Getting deeper in the knowledge domain of locations and building an onology of this domain I ended in the question how deep I want to describe locations. Is it reasonable to map the friendliness of the waiters, how many they are in the location or a better example what beer is provided in a bar? Well, building an ontology is nice, but to be mor pragmatic we have think about the costs of those informations. I mean it’s quite unusual to rate the waiters behaviour or what kind of beer is provided in bar. It’s quite impossible to get this information, isn’t it.
But now I found a locations guide that provides a seach by beer. You only select the kind of beer you want to consume and you get a list of bars that provide this kind of beer. Unsurprisingly this locations guide or bether beer guide is located in Australia 
.
Just try it yourself: http://www.yourbars.com.au/beers/nsw/
Getting into the secrets of taxonomies, ontologies, etc. I found a classification of animals from a specific chinese encyclopedia:
- dem Kaiser gehörige,
- einbalsamierte,
- gezähmte,
- Milchschweine,
- Sirenen,
- Fabeltiere,
- streunende Hunde,
- in diese Einteilung aufgenommene,
- die sich wie toll gebärden,
- unzählbare,
- mit feinstem Kamelhaarpinsel gezeichnete,
- und so weiter,
- die den Wasserkrug zerbrochen haben,
- die von weitem wie Fliegen aussehen.
You can find this example in the wikipedia article about Taxonomie.
I’m joining the SEALs (software evolution and architecture lab) in July and I’m going to work on a very interesting project I was asked for by the company Astina AG. This project is supported by the CTI (commision of technology and innovation) cause of its high potential use in different areas like tourism. The CTI is the national agency for innovation. The CTI supports the knowledge transfer between companies and universities to create innovation and not just inventions.
As mentioned already, I’ll start working on my doctoral thesis in July. The project is a cooperation between two chais. The main chair is the one from Prof. Gall at the SEAL and Dr. Reif, my mentor. They have huge knowledge in the semantic web domain, a key knowledge area for my phD thesis. The other chair is from Prof. Bernstein at the DDIS (dynamic and distributed information systems) that delivers huge knowledge and expertise in data mining, onthology and taxonomy.
Well, I’m extremly happy and proud having this chance to promovate even if I get payed less then in the industry. But money is not everything. I think I’ll retrieve more value from this work then from every other job from a personal view. I was offered lots of well payed jobs. But I had to reject them all because no one was that challenging. I’ve to say I was a bit disappointed about the industry. Experience seems to count a lot in comparision to knowledge. I know that students mostly don’t have experience, but they have a huge theoretical background, are extremly creative and motivated and are used to work a lot. I know lot of examples that student result were even better then results made my experienced workers cause of those reasons.
I’m sure that you’ll get in touch with my phD thesis in the very near future because it’s going to be implemented by Astina. I’m looking forward to it and can’t wait to start this great work.
Some days ago the day became night cause the densitity of the cloudes. It was unbelievable. As it starts to rain the prominent class room KOH-B-10 at the University of Zurich has shown that it leeks. Nice test environment would say computer scientists . The video blow shows how much! And the most strange thing is, that the video shows the true colours. Yes, the class room is painted in pink and the tables and seats in poison green 
A week ago, the 16th of May, I finished my master thesis about an implementation of a graph-based knowledgebrowser for a CMS. Now, I spend time in relaxing and organizing my next steps to the future. The current IT market is asking for graduates and I remark it evertime taking a look to my email account
The time writting my master thesis was absolutely great. Extremly work intensive, but great! I got a lot of support from my family and girlfriend, and from my friends too. Thank you at this point. Now, I know what it means to work from 7.30 to 23.00 over several months every day including the weekend. I experienced that workin over 100 hours a week isn’t realy efficent. You work not at 100% and your personal efficeny rate dops every day. It’s not recommendable work many over a long period. It doesn’t only affect your work, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, the theme of my thesis seems to be very attractive. During my research I got lots of requests from all over the world. A professor from the St. Louis University in America was interested in using my developed tool for research in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Other knowledge workers wanted to share experience. The results of my research and the potential of an interactive knowledge map for knowledge transfer leeds me to possible future works. I just got some recommendations searching for venture capitalist to innovate my invention. We’ll see. It’s not the only projection on my fingertips.
Wow, great! My mentor Benjamin promoted my temporaly successfull participation in the Imagine Cup 2007 at the Institute of Informatics. He published a news article about my current ranking (3rd rank) and proceeding to the semi finals:
IfI Student Enters Semi Finals in International User Interface Competition
IfI diploma student Amancio Bouza ranked 3rd in the user interface discipline to enter the semi-finals of Microsoft’s international computer science talent competition Imagine Cup. His successful contribution presents a novel AJAX powered user interface. The solution improves accessing and modifying graph based knowledge structures in an enterprise content management system. The user interface unites editing and browsing functions, and therefore will empower regular knowledge workers to view and change how knowledge is represented within their organization more easily.
The diploma thesis is currently under development with the Information Management Research Group at the IfI. Since Mr. Bouza seems to be the only Swiss participant in the competition, he hopefully will advance to the final round held this summer in Korea.Published: 04.04.07
Weehaaahh, I’m proceeding to the next round in the Imagine Cup 2007 as 3 ranked team. Only 30 Teams with 1-2 persons had the chance to proceed to the next round. This 30 teams were elected by community voting. Community voting meens, that registered competitors vote for the other teams and no judges.
The ImagingeCup consists of 7 categories and over 100′000 students from all arround the world joined to compete:
- embedded development
- web development
- project hoshimi programming battler
- information technology
- algorithm
- short film
- interface design
I’m competing in the category Interface Design. With the community voting I reached rank 3 as you can see on the leaderboard in interface design. My team is IfIface.
For the next round I have to hand in a working prototype until 07:00 AM GMT on May 19, 2007. This prototype is evaluated by a judges. The criterias are:
- 50% How innovative is the interface/interaction concept?
- 50% Quality of the overall user experience (works well, looks good, high production quality
The 1st placed idea is a 3D file explorer. The 2nd placed team is intoi that submitted the idea of a presentation board. I mentioned team intoi in an other blog entry already.
Well, we’ll see how it’s valued. The best 6 teams will be the finalist and go to the ImagineCup finals in Seoul (Korea).
Community voting
The community voting was as fair as possible. Only competing teams with a valid submission could vote. No fake teams could be made to vote for the original team because you would have submitted at least another idea. The other restriction was that teams couldn’t vote for the own teams or teams from the same country. And finally to motivate competitors to vote realy for the best teams you have as many chances to win a XBox 360 as you voted for the teams that is going to be finalist at the end.
I think the organisators realy thought about the risk of community voting and initiated the right voting setting in order to provide a realy fair voting. Congratulation to the interface design captain Unni Ravindranathan for this voting setting.
The competition of the ImagineCup 2007 is very hard. Lots of people invested lots of time and money to develop and design new interfaces. I saw lots of innovative ideas. Some are extremly innovative other are improvments of existings ones. The main goal for the interfaces in the ImagineCup 2007 is to improve education.
I’ll show you an example of two femal students from Austria that designed a marvellous interface. Just watch ther advertising video of Intoi
The ImagineCup is a global competition about informatics between students all over the world. The provider of the ImageineCup is Microsoft. This competition is divided into small competitions addressing different aspects of informatics like algorithm, web development, embedded systems, interface design, etc.
In my case I applied for “Interface Design” and I’ll propose my master thesis for the application. That was the idea of my mentor
Yesterday, I got an email reminder that I should upload my storyboard in order to complete the requirements for the first round. I realy forgot the deadline . I spent nearly the hole day in creating abstract, story board, considerations, addressing problems and challenges of the users, user-experience of the proposed interface, etc. . A ended up with a nice powerpoint presentation of my proposed interface about 19 pages , plenty of text and images.
The deadline for round 1 ended this night and I remarked, that I should have uploaded a ZIP file with an abstract, powerpoint presentation, image. I just uploaded a pdf containg my presentation including abstract and images. I’ll see if they accept that or they simply disqualify me.
The competitions has 3 Rounds. The first one consits of describing your own proposol. All proposals are going to be voted by the community to enter Round2. Only 30 teams enter Round 2. In case of the Interface Design competition you have to hand in a working prototype to complete the requirements of Round 2. The prototype is going to be evaluated by experts. Only 6 teams will enter Round 3. That means you won as trip to Seoul in Korea where the finalists come together to compete in a 24h-competition. Well there are some prices, but I think the trip to Koread is worth joining the competition, isn’t it?
I’ll keep you informed about this competition 
This tutorial is for people making their first steps in coding a Web Part for a Sharepoint server. This tutorial describes how to configure Visual Studio 2005 to write Webparts, how to deploy the Web part to the Sharepoint Server and giving hints how to get access the content of the Sharepoint Server like documents, discussions, folders and users.
1. Get Visual Studio 2005 prepaired for the developement of Windows Sharepoint Web Parts
First of all you need to install the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services. On following site you get all the informations on how to get the extensions and how to create your first Web Part project:
As you have read on the site of the upper link, the deployment is realy easy and in fact it is!
If you end up with the deployment error “No Sharepoint Site exists at the specified URL” simply right-click your project in the Solution Explorer, select Properties and go to the debug section. There you only have to insert into the field “Start browser with URL” the URL to the SharePoint site.
2. Writing a”Hello World” Web Part
After creating a new Web Part project you end up with various files and a class file with the name of your project . The following code shows the initial code of your Web Part class file. The only change I made is done in the write statement where I wrote “<h1>Hello World</h1>”.
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages;
namespace Web_Part1
{
Guid(”1b215a64-9c05-4183-9026-735a0a68b772″)]
public class Web_Part1 : System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart
{
protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
{
writer.Write(”<h1>Hello World</h1>”);
}
}
}
Now you have just to press F5 to compile and deploy it on the SharePoint Server. From now on you can use this Web Part on the SharePoint Server.
3. Accessing the content of the SharePoint Server
After getting the
In order to access the content of the SharePoint Server you have to include the Sharepoint library. Just add the following statment to the top of your class file
Next you need to reference your site you want the content of. The following example shows how to access all the files on a site. It parses all the files and creates a simple list of those files:
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages;
namespace Web_Part1
{
Guid(”1b215a64-9c05-4183-9026-735a0a68b772″)]
public class Web_Part1 : System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart
{
protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
{
//Create the reference to my site
SPSite mysite = new SPSite(”http://url/to/my/site”)
SPWeb myweb = mysite.OpenWeb();
writer.Write(”<ul>”);
//parse the folders for files
for (int i = 0; i < myweb.Folders.Count; i++)
{
SPFolder currentlibrary = myweb.Folders[i];
SPFileCollection files = currentlibrary.Files;
for (var k = 0; k < files.Count; k++)
{
//Print the filenames
SPFile file = files[i];
writer.Write("<li>");
writer.Write(file.Name);
writer.Write("</li>");
}
}
writer.Write("</ul>");
}
}
}