about this one!!). Some of the talks were at least for me to basic and I couldn’t learn a thing (What’s Java, Eclipse, Open Source, Linux, … on beginners level).

Conclusion: The barcamp is actually a good thing, and the organisation was great! THX to Dani, Ed & Georg: This was good work as everything went smooth and perfect. But at the barcamp Kärnten the shiny and cool insiders, VIPs and master bloggers were clearly missing. There were more local heroes than admiring audience However some presentations were cool, funny and really good.

Another report about the event and other presentations can be found for instance at zerokspot.com (Horst Gutmann). See also photos @ flickr.