Last week the first requirements workshop of the IKS project (Interactive Knowledege Stack) has taken place. Bertrand has described the project's setup and goals in a previous post, but in a nutshell:
The goal of this integrating project, partly funded by the European Commission, is to create an open source technology platform for semantically enhanced content management systems.
The purpose of this workshop was to identify CMS use cases out of this high-level goal. The project consortium consists of academic institutions and commercial CMS vendors that contribute to open source CMSs like Day or the companies contributing to Midgard or OpenCMS. However, for this task (and the public discussion to follow in the future) the project's consortium members were joined by numerous representatives of various open source content management systems. For example, there were John Norman of Sakai, Jahia's Stephane Croissier, Justin Cormack of squiz, one of the original Joomla founders Johan Janssens, Plone's Raphael Ritz, and Arne Blankerts of fCMS to name only a few (here's the complete list). It is rare to see that much CMS competence in one room.
The Salzburg Research team did a fantastic job at moderating the various thoughts and ideas about use cases and requirements. As a consequence there are now a number of projects already on the way:
- A semantic search engine proposed by Bertrand. Amongst other things this search engine will be helpful to benchmark the data generated by our CMSs
- A common ontology for CMSs
- Henry Bergius has suggested to implement a semantically enhanced rich text editor (and will lead the project). Think "insert person" instead of "insert link".
I was also impressed by the demos shown by SRDC. A semantically enhanced search engine was demonstrated to find documents containing the text "Angela Merkel" when being queried "German Chancellor". DKFI showed a newsroom type application where search facets where generated out of the news item's extracted information.
If you are interested in following this project sign up to the IKS community mailing list. The discussions on use cases or requirements are still in full swing so your voice will be heard.
More impressions about the workshop have been blogged by Bertrand, Stephane Croissier, Henry Bergius has Quaiku'ed the workshop, the Twitter hashtag is #iks-project and Salzburg Research has written about it here.