In October and November, I will present Christine Kunzmann’s and my approach to competency-oriented human resource development to different audiences:

• We were invited to present our ontology-driven approach to the HR-XML community at the Human Capital and Social Innovation Summit 2007 in Maastricht on October 17, 2007. There is a special session (organized by the Ontology Outreach Advisory), exploring the potential of semantics and competency frameworks for the future evolution of HR-XML. My talk will especially focus on competency relationships.
• At the eChallenges 2007 in Den Haag (October 24-26), I will present the approach under the special focus of sustainability (see our paper on Sustainable Competency-Oriented Human Resource Development): how can approaches based on competency ontologies actually be maintained over time. The ideas presented there are a precursor to the research in the MATURE IP.
• Christine and I were also invited to present an overview of the paradigm of competency-oriented human resource development at the Professional Training Facts 2007 on November 13 at Stuttgart. At the same event, my colleague Simone Braun was also invited to give a talk on social issues in informal learning support.

Although this will mean a lot of traveling, I am looking forward to talk with different communities, get feedback on our work, possibilities to apply them in different companies, and fresh ideas on how to continue our research.

Yesterday, I presented at Osnabrück the first results of our work on SOPRANO. The focus of our contribution on Ontology-Centered Design of an Ambient Middleware for Assisted Living – The Case of SOPRANO was the design methodology (ontology-centered design), making ontology engineering an architectural design activity. In the course of developing an ontology with all the stakeholders, we develop a shared conceptual understanding that makes up the foundations of the architecture. This ensures higher semantic coherence in big projects.

The workshop itself was rather small and consisted mainly of contributions from the Universities of Rostock and Jena (the organizers). Although AI in ambient environments is promising, it remains the question whether the KI conference is actually the right place for such a forum.

This week I was for the fourth time at the I-KNOW Conference, which now is part of the Triple-I conference cluster (together with the I-SEMANTICS and I-MEDIA). As always, I enjoyed the days there (including food and the location), had a lot of interesting talks and meet a lot of nice, interesting, and inspiring people there.

Keynotes (by Marc A. Smith from Microsoft, Peter Reiser from Sun and Martin Eppler) were also interesting and touched the hot topic at the conference: communities and the social dimension of knowledge management and learning. At all conference parts, social software, collaboration, tagging etc. were the dominating theme.

Despite this overall positive picture, some of the talks were really shallow (especially at the I-SEMANTICS part), and I started wondering how they actually got accepted. Minor technical advancements or Yet-Another-Approach-Doing-The-Same-Thing are simply disappointment, especially combined with bad talks.

I presented our work on validating our knowledge maturing model by analyzing Wikipedia at the Special Track on Integrating Working and Learning - and announced our upcoming IP MATURE. As four key people of proposal preparation were also there, we grabbed the opportunity for celebrating our success.

I was accompanies by four colleagues presenting our work at FZI: Heiko Paoli presented his user-driven approach to semantic service descriptions, Valentin Zacharias his approach on visualizing rule bases, Mark Hefke concepts and tools relation to knowledge management maturity, and Max Völkel his approach on combining semantic web technologies with content management.