Google Social Graph API

Google announced the release of the Social Graph API with a focus on public connections between people on the Web.

Here's how it works: we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people's accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF. When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they've said they're friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site.

Links:
Social Graph API homepage
Developer documentation
Social Graph API Group
XHTML Friends Network (XFN),
Friend of a Friend (FOAF)

GWT Ext 2.0 Released

GWT Ext 2.0 has been released with several new changes and widgets.
Demo : http://www.gwt-ext.com/demo
Project Site : http://www.gwt-ext.com/
Release Notes : http://gwt-ext.com/release_notes.html

GWT-Ext is a powerful widget library that provides rich widgets like Grid with sort, paging and filtering, Tree’s with Drag & Drop support, highly customizable ComboBoxes, Tab Panels, Menus & Toolbars, Dialogs, Forms and a lot more right out of the box with a powerful and easy to use API. It uses GWT and Ext.

Metadata 2.0

Last week I participated in the Metadata 2.0 workshop in Leuven. It was indeed a very successful event, well organized and chaired by Erik, as usual. I presented there our automatic metadata generation system ALOA. The slides are available on slideshare. All presentations are available at the workshop wiki. Interesting people have attended this workshop either in person or remotely via flashmeeting. We discussed several crucial metadata issues. In my opinion, there are still many open issues to work on in the metadata research area.
I enjoyed talking to Martin Memmel who turned out to be a colleague of Bertin Klein, a very good old friend of mine with whom I enjoyed playing soccer at my former soccer team Eintracht Kaiserslautern. Martin has also given a nice talk on ALOE (not ALOA:-). We discussed ways to join forces. We are planning for instance to make ALOE use ALOA as its metadata generator. Hope this can be realized soon.

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The Future of e-Learning: a shift to knowledge networking and social software

Our journal article "The future of e-learning: a shift to knowledge networking and social software" has been published by INDERSCIENCE PUBLISHERS. The article can be downloaded here (.pdf). Your comments are welcome!

Abstract:
The main aim of Knowledge Management (KM) is to connect people to quality knowledge as well as people to people in order to peak performance. This is also the primary goal of Learning Management (LM). In fact, in the world of e-learning, it is more widely recognised that how learning content is used and distributed by learners might be more important than how it is designed. In the last few years, there has been an increasing focus on social software applications and services as a result of the rapid development of Web 2.0 concepts. In this paper, we argue that LM and KM can be viewed as two sides of the same coin, and explore how Web 2.0 technologies can leverage knowledge sharing and learning and enhance individual performance whereas previous models of LM and KM have failed, and present a social software driven approach to LM and KM.

Reference:
Chatti, M.A., Jarke, M. and Frosch-Wilke, D. (2007) ‘The future of e-learning: a shift to knowledge networking and social software’, Int. J. Knowledge and Learning, Vol. 3, Nos. 4/5, pp.404–420.
Special Issue on Learning and Interacting in the Web: Social Networks and Social Software in the Web 2.0.
Guest Editors: Miltiadis D. Lytras, Sheizaf Rafaeli, Stephen Downes, Ambjorn Naeve and Patricia Ordóñez de Pablos

Metadata 2.0

On Thursday I'll be attending the Metadata 2.0 workshop organized by Prof. Erik Duval at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. I'll give a talk there about the automatic metadata generation system ALOA. From the announcement of the workshop:

Current metadata standards (DC, LOM, MPEG, ...) are all based on early work inn the mid 1990's.
In the mean time, technology has advanced and some or many of the assumptions that held 17 years ago may no longer be so relevant...
That doesn't detract from the huge success that these standards have realised: there are probably many millions of DC, LOM or MPEG instances. Yet, there is probably orders of magnitude more metadata that does not conform to these standards. And, the interoperability between the DC, LOM and MPEG world remains quite complex. Consequently, their application domains remain too disconnected.
In this workshop, we will reconsider how metadata could be generated, managed and put to use. We believe that the current standards and technologies will remain dominant for at least 3 to 5 years. The workshop will consider a longer-term perspective, and consider approaches, paradigmas, techniques and technologies that could enable a more unified, flexible, modular and versatile metadata world in 2010 and beyond.

I'm really looking forward to this special event. I'm also happy to have again the chance to meet Erik who is in my eyes one of the greatest researchers I've ever met.