BlueDynamics Alliance - IKS Project Related Topics

BDA goes GSOC 2011

Jens W. Klein — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 15:35:00 +0200

Plone Foundation happily got five slots for Google Summer of Code 2011 projects. Two of the committed proposals refered to software related to the BlueDynamics Alliance.

Dexterity type modelling and generation

First the ArchGenXML successor, a complete rewrite called AGX, was proposed to get extended to generate Dexterity content-types. Proposing student for this project is Pranshu Saxena, third year student of Computer Science at Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India. Mentor is Robert Niederreiter from Austria, main contributor of the new AGX stack. Co-mentor Jens Klein is long term contributor to both, ArchGenXML and AGX, supporting this project with deep knowledge in UML. Phil Auersperg, original author of ArchGenXML, known for his "lazy-programming" aproaches, will help to develop KISS-style and usable model-profiles and testing.

Stanbol Semantic Enhancement Engine

Second proposal deals with semantic web, using the Apache Stanbol stack of the IKS project where BlueDynamics Alliance acts as Early Adopter for FISE-Plone Integration and is involved in the project as community partner. Proposing student is Yannis Mazzer, fourth year student in the computer science department of the University Claude Bernard of Lyon in France. Mentor is Jens Klein, involved in IKS from pre-alpha release of FISE, the sementic enhancement engine. He participated in three IKS community workshops.

Proud to support Plone

In our long tradition of participating in the Plone Community and contributing to OpenSource we thanks Google to advance young software engineers. Thumbs up on the Plone Community for it's huge engagement in always bringing Plone towards the next level.

Plone, Semantics and Python, IKS FISE at Plone Conference 2010

Jens W. Klein — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 12:56:35 +0100

First of all I was really amazed to see my talk titled "Plone is so semantic, isn't it?" accepted for Plone Conference 2010. I always thought Plone and Semantics is not a topic popular at the conference. Now I know better. My talk at the conference including the questions and answers afterwards was recorded, so watch it yourself. If you cant read the slides in the video, especially the code examples, please look at slidesshare or at the README at github.

Prior to the talk I got in contact with Mr. De Marinis from the European Environmental Agency (EEA). We had a very good conversation and I learned a lot about new semantic package eea.rdfmarshaller for Plone created by/for the EEA. This great work exports the whole structure and metadata of a Plone site or of a single content object to RDF using standards and common namespaces. EEA uses it to make its site with it tons of information available in the linked data cloud.

I also meet other interested people to talk, get ideas and use cases. The major fear about semantics is, people talking about it all the time - a big buzz - but theres no pragmatic, easy to use software out there. Starting with semantics usally increases the complexity of your software and software stack dramatically.

In my opinion FISE will decrease this complexity a lot. It bundles semantic analyzers, a triple store and a sparql-endpoint. Unfortunately quering a triple store with SPARQL brings a new query language and also thinking in triples is more complex than thinking in tables. So what we need here is a supporting tool. With RDFlib and SuRF Python has a good libraries to deal with triples, also making the creation of SPARQL queries pythonic.

FISE itself is a RESTful service. I created fise.client, a simple python client dealing with FISE engines and store based on restkit. It makes the work with FISE pythonic, hiding all the RESTful HTTP struggling. The client ships with tests against a running FISE server. I also provided an integration buildout stitching the Python fise.client and the Java FISE-Server together, making it easy for Python developers to try the stack.

Beside the Talk at Plone Conference I invited for an Open Space session on Plone and Semantics. We had about 8-10 interested people in the room talking and discussing about semantics in general, about possible use-cases and about existing software. I learned its difficult to construct use-cases, because in IT we dont think semantic. After the implications of having facts in triples in a triple store were explained, finding good real-world uses-cases improving the current situation were no longer a problem.

After the conference two days of sprint (aka hackathon) were held. At Saturday I worked together with Alexander Pilz from Munich on the Plone FISE story. While I fixed bugs in fise.client and helped bootstrapping FISE using fise-buildout on other computers, Alexander started a first version of a Plone Integration package with FISE. Finally we got Plone Content (the SearchableText) passed to FISE. Theres really a bunch of work to be done, but it shows how easy FISE and fise.client is to use in a CMS.

There is a lot more work to be done. First we need to use plone.app.async while pushing content to fise. Then we need to fetch the enhancements back and display them in Plone or expose them. Next we need to find a path to get the structural information of Plone offered by eea.rdfmarshaller into the FISE store, so we can include it in the sparql queries/results. And finally this all need to be used in a real world project.

However, next date on my schedule - and on everybodys whos seriosly interested in the IKS stack - is the workshop "Unleashing the Power of Semantic Data - Today" 9th and 10th of december 2010 in Amsterdam. Lets meet there!

Image by Wurz under a CC-License from Flickr

Reflection: IKS Project Requirements Workshop

Jens W. Klein — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:46:35 +0200

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.

IKS Requirements Workshop: Semantic Web

Jens W. Klein — Tue, 26 May 2009 11:05:00 +0200

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!