Die Klein & Partner KEG hat die neue Seite des Zukunftszentrum Tirol vollständig von Konzept über Design und Programmierung bis hin zum Hosting umgesetzt.

Der Kunde hat eine komplexe Themenvielfalt deren Struktur die alte Webseite nicht mehr abbilden konnte. Jens Klein hat hat die neuen Anforderungen zusammen mit den MitarbeiterInnen des Zukunftszentrums Tirol analysiert und daraus ein Konzept erstellt. Ziel war es die Besucher der neuen Webseite mit Ihren Fragen abzuholen. Die Startseite ist die Plakatwand für aktuelle Themen und reduziert Mausklicks. Alle Inhalte sind auch über die klassische Navigation und die Suche schnell erreichbar. In der zweiten Ebene stellen Übersichtsseiten beschreibende Verweise auf die Dritte Ebene mit den eigentlichen Inhalten zur Verfügung. Das Design übernimmt die Elemente der alten Seite und ist dennoch vollständig neu und an aktuelle Kriterien für gute Web-Usability angelehnt.

Umgesetzt ist die Seite mit dem Content-Management-System Plone. Zum Einsatz kommt die innovative Technologie Collage. Sie erlaubt es den WebredakteurInnen am Zukunftszentrum ganz einfach Unterseiten aus verschiedenen Elementen (wie z.B. Text, Bilder, Videos) in verschiedener Erscheinungsweise zu erstellen. Collage wurde dazu von uns mit dem Fokus auf noch einfachere Bedienbarkeit überarbeitet. Auch die deutsche Übersetzung haben wir vollständig redigiert.

Für die Veranstaltungen am Zukunftszentrum haben wir uns etwas besonderes einfallen lassen: Jede Veranstaltung hat zusätzlich zum Vorankündigungstext einen Nachbereitungstext erhalten. Ausserdem können im Vorfeld und im Nachhinein Dateien und Bilder zu einer Veranstaltung hochgeladen werden. Somit lassen sich diverse Zusatzinformationen bereitstellen und ein Archiv mitsamt Bilder-Gallerie anlegen.

Die selektive Inhaltsübernahme von der alten Webseite wurde durch die Klein & Partner KEG in enger Zusammenarbeit mit dem Team des Zukunftszentrums vorgenommen.

Die Seite wird auf unserer schnellen Hosting Plattform ZOPLO betrieben. Optimiert für Suchmaschinen und barrierefrei programmiert ist die Seite für Heute und die Zukunft gemacht.

After doing a quick google search for a Firefox search plugin to search the PyPI index, i certainly found one. And because it's so nice, i won't keep back this info:

http://ccomb.gorfou.fr/static/pypi/pypi.html

Try this out!

The IKS workshop was surprisingly great! Salzburg Research and the IKS team managed it to bring complete different CMS free- and OpenSource-software communities together.

Raphael Ritz and Jens Klein (me) represented Plone, Zope and Python in the discussion. Raphael did this primary from a scientific point of view while I brought in needs of a small to medium enterprises as founding member of BlueDynamics Alliance and managing director of Klein & Partner KEG.

We had a bunch of JAVA CMS members like OpenCMS, Jaiha and more, a bunch of PHP folks, like Midgard, Drupal, fCMS and others. We had people from all over Europe, India and Canada there. This were the 18 people from open source communities (community members). The participating projects core-members are from 7 research partners and 6 industrial partners. At all we have been about 60 persons. We started at thursday with participants self-introductions. Unfortunatly only community-members introduced themselfs. Then we head over to dinner at Krimplstätter: Tafelspitz, home brewn beer and 60 semantic people - it was an interesting evening with lots of valuable talking.

IKS project is a Integrated Project of the European Union funded for 4 years, initiated and coordinated by Salzburg Research. Integrated Projects are the biggest possible projects in the field of european ICT projects. IKS means Interactive Knowledge Stack. While this means all and nothing lets explain a bit from my understanding what it is all about.

IKS deals with idea to empower small and medium european enterprises in the CMS market to integrate, use and sell semantic web technologies. As all technology is free and opensource this is for sure available to non-europeans too. Most important three goals the eu commission want to achieve is: impact, impact and impact.

But: What is semantic web? First its a well known buzzword for more than 10 years now. Its also known as an academic, non-real-world approach to deal with content. On the other hand we all know: Our current way to deal with information is not enough. In several of our projects we added additional fields containing keywords from controlled vocabularies or onthologies. We used those additional information with Plone-collections (stored dynamics searches) to offer the consumer of the information dynamic horizontal views and the content-soup - and at all it worked fine. But we don't have it generic. The same procedure like every year? Yes the same procedure like every year.

Having a more generic way to give the content a meaning is indeed often a customer need. But customer - better say customers content-creators - do not like to edit additional information! Here is the conflict and main reason why semantic web isn't used.

At Friday we started with brainstorming: our requirements, use-cases, user-stories and ideas were asked for. Several ideas and requirements came up, most of them related to semantic web. But even for us Plone-people trivial (and off-topic) things like security, transaction-wareness and process support came up. Here you can see the power of Plone in several fields - we may need to communicate this better (even outside any semantic context). After the brainstorming session we had 5 pinboards full of cards. One major point I brought up (I think I dropped in about 5) was to make the IKS software stack architecture independent from its implemenation and offer everything as services (vs. libraries). Its needed by the heterogenos technology mix out there in the real world. All outcomes of the workshop will be documented and published soon. I'll provided the link as an new post here commenting them from my point of view.

We identified some fields where action can be done very soon. One of them is a semantic search engine based on Lucene/SOLR. Bertrand from the industry partners already started working on this. Since Plone can easily be integrated into SOLR its also easy to do this for a semantic SOLR. Then the documents need to be enriched with semantic metadata. At least the data we have can be exposed. This is goal of the Google Summer of Code project Raphael mentors and Matthew works on. If all is combined we be able put Plone Content into Semantic SOLR and query it on a semantic layer. If Semantic SOLR supports SPARQL, we can use the python-sparql client in Plone to ask complex questions on a semantic layer for Plone Content. We're not so far away from it.

Another short-term goal is a semantic wysiwig editor. Current editors like KUPU do not enrich the markup with semantics but with formatting, like classes and tags. A semantic editor would do this an the base of well-defined microformats or RDFa.

I'am looking forward to test the outcomes of the short-term goals as soon as possible.

The EU project IKS invited me to participate at the first Requirements Workshop held in Salzburg/ Austria at May 28th/29th 2009. Together with Raphael Ritz from the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility we represent the Zope and Plone community and the language Python  there.

Invited are over 50 persons from FOSS-/CMS-communities, universities and vendors.

Goal of the workshop is to identify the main-topics for future features in the area of semantic web and linked data needed by OpenSource CMS/KMS projects to support small and medium companies.

Provide me with your ideas, your requirements, projects on semantic web you did or know about in the Python (Zope/Plone/Repoze/Django/Pylon/TurboGears, etc.) world!

Just add an comment (using your OpenId) or write me an e-mail: jens@bluedynamics.com

Picture: Semantic Web Rubik's Cube by dullhunk at flickr under a cc-license. Thanks!

I'm currently working on my diploma thesis called "Activity Model Runtime Engine for Python". This engine will be loosely based on the "UML Activity Diagram" specification using Python and Zope3 components.

A month ago I participated at a modeling sprint at BlueDynamics in Innsbruck.

Meta-Meta-Modeling

There we were discussing a generic meta modeling framework which could be used to manage models, manipulate models, validate them and so on. There is already a framework in development called cornerstone.model, but we were spinning ideas around a metamodel framework based on the ideas of the OMG, specifically a MOF[1] (Meta Object Facility) based metamodeling stack.

The MOF Specification provides basic meta-meta model elements to build meta models upon. The OMG's metamodeling vision defines 4 modeling layers, as illustrated below:

OMG's meta layers. Illustration based on [2], pg.62

The MOF is a meta-meta modeling language and sits on the the modeling layer M3. We thought (and some literature implies this) that the UML metamodel is an instance of the MOF. We discussed the idea of bootstrapping the metamodel framework out of OMG's specifications in form of XMI files (such bootstrapping is realized in some degree by the Coral framework ([3], pg. 2-3)).

However, thats not the case. We found that the UML specification is split into the "UML Infrastructure" and the "UML Superstructure" specifications. The UML infrastructure defines the meta-meta model of UML while the UML language definition (the metamodel) is defined in the superstructure. But, the superstructure contains more: the infrastructure is merged into the superstructure ([4], pg. 686) and is therefore self-contained. It defines the whole stack. See the illustration below.

Illustration of UML's meta levels

But now, what about the MOF?

In UML2 the infrastructure was aligned with the MOF2 ([4], pg. 7). MOF2 is built on a subset of the UML2 infrastructure ([5] pg. 29). Both are equivalent but not the same. UML is not really an instance of MOF but should be compatible to any MOF based toolkit.

The MOF can be used for any metamodel and is the basis for CWM (Common Warehouse Metamodel) and so on.

Attention: This can screw your head.

The UML specification and other work by the OMG are great, but we left our metamodel bootstrapping idea behind. Now I focus my work on a metamodel for activities without any formalized meta-meta model behind it. I think that this pragmatic approach is quite sufficient.

References:

[1] http://www.omg.org/mof/
[2] Stahl et al. Modellgetriebene Softwareentwicklung, 2.Auflage. dpunkt Verlag 2007
[3] Marcus Alanen and Ivan Porres. The Coral Modelling Framework. http://www.tucs.fi/publications/attachment.php?fname=inpAlPo04a.pdf
[4] Rumbaugh, Jacobson, Booch. The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual, Second Edition. Addison-Wesley, 2005
[5] Meta Object Facility (MOF) Core Specification. http://doc.omg.org/formal/2006-01-01.pdf

The picture "Impossible Staircase" is made by Sakurambo and can be downloaded from Wikipedia.