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Semantic Mediawiki Spring 2010 conference

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I attended http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Spring_2010_SMWCon at the MIT CSAIL Lab in sunny Boston and microblogged (on Twitter) comments on most sessions; my talk is at Encouraging Semantic Mediawiki use with non technical people‎.

State of the software - Yaron Koren

  • First challenge for smw: visibility
  • Second challenge for smw: communication ... duplicate effort
  • "no brick walls separating users from developers," everyone welcome to contribute
  • Third challenge, less important, funding ... too much money can hurt a project
  • "Semantic" is an abused word, use alternatives.. platform.. but semantic will be the breakthrough?

Welcome address - David Karger

  • @karger - many tools are wrong, developers 'guessing' - smw lets users emerge their data/structure, see more tools like smw
  • Philip of @Ontoprise plan fine access controls; rich editor w annotations, queries; social/dashboard; wikibooks; facet browse, rules

Halo: Current status and future developments in 2010 - Philipp Zaltenbach

  • @Ontoprise dev'ing linked open data #LOD between sites — integrate DBPedia (WP), etc; q about dependencies on their proprietary sw
  • side skype chat discussing problems with rich text editors that mangle output, same problem for many systems

Mashup of LexWiki and WebProtege for collaborative ontology authoring - Guoqian Jiang

  • Guoqian Jiang @MayoClinic Lexwiki collab ontology dev ('propose' tab), curate, integrity; SMW to scale/distrib experts, hierch probs


The Unbearable Lightness of Wiking - A Study of SMW Usability - Jie Bao

  • Jie Bao SMW usability (map.rpi.edu, data.gov) UI trumps low level abilities; forms limited; page model restrictive; devs prefer dev
  • RDF model 'deeply right' for flexbl DB. Fixes: small cadre dev semantics, most use; inline triples; support mult POV; SMW != RDF

Applying SMW on the Wikia environment - Timothy Quievryn

  • Timothy Quievryn SMW impact on @wikia (mostly entertainment); Forms great advance, biggest wikis use it; soon all, dynamic games?

WikiTags: Connecting SMW with MS Office users - Jesse Wang

  • Jesse Wang connects SMW to MS Office for user workflow, usability: uses MS SMartTags. Browse values, easy Outlook export nonfree

Flexible, purposive SMW use - Clarence Dillon

  • Clarence Dillon @DeptofDefense Flexible, purposive SMW use: mil takes 5 years to roll out; hesitate to collab.
  • "Power corrupts; PowerPoint corrupts absolutely"
  • simpler comm model for mil w SMW. huge money/time savings. spread via peer pressure. organic, private wikis, gov2gov, triage, social
  • social networking critical. remote data, vocabularies. encouraging not using Office at all, directly in wiki. wikipatterns
  • avoid noisy data w forms, "nobody above Major/above 35 uses it" (with exceptions) intel. comm. "learn to collab or lose job"

SIMILE, Exhibit, Wibit, Datapress, and Dido - David Karger

  • @karger SIMILE, Exhibit, Dido: structured data in embedded novel interfaces for everyone in author society — lenses, views, facets
  • @karger "You only need one person to be interested in something for it to show up on the Web" Ontario breweries 1914-1915
  • online course catalog in 4 days, took 6 months to get data from registrar; easy reuse data; datapress embed in wordpress cross site
  • Dido inline view/data editor ­— no need to learn schemas, "Make the data look the way you want" separate representation from backend

The future of Semantic Forms - Yaron Koren

  • Yaron Koren @wikiworks Next steps for Semantic Forms better integrated; easier SMW class maint; sep model/view, device UIs; use XML?
  • wiki markup vs xml, issues moving away from wiki model to create richer, simpler UIs, markup too complicated: a crossroads

Handling n-ary data - Yaron Koren

  • No great answers for n-ary data in SMW — no rich page editing, problems with page model?


Type: Policy

Status: Adopted on 2/15/08

Source File: http://www.usmd.edu/newsroom/news/439

Description:

University System of Maryland (USM) Chancellor William E. Kirwan has launched a new initiative to promote environmental stewardship and sustainable practices across the system's universities, research institutions, and regional higher education centers. The chancellor's Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change Initiative will focus on developing policies, practices, and programs that will make the university system a national leader in institutional responses to the challenges of global climate change.

"Our universities have long been on the forefront of environmental education, research, and policymaking," said Chancellor Kirwan. "The initiative will utilize USM's strengths in these areas to establish sustainable and energy efficient practices across all of our campuses. We will also work to strengthen curricular offerings and opportunities for research and collaboration in environmental science, policy, and sustainable technologies."

"The University System of Maryland recognizes that we need to foster a sustainable environment to retain Maryland's quality of life and leading role in the nation's knowledge economy," said Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, whom Chancellor Kirwan has appointed the system's vice chancellor of environmental sustainability. "The best way to ensure that future generations of Marylanders inherit a healthy, sustainable environment is to lead by example and see to it that today's decisions contribute to a better tomorrow."

Goals of the USM sustainability initiative include:

  • Reducing energy consumption system-wide by 15 percent and greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020 per Governor Martin O'Malley's EmPOWER Maryland initiative and Climate Change Commission recommendations as a way to save taxpayers money, reduce stress on Maryland's energy markets, and improve the environment;
  • Crafting and enacting new policies for capital projects, human resources, and procurement to achieve these objectives;
  • Conducting audits of greenhouse gas emission for all USM institutions and using best practices to reduce these emissions;
  • Developing a system-wide strategy for campus sustainability and energy efficiency, including "green" building guidelines and sustainability benchmarks for all new construction and major facility renovations;
  • Refocusing and strengthening instructional and research programs dealing with environmental sustainability and climate change;
  • Bringing the expertise of USM's institutions to bear in addressing Maryland's three-part challenge of Chesapeake Bay restoration, growth, and climate change.

"Across the university system, I have met and spoken with many students who want sustainability to become a guiding principle for our universities and our society," said USM Student Regent Richard Scott, a senior at Frostburg State University and a member of the Maryland Student Climate Coalition (MSCC). The MSCC is a grassroots organization of USM students advocating for the adoption of sustainable practices and a policy of carbon neutrality across the university system. "I am very encouraged by the system's proactive stance and commitment to become a leader in responding to the challenges of global climate change."

The sustainability initiative is one of three new initiatives established by Chancellor Kirwan to address major challenges to Maryland's economic leadership, educational preparedness, and environmental quality. In addition to fostering system-wide sustainability, the chancellor has set two other priorities for his tenure: closing the college retention and graduation achievement gap for minority and underserved students and fostering the state's global economic competitiveness by increasing the number of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) teachers and graduates from USM institutions.

For more information on the USM sustainability initiative, visit: http://www.usmd.edu/usm/sustainability.

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