The 3rd KiWi Annual Meeting took place in the freezing Munich with a “cool” temperature under minus 5 degrees . In the first day of meeting, Sebastian showed a demo of KiWi system with the new interface and made an overview of the workplan for the next months. In the second day, the enabling technologies presented a research summary of their work and last developments.

From 5th to 11th of July, I participated of the 7th edition of Summer School on Ontological Engineering and Semantic Web in Cercedilla, Spain. We were 50 students (mostly in the 1st year of our PhD) confined in a residence surrounded by spectacular nature.

Every morning we had talks from the tutors and famed invited speakers such as Prof Stefan Decker and Peter Mika. After each talk, we had hands-on session to put in practice what we had learnt from early “lessons”. The quality of the tutors, head by Prof Enrico Motta, contributed a lot for the success of the school.

The 3rd conference day featured interesting keynote on video semantics. Furthermore, various talks on tagging and annotation were relevant to our research. Talk from EPFL was particularly interesting in conducted experiment in tagging system. As we are going to cooperate with Aberdeen, their talk about tagging and annotations and especially the patterns for expansions was also very relevant to our tag based recommender systems. Well, the conference is over now and as we saw it will expand to new areas next year as well with a new namne: Extended Semantic Web Conference.

The attendance to the European Semantic Web Conference 2009 was a great opportunity to see other applications in field of Semantic Web. At the demo sections, I could evidence that a lot of effort is being put on semantic web services, knowledge management using semantic web and different usages of SPARQL for querying expansion. In particular, the panel of tagging and annotation presented related works to what we are doing at AAU. Such works will help me to improve my work as well as to explore other techniques that I had not considered so far.

The second day for us was mostly about the semantic wiki workshop. We have presented and demoed our personalized recommendations widgets, together with their performance evaluation.

The first workshop day at ESWC highlight was the workshop of stream reasoning. The workshop featured a very interesting collection of presentations and discussions on applications on streaming, spatial reasoning with streams, answering reachability queries, especially interesting SPARQL extensions for stream querying, reachability queries and type system for streams with DL reasoning. It was a very interesting day and relevant for new research topics IWIS group would like to pursue.

The vision of the Semantic Web is to enhance today's Web by exploiting machine-processable metadata. The explicit representation of the semantics of data, enriched with domain theories (ontologies), will enable a web that provides a qualitatively new level of service. It will weave together a large network of human knowledge and makes this knowledge machine-processable. Various automated services will help the users to achieve their goals by accessing and processing information in machine-understandable form.