PhD Defended

On 20.05.2009 I defended my Dissertation at Chemnitz. The last 5 years have been quite an experience for me: new technologies, new ideas, new personal challanges, new places, new research groups, ... I would like to thank all the great people I had the honour to work with and who supported me during this time.

Moved to a New Lab

In November 2008, I left the DSS group and joined SAP Research to work at the Campus-based Engineering Center in Dresden. If you want to contact me, please use my TU Chemnitz email address which remains valid.

The problem with URIs

... is that they are extremely useful to pin down the meaning of something for a machine, but they are not easy to handle for a human user. Unless you have the right Web Engineering tools :-). Today, I wrote a component that assists users in entering meaningful values (URIs) by offering autocomplete to a list of given choices. The choices originate from a configured Linked Data source, like a SPARQL endpoint or a DataGridService.

News from WAM

The WebComposition Architecture Model finally has a homepage: http://webcomposition.net/wam (Thanks to Andreas Heil's initiative). The page summarizes project-relevant links, papers, examples, downloadable hands-on material and a demo for future reference. Currently, one of our student projects applies WAM in an interesting domain: visualizing security architectures in the context of IP telephony.

PhD thesis submitted

After a long phase of reviewing and reworking, I officially submitted my PhD thesis yesterday. Following now will be the process of the faculty for Informatics, which includes expert reports, an examination and the defense. This also marks the end of my time at VSR, as I will leave the group at the end of September.

Underwater Laboratory

Earlier this week, we had to discover that a part of the ceiling had collapsed in the student laboratory next to our room and that water was dripping on our hardware. Luckily, there was nobody in the room when it happened, so no casualties except a keyboard. The cause of the accident was a leak in the air conditioning system, which apparently seems to happen here once in a while.

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.