Managing the Semantic Web

Thinking of WebServices and the Semantic Web, the future of Open Source Content and Knowledge Management Systems is the future of distributed and annotated content. The implications are vast and not only of technical nature. We also have to take into account aspects related to the we work in a knowledge based economy and society (life-long learning, self-organised groups of interest, ...). That means that Open Source CMS and KMS projects should not only worry about the right choice of APIs and semantic vocabulary (e.g. SOAP, XML-RPC, RDF, RSS, Ontologies, ...). They should also be concerned with modelling new forms of user interaction.

Just think of access groups either valid globally in a network of interconnected CMS/KMS or only available at one CMS/KMS installation. How can we set-up interfaces where a standardisation team decides upon such global groups which are then automatically passed to the interconnected CMS/KMS? The same question can be raised when we think of globally or locally valid metadata to annotate content and to transform metadata to be interoperable in different contexts. Basically, this speech asks: how can we ensure efficient user-computer-interaction based on distributed content and knowledge management to make the Semantic Web manageable and useful?

To clarify the problems and to offer some solutions, I will present the Open Communities Project (oc4 project) as a case study. The oc4 project provides a free knowledge network on the Web. The Open Communities Society located in Tübingen/Germany maintains most portals of this network, supported by IT companies, universities, Open Source developers, etc. This new kind of public private partnership offers free software and free knowledge Web sites to universities and schools to publish, discuss, etc. scientific or educational material. Currently, the library of the University of Tübingen/Germany implements a oc4 portal to join the oc4 project.

Sandro Zic is CEO of ZZ/OSS Information Networking. He is actively engaged in the international FOSS community, especially the PEAR group, the OpenISIS database for digital libraries, and Bitfluxeditor, a WISIWYG XML editor. Sandro has been invited to speak at several conferences, e.g. the International PHP Conference 2001. For Wrox Press, he writes and reviews texts for software programmers.

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