Rigorosum, generic Connection Server, Book Chapter Review and HS3

Last week Markus was reimplementing part of the search logik of HS3. Now the Semantic Search Service uses in addtion an OR logic instead of just multiple parallel AND statements to perform the search. This has the advantage that it is faster and not that much parallel execution is needed to perform a search. Furthermore, the boost logic of Lucene is no used to calcualte the actual rank of the results. Currently Markus is working on an enhanced version of the Data Fetcher that generates queries based on instances and concepts in the KB, permutates them and queries Yahoo BOSS to receive appropriate sites. However, the retrieved sites will have to be pre-filtered according to their relevance.

The last weeks Ingo has been working on the creation of a generic Connection Server package which can be used by other researchers to implement Virtual Institutions. In particular, it is intended to support Tomas in the connection between Electronic Institutions and 3D Virtual Worlds in his research domain of automatically creating 3D Virtual Worlds out of Electronic Institution specifications. While the static generation has already been realized by Tomas, the generic Connection Server package will aid him in making the environment dynamic.

Furthermore, Markus and Ingo reviewed two book chapters for the book “Ontology-Driven Web Mining”. We had received these review requests as we had also submitted a chapter for publication in this book, and, apparently, the editor had run out of reviewers and kindly asked us to also review two chapters. And this we did.

Ingo is also eagerly awaiting his Rigorosum (comparable to a PhD defense) which will take place tomorrow on Monday, June, 21th. He has prepared a talked which he already had presented in front of the members of the VSEM project this week and is currently working on further refining and optimizing the talk in order to give a good presentation tomorrow.