(Wow, I havn’t been blogging for months…)

Last week I attended really fun and interesting games research workshop at HUMLab, Umeå University in Sweden. Originally, this workshop started out as a get-together of the Truants World of Warcraft guild, but then quickly turned into an actual workshop, with presenters coming from all over Europe and even the US. Since everybody except me came from an arts and social sciences background - games and media researchers, sociologists, history, ethnology - this was an experience which was rather different from the IT conferences I usually attend.

The schedule was a good mix of lectures and hands-on activities, ranging from Games as Social Systems, Gaming and the Gender Gap, Leadership to a Machinima Workshop. The highlight was probably the presentation of star guest Mia Consalvo, who talked about The Cultural Practices of Cheating in Digital Games. I found all of the lectures really interesting and engaging (a welcome change from some of the dry and boring technical talks I’ve seen elsewhere), even though I must admit that I probably lack a lot of the background knowledge. In revenge, I was able to torture an audience of arts researchers with a really technical talk about a World of Warcraft Mashup, including topics such as the internals of WoW addons and Semantic Web and other Web<->Game mashups, such as an Ultima Online Hack or RDFRoom. Actually, this mashup is something I will also present at the upcoming Semantic Web Scripting Workshop at ESWC2008. More about this soon, stay tuned…

I just have to add that, going very well with the topic of the workshop, the social event was a match of laser tag to the death! Basically a three team Warsong Gulch with laser weapons (And a dinner, of course…)

world of webcraft, games, deriblog | 1 Comment »

Over at the spanking new SMILE group blog, there is a post about Dragos’s work on porting Shift to KDE, as part of the Nepomuk project. Of course, it’s not quite as slick as on a Mac.

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Shift (as well as Kante and Knoten) have been available as source for a while now, but installing from source is not really a lot of fun if you just want to try it out.
So, now I finally got around to putting together an installer package for Shift, that will just install the binaries on your computer! It contains the Shift application itself, as well as three plugins (AddressBook, iCal and BibDesk). So, no more excuses - just download the installer, install Shift, and start creating RDFa!
When I get the time, I will put together a proper readme file. In the meantime, I hope you will find Shift self-explanatory.

Oh, and please send plenty of bug reports.

deriblog, rdfa, shift | No Comments »

Arggghhhhh… by some unfortunate series of events, I deleted this whole blog. I won’t tell you the long, boring story, just the bottom line: I will have to start over again. The only good thing about it is that it gives me the opportunity to implement some changes I had planned on doing for quite some time. For starters, I changed the name from “semiblog” to “kantenwerk”, because I’m no longer working on the semiBlog software. I realized it was a bit pointless to try building a complete blog authoring tool, when all I really wanted to do was provide a tool to annotate blogs with all kinds of content-related metadata. There are lots of really good blogging tools out there that have functionality that semiBlog just couldn’t compete with.

So, I extracted the core functionality of semiBlog - create RDF metadata from desktop objects - and threw away the rest. The result is an application called “Shift”, which simply let’s you take objects from other desktop applications (contacts, calendar event, papers, …) and generate a snippet of metadata from them in a very convenient way. Drag&Drop, autocompletion, copy&paste, that’s all. Those snippets can be in various format, such as RDFa, which makes it really easy to incorporate them into web pages - blog posts, but also any other web page. For WWW2007, I made a little video of Shift in action.

Also, instead of using this blog as the web site for one software project, I think I will just turn it into my personal web site. It’s too annoying to have to juggle around with too many different sites.

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Another one of those test posts, just to demonstrate how you can use Shift (formerly semiBlog) and SemClip to move data between desktops. The Shift application was written by Knud Möller, and allows you to produce RDFa code from desktop objects, which you can then use to annotate any webpage. E.g., this blog post! The Semantic Clipboard (or SemClip) is a software by Gerald Reif and his group, and allows you to do the exact opposite: you can copy RDFa (or other RDF) from web pages and paste it back into your desktop applications.
Both will be demonstrated at the Web Data 2 Session of the Developer’s Track at WWW2007 by Siegfried Handschuh.

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