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.

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.