Aldo de Moor

Mar

2008

Back to the basics

Since yesterday, I am the happy owner of an Asus EEE laptop. No, it’s not yet another machine with more cycles, megabytes, and features. Rather, the philosophy is “less is more”. EEE stands for “Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play”, and as far as I am concerned, the machine fully lives up to this promise.

My version is the 4G-Surf: only a 7″ display, 512 Mb RAM, and 4 Gb solid state disk. The price? Less than 350 euros for all this goodness! There is a huge backorder for the newest models (4 Gb SSD with webcam, 8 Gb SSD), but the 4G-Surf is already definitely good enough for your daily basic mobile needs. See also my post on GrowingPains for some reflections on the impact of this development.… Read more...

Mar

2008

5th Prato Community Informatics & Development Informatics Conference 2008

5th Prato Community Informatics & Development Informatics Conference 2008: ICTs for Social Inclusion: What is the Reality?

27 OCTOBER-30 OCTOBER 2008, MONASH CENTRE, PRATO ITALY.

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
We are seeking abstracts and proposals from academics, practitioners and PhD students for a conference and workshop event at the Monash University Centre, Prato, Italy (near Florence). The Conference will also include a development informatics stream under the aegis of the International Development Informatics Association as part of its second conference meeting.

Click here for more information.

Mar

2008

Virtual worlds are not enough

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with Philippe Kerremans, who through his Louis Platini company is implementing Second Life business solutions. We agreed that building virtual worlds in, for example, Second Life is not enough. Additional necessary conditions are an accompanying website in “ordinary cyberspace” and process models that can be used to ensure that available functionalities are actually being used by community members in all their various roles.

Mar

2008

IADIS International Conference Web Based Communities 2008

IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE WEB BASED COMMUNITIES 2008

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 24 to 26 July 2008

(http://www.webcommunities-conf.org/)

part of the IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems

(MCCSIS 2008)

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 22 to 27 July 2008

(http://www.mccsis.org)

* Conference background and goals

The mission of this conference is to publish and integrate scientific results and act catalytically to the fast developing culture of web communities. The conference invites original papers, review papers, technical reports and case studies on WWW in particular the emerging role of so-called WWW-Based Communities.

Mar

2008

Ontology Management book

M. Hepp, P. De Leenheer, A. de Moor, Y. Sure, eds. (2008). Ontology Management: Semantic Web, Semantic Web Services, and Business Applications, Semantic Web and Beyond: Computing for Human Experience series, Springer Verlag, Berlin, ISBN 978-0-387-69899-1

has just been published. It contains a set of state-of-the-art chapters of ontology management. An interesting observation is that concepts like evolution and communities are starting to be seen as core elements of successful ontology management. The very formal and informal semantic worlds are finally starting to meet.

Besides having been a co-editor, I have also been a co-author of one of the book chapters:

S. Christiaens, P. De Leenheer, A. de Moor, and R. Meersman (2008). Ontologising Competencies in an Interorganisational Setting. In M.… Read more...

Mar

2008

Welcome to the Making CommunitySense blog

Since 2004, I have been musing about the “theory and practice on evolving virtual communities” on my GrowingPains blog. Having moved out of academia I started my own company, CommunitySense in 2007. There were many reasons for this small step for mankind, giant step for me. I have now been in business for a while, and feel the need for a new blog, in which I will share the more detailed, technical, some might say boring bits and pieces of the blood, sweat and tears of making online communities really work. Whereas with GrowingPains I try to paint the bigger “what” picture, through this Making CommunitySense blog I hope to share more of the “how to-s” of making people collaborate through the Internet successfully.… Read more...

Feb

2008

What is the Pragmatic Web?

The Pragmatic Web is still in its infancy, as are the explanations about what it is or could become. Here is one of my recent takes on the matter trying to answer some questions by Paola di Maio on the Pragmatic Web mailing list.

——– Original Message ——–
Subject: Re: [PragmaticWeb] following on
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:31:54 +0100
From: Aldo de Moor <ademoor@communitysense.nl>
To: pragmaticweb@listserv.uni-hohenheim.de
References:<c09b00eb0802140033q39df5efek8ec3873b28207ba@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Paola,

paola.dimaio@gmail.com wrote, on 14-2-2008 9:33:

> – to fill such a gap, a new paradigm shift is now emerging called
> ‘pragmatic web’ designed primarily to support and automate the
> human-human web based knowlege exchange, particular emphasis is being
> place on – rule based reasoning and intelligent applications based on
> NL

To me, the PW is basically about context and purpose: making web applications more context-aware and serving purposes of (their communities of) use.… Read more...

Jul

2007

Symposium “You Can Do So Much More with a Second Life…”

Second Life is hot. Just having attended the Interdisciplinary Second Life Workshop at the University of Twente, on June 21 another workshop on this themewas organized at Tilburg University by TILT (Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society), together with ECP.NL, a national platform which tries to improve the Dutch international competitive position with respect to the information society and economy. Although many of the issues were related, the focus was slightly different. The symposion was in Dutch, but the (sometimes translated) titles of the presentations should give a good idea what this was all about:

Barend Raaff (DNB Media): Guided Tour through Second Life
Arno Lodder (Free University Amsterdam): Best of Both Worlds: Physical Characteristics in an Electronic Environment – About Education and Conflict Resolution in Virtual Three-Dimensional Worlds
Jacob van Kokswijk (University of Twente): Virtuality and Interreality
Kees Stuurman (TILT): Rules of the Game or Rules of Law?

Jun

2007

Interdisciplinary Second Life Workshop 2007

On June 14, I was at the University of Twente in Enschede to attend the Interdisciplinary Second Life Workshop. It was organized by the new inter-facultary Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS), part of the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology.

The workshop was very well-attended and lively. The speakers gave a good overview of the main promises and problems surrounding Second Life. The workshop was preceded by an inspiring keynote address by Peter Ludlow, well-known as editor of High Noon on the Electronic Frontier and founder of the Second Life Herald newspaper.

The titles of the presentations give some idea of the kind of issues addressed:

Peter Ludlow (Uni Michigan): Emergent Gameplay, Deviant Ageplay, and the Elusive Payday of Business in Second Life
Dan Seamans (Open Uni, UK): The Vital SPark: Managing a Dynamic Learning Space in Teen Second Life
Patrick Ozer and Albert van Breemen (Philips Research, the Netherlands): Interreality Communication: iCat Meets Second Life
Robert Slagter and Wil Jansen (Telematica Instituut, the Netherlands): Real Business in Virtual Worlds
David Nieborg (Uni Amsterdam): ‘Don’t Sponsor a Game that is a Playground for Criminals!’

Aldo de Moor

Back to the basics

5th Prato Community Informatics & Development Informatics Conference 2008

Virtual worlds are not enough

IADIS International Conference Web Based Communities 2008

Ontology Management book

Welcome to the Making CommunitySense blog

What is the Pragmatic Web?

Symposium “You Can Do So Much More with a Second Life…”

Interdisciplinary Second Life Workshop 2007

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