KIWI Successfully Kicked off
Last week I was in Salzburg, attending the Kiwi kick-off meeting. Kiwi (standing for Knowledge in a Wiki) is a Semantic Wiki project, funded by the European Union. It aims to research and to develop an advanced Semantic Wiki vision, which would help with knowledge management in knowledge-intensive organizations. The term ‘Knowledge management’ got compromised in the past, mostly thanks to solutions which didn’t work. This project should be different, because:
It involves several partners from all around the Europe, from both the academia and industry and Sun is one of them - we are serving as use-case providers. As we hope, this combination could help to give researchers working on the project enough ground for their ideas. One of the use-cases serving as a framework for the future research and development is knowledge management in Sun’s Open Source communities, particularily in the NetBeans community. You can find the list of participants and their descriptions at the Semantic Web Company Blog.
It aims to support social convention developed by people working in knowledge-intensive environments, rather than to expose them to fixed designs and workflows (which cannot be designed right and thus often need rework). This means applying wiki model not just on the system’s content (as in wikipedia), but also on the information architecture and presentation (as nowhere I have seen so far). The project aims to develop advanced text-extraction, reasoning, personalization and onthology management practices.
This all means, that rather than developing some traditional fixed system, the goal is to create a semantic social platform, which would shape and evolve based on the nature of the community using it. Bottom-up they call it.
At the end of this post, let me thank folks from Salzburg Research, who have organized this event. It was great - thanks!
I’ll be blogging about things related to the project from now on, so stay tunned.