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.