OrganiK project: Semantic Web for SMEs

The OrganiK project, where Gunnar Grimnes and I from DFKI are currently working on, is speeding up.

Last year we submitted a paper to the SCPE Journal of Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience Scientific International Journal for Parallel and Distributed Computing. They have a special issue on “The Web on the Move”. Our paper is called “A Sociotechnical Approach to Knowledge Management in the Era of Enterprise 2.0: the Case of OrganiK”, here is the abstract:

The increasing need of small knowledge-intensive companies for loosely-coupled collaboration and ad-hoc knowledge sharing has led to a strong requirement for an alternative approach to developing knowledge management systems. This paper proposes a framework for managing organisational knowledge that builds on a socio-technical perspective and considers people as well as technology as two highly interconnected components. We introduce a conceptualised system architecture that merges enterprise social software characteristics from the realm of Enterprise 2.0, and information processing techniques from the domain of Semantic Web technologies. In order to deliver a KM approach that could assist in reducing the socio-technical gap, we suggest deploying such a solution using an integrated sociotechnical implementation methodology.

PhD Step4: submitting the PhD

Tada! Yesterday I submitted my PhD to the University. If you remember, a little more than two years ago I started blogging about my PhD. The last step, the third one, was to write a PhD.

In the last year, the step was to have it reviewed by first supervisor, Andreas Dengel, and second supervisor, Mehdi Jazayeri. Their feedback was healthy for the PhD and challenging me to do some overnight work to include it. At the end, the PhD improved a lot and parts of it were rewritten, a new chapter added, others shortened.

After handing it in yesterday, it will ripen a bit by staying at the university, then the supervisors will review and comment on it, and finally an appointment for the defense will be planned. That will hopefully be before summer, but can also be in autumn this year.

I feel a bit reliefed to finally have it finished writing, and I am happy to get this item from my todo list. It leaves me a few days of joy, until the remaining tasks of nepomuk kick back, work on the OrganiK project kicks in, my work for OSCAF ontologies has to be continued, and our Semantic Desktop Spinn-Off company also starts spinning…

as Linus from the peanuts put it: “That’s the secret to life… replace one worry with another….”