is it just me

On wednesday our workshop Social Software Engineering takes place and we finished the program. You can see it online at the website for the workshop.

Presentation 1: Towards Social Information Systems

Presentation 2: weHelp: A Reference Architecture for Social Recommender Systems

Presentation 3: Towards Assisting Software Engineers in Switching Artifacts by using Personal and Shared Context

Presentation 4: Bringing Semantics into Social Software Engineering: Applying Ontologies to a Community-oriented Requirements Engineering Environment

Presentation 5: Diagnosing Inconsistent Requirements Preferences in Distributed Software Projects

Presentation 6: User-Driven Requirements Engineering for Mobile Social Software

Keynote: The use of social engineering in software projects

Popularity: 1% [?]

Next week I’ll be in Innsbruck at Grillhof for the JTEL WinterSchool 2010. Luckily I received a funding of the STELLAR Network of Excellence (thx for that) and can enjoy the exchange of ideas with a lot of like-minded Ph.D. students and the crème de la crème of the TEL researchers.

One of our preparation tasks was to prepare a mini Pecha Kucha talk consisting of 6 slides where each of the slides is shown exactly 30 seconds – no matter if you finished what you wanted to say or not. Cristina has uploaded her slides already here.

I hope people will understand what I’m about with Artefact-Actor-Networks and ask good questions. Here are my slides:

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tags are the new classification systems for nearly all current web applications. But how do you keep track on where you posted, linked, commented or uploaded stuff. Florian Bailey posted a simple but effective idea to do this (HT to René Sprotte for linking me to this):

My problem is how to aggregate everything I publish easily. I tried various ways to do this. For comments there are services like disqus but sadly only a few sites actually integrate it, Facebook and Friendfeed are partly an answer to it but even with them I can only add sites where I have an account ( or that allow me to use my facebook account) or a public RSS Feed is available.

At the end, all of these services only work with some sites, the only global services that work on every site are search engines.

So I’m now trying to aggregate everything I publish with google.

For this I created my personal tag, it’s a unique string I will add to every kind of content I publish anywhere on the internet. And Google will do the rest.

My Personal Tag is: #ptfjib80
# – as identifier of a tag
pt – personal tag
fjib80 – as unique string

I like the idea because it so simple, clean and pretty straightforward. I’ll try to use my personal tag #ptwollepb999 from now on. What about you?

Popularity: 6% [?]

This week I had the opportunity to present the idea of Artefact-Actor-Networks at the CollaborateCom 2009 conference in Washington D.C. – a conference mainly focussing on collaborative computing and its applications in networking and at the workplace.
Abstract:

Social networks reflect communication, cooperation and loose acquaintances in networked communities. Numerous metrics allow to expose connections, important persons or clusters within these communities. Furthermore, networks can be spanned to connect documents, blog entries or wiki articles. We call such a network an artefact network. In this paper we introduce the approach of Artefact-Actor-Networks that tries to connect social networks and artefact networks in order to make claims on the semantical connections between persons and manifold artefacts. We present practical use cases for Artefact- Actor-Networks and discuss generic and specific semantical requirements and added values through the existence of Artefact-Actor-Networks.

Reference: W. Reinhardt, M. Moi, and T. Varlemann: Artefact-Actor-Networks as tie between social networks and artefact networks. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Collaborative Computing (CollaborateCom’09), November 2009.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I am very glad to announce the 3rd International Workshop on Social Software Engineering (SSE2010) that is co-located with the Software Engineering 2010 conference in Paderborn, Germany (February,  22-26 2010). The workshop will take place on February, 24 2010.

In this workshop we would like to bring together researchers and practitioners working on different aspects of collaboration and knowledge sharing in software engineering as well as the engineering of social software to discuss new results and future research challenges. Major topics addressed at the workshop include (but not limited to):

The topics of the workshop include, but are not restricted to:

• Social and human aspects of software engineering
  • Collaboration and knowledge sharing in development teams and (Open Source) communities
  • Impact of Social Software on development processes
  • Empirical studies on collaboration and information behaviour in social software engineering
• Engineering social software
  • Engineering of lightweight and unobtrusive tools, Web 2.0 and Social Semantic Web applications
  • Approaches and tools for context-aware and personalized assistance
  • Particularities in the development of Social Software
• Social Software Engineering
  • Concerns of individuals in collaboration settings, such as learning, usability and incentives
  • Usage of Social Software to teach software engineering, teaching social aspects of software engineering
  • Research methods and approaches for analyzing and designing successful collaboration support
  • Scientific analysis of the relation between methods/processes, tools and collaborative development practice

CfP Social Software Engineering 2010 (Paderborn, Germany)

Popularity: 14% [?]

There is much going on these days at Twitter. After they introduced the new lists feature last week and a spanish version of Twitter, today they roll out a limited access to the new re-tweet feature. I can’t wait to see it in action and implemented in Artefact-Actor-Networks – re-tweets will be the next step of mooring Twitter in the Semantic Web. Hopefully they will allow the geolocation for single tweets soon, which would be another great step in a better connected and semantically annotated web world.

The lists feature obtained mixed feedback. Some people like it that they can put their followers in lists according to their location, community, language or any other criterium, others are saying it was a snapshot of the Twitter team. If you look at the profile of Tim Berners-Lee you’ll see he is listed nearly 1200 times. A lot of these lists are  related to technology, the WWW and semantic web. Unfortunately (or luckily) there is not the One technology lists where anyone you get started (mainly because such a list is pure imagination). On the other hand, if you look at the lists that Stephen Downes is on, you’ll get 90 lists, all dealing with education and learning in the web 2.0. Like so often each coin has to sides and we will need to sit and wait what Twitter lists will be useful for. For me I like it that now I can sync my lists with several tools and the Twitter website – a great gain in mobility and consistency.

If you are developing applications built on the Twitter API maybe the experimental Twitter Streaming API is interesting for you.

Popularity: 8% [?]

During the last week I was attending the EC-TEL 2009 in Nice. I really met great people there (some for the first time, some finally again) and the location was
marvelous. It was a conference for the TEL researches, had a good Wifi performance and I was prepared for the luck of plugs.

I was attending two pre-conference workshops on tuesday (Science 2.0, TEL-CoPs) and could listen to cool keynotes and interesting sessions. During the Science 2.0 (other post) workshop we discussed how we can use technology in beforehand of a conference, at the conference and afterwards. Graham Attwell, who was not attending the conference also added some notes and Erik Duval and Martin Weller wrote dome some notes or uploaded videos.

We all agree that currently conferences heavily differ in their application of technology and attendee-support. At EC-TEL I first saw a conference planning tool that basically is a social bookmarking tool and simple recommender system (see Hendrik’s slides). All talks with their respective authors and keywords are placed in the system and you can assemble your own conference schedule by selecting the most interesting abstracts, tag them and propose these talks to groups of users. The conference planner is a great starting point for making conferences more interactive and transparent to the (online | offline) attending researchers. But for me it is still pretty much Web 1.0 -ish… I’m thinking of some cool conference website that not only presents the CfP and Venue information but shows the main themes from accepted papers, emerging clusters and top referenced papers. If there was some tag cloudy visualization of a conference’s content (coming from Blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Slideshare, and accepted papers of course) that can be individually browsed we come to a point where we not only support the offline attendees but also interested people from the community that aren’t able to come to the conference. I totally agree with Graham that we can motivate students and young researchers to focus on a conference even if they can’t go there.

During the week I was able to tell a bit about the concept of Artefact-Actor-Networks and the possibilities it offers to store and analyse dynamic communications. Maybe there will be an option to use the concept for a tool for upcoming conferences like the conference planner was tested this time. What I learned from the keynote of Mike Sharples is that good design-based research must include early user involvement and user studies that may turn all your implementation around. From the TEL-CoP workshop we learned that visualizations that are created by us computer scientists very often are worth null because we don’t note cognitive theories or aren’t sure about our visualization goals.

It also was a great pleasure to see all the STELLAR guys wearing their t-shirts. They really did great dissemination work and I kind of like their approach to establish TEL as an standalone research discipline that must bring closer together computer science, didactics and pedagogics.

Popularity: 38% [?]

I call the theoretical model behind my current research Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) and gave them a dedicated place on the web. From today on there is the domain http://artefact-actor-networks.net where you can stay up-to-date regarding this topic.

Curious about what’s an AAN?

Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) are a theoretical model to link social networks and artefact network in order to make claims about the semantic relatedness between users and their respective artefacts. The general goal of AANs is to ease the understanding of how these to knowledge entities (Trier, 2005) are interconnected, how they influence each other and how we can make use of semantic technologies in this field of research

Popularity: 16% [?]

Our second publication from the MASHl09 workshop at the ICL conference 2009 is also available online.

Abstract:

Classical tools for supporting software engineering teams (collaborative development environment, CDE) are designed to support one team during the development of a product. Often the required data sources or experts reside outside of the internal project team and thus not provided by these CDEs. This paper describes an approach for a community-embedded CDE (CCDE), which is capable of handling multiple projects of several organizations, providing inter-project knowledge sharing and developer awareness. The presented approach uses the mashup pattern to integrate multiple data sources in order to provide software teams with an exactingly development environment.

Reference: W. Reinhardt and S.Rinne: An Architecture to Support Learning, Awareness, and Transparency in Social Software Engineering. In: International Conference on Interactive Computer Aided Learning (ICL 2009).

An Architecture to Support Learning, Awareness, and Transparency in Social Software Engineering

Popularity: 12% [?]

These are my slides for the presentation at MASHL09 Special Track at ICL 2009 Conference later today. Let’s see what the Mashup experts tell me about the idea of connecting several tools in the context of software engineering…

Popularity: 5% [?]