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See me speak at ESTC2008

I will be speaking at ESTC2008, on 25th September 2008 around 16:45 in the Rittersaal room.

The topics of my talk will be circling around Semantic Desktop, personalized Semantic Web, and how this is used or can be used in company settings

  • Why is Semantic Web needed on the desktop?
  • How does data fusion work on the desktop?
  • What is a personal information model?
  • How do existing user interfaces and user experience change?
  • Which projects are active and what are their results?
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Gender Studies and Cyc Micro-Theories

Recently, on 28.7.2008, the Semantic Web company published an interview with Corinna Barth about gender studies and the Semantic Web. I blogged about that.

Stefano Bertolo pointed out in a comment that CYC allows Microtheories and that this allows alternating views.

I asked Corinna about that and she helped me a lot by passing on a few pointers from her vast literature collection about CYC and gender studies, indicating that this fact is known and that she referenced a study by Alison Adam (1995, 1998). I will share the references with you, if you google for gender studies and Semantic Web, it may help you:

  • Catherine Sherron (2000): Constructing Common Sense. In: Ellen Balka/ Richard Smith: Women, Work and Computerization. Kluwer, 111-118).
  • Geoffrey Bowker/ Susan Leigh Star (2000): Sorting Things Out. Classification and its Consequences. MIT Press)
  • Alison Adam (1998): Artificial Knowing. Gender and the Thinking Machine. London and New York: Routledge.
  • Adam, Alison (1995): Embodying Knowledge. A Feminist Critique of Artificial Intelligence. In: The European Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol.2, 355-377

(updated on 10.9. based on more information)

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Arrived at NEPOMUK Summer School

as blogged in May, we organize a Summer School on the Semantic Desktop and the NEPOMUK project.

I arrived today in Malta, at 8 in the evening and sitting now together with the other organizers doing last-minute preparation tasks. The others were working all day already.

It is going to be a good week for us, a good moment in the project (NEPOMUK ends in December) and we can pass on a lot of information we learned to other PhD students to keep the ball rolling.

At the airport I met Bernhard Schandl from Vienna, who is part of the Web of data hands-on organization team (btw, sign up there! if the web-form is not online yet, send them a mail). We met before and had a nice chat, good start into the week.