Summer Semester 2008 – Lessons Learned

Today marks the end of another lecture period at Chemnitz University. The joined seminar / pro-seminar on Semantic Web turned out to be quite a challenge for the participating students. It is interesting to see how the Semantic Web, after being around for about 10 years, is still confusing newcomers. Lessons learned from the improved feedback marks of the lecture-related tutorial on protocols of distributed systems (6.4/7 points): students love to actually see and experience the technologies mentioned on the slides in demos and exercises.

ICWE 2008

Next week, the Eighth International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE2008) will be held in Yorktown Heights, New York, USA. Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend this year, after having visited all conferences of the last four years (Munich, Sydney, Palo Alto, Como). However, some of the tools we have been building recently will be used, like the idFS-enabled Wiki for the car sharing site and the WebComposition/DGS for managing a list of the published papers.

Site updates

The reengineering of our homepage is advancing. Recently, we have setup a publicly readable version of the Data Grid Service at our VSR-DATA site to publish the content in multiple machine-readable formats. A new list has been added for student research projects, forming the base for future tools to manage the advising process. On my own homepage, I have added a Links section from del.ico.us.

Generation W

Chemnitz University of Technology and the Computer science faculty are currently conducting a number of programs to attract more pupils from schools. Yesterday, I was giving a lecture on Web internals to a group of 10th grade students. All born after the invention of the Web, they have been growing up with it and already knew a lot. Most of them had experience in writing their own Web sites, many of them had also programmed Web applications.

idFS Homepage online

The idFS homepage is now online. The site offers a downloadable version of idFS, current idFS-related news, documentation and related papers. Moreover, there is an online demo available that illustrates, how federated single sign on can be achieved through browser redirects.

Site updates

After the recent visual changes, the VSR web site is now becoming a) "more English" and b) "more semantic". During the next weeks, we plan to translate most of the up-front pages to reflect the international orientation of our research. Yesterday, I extended the publication list with an RDF view, linking papers with our FOAF files. Furthermore, we have added a new DGS list for projects.

The new (old) design

As the eye of the careful observer might have noticed, Chemnitz University has switched to a new Web design, which is slightly more pastel-greenish than the old one. The real progress is however even more subtle: the style template is now proper XHTML, i.e. much more friendly for machine-readable markup (microformats, RDFa etc). I still remember the hassle with the last version of my homepage when I manually adjusted a copy of the PHP template.