The xOperator Project is moved to Google Code which is much faster (the tracker, not the subversion repository) and has some nice features (e.g. the customizable grid view).

Traditionally we use SourceForge.net for our open source project management. SF is a great side and I’m member of 9 projects there but it was time to move. Basically its a matter of speed. I work every day on tracker items like bug reports, feature requests and tasks for one of our projects and the sf-page is very slow in comparison to google code and also in comparison to our tracker for commercial projects (we use mantis for that).

Project resources of xOperator are now Issue Tracker, Downloads and Mailinglist (moved to google groups). Our homepage @ aksw.org doesnt moved.

When & Where?

Next week (27.02.2008) we arrange the first OntoWiki Plugin Developer Workshop (OPDW-ONE ) at the IfI / University of Leipzig (room 5-10).

Group of Participants

• OntoWiki Core Team: Christoph Riess, Michael Haschke, Norman Heino, Philipp Frischmuth, Sebastian Dietzold
• Plugin Developer: Cerial Jacobs (vakantieland.nl), Deniz Dalli (Interactive Systems), Martin Peklo, Maria Moritz, Michael Martin, Leszek Kotas, Thomas Kappel

Program

• 10:00 Welcome (Seebi)
• 10:30 Introduction to proposed plugins:
  SoftWiki (Lesz), DL-Learner GUI (Maria), Flash Visualization (Deniz), vakantieland.nl Backend (Micha), Social Network Integration (Thomas), OntoBuilder 3 (Seebi)
• 12:00 Introduction to the plugin and CSS framework (Haschek)
• 13:00 Lunch
• 14:00 Extraction of common plugin requirements and discussion of solutions for them (all)
• 15:00 Team programming of a plugin from the scratch (Norm + all)

Deliverables after the Workshop

• Plugin development cookbook for common plugin problems
• Example plugin which uses most tricks of the plugin development cookbook
• Screencast of the team programming session (maybe)

The workshop language is german. If you are interested in participation or want your own OntoWiki workshop drop a note to me.

xOperator combines advantages of social network websites with instant messaging. It tries to be a semantic agent for xmpp / jabber network which finds and shares content about resources (using RDF/SPARQL) for you and your jabber friends.

The first public version of xOperator is now available for dowload. It includes the following features:

• basic xmpp account management (user account, proxy account)
• management of query templates, datastores and namespaces directly with your jabber client
• simple query templates for easy starting with xOperator
• query scripts in groovy for advanced queries and post processing

Links: Homepage, Changelog, Mailing list

Yesterday, Steffen Lohmann from the Interactive Systems Working Group at the University of Duisburg-Essen has surprised me with very nice eyetracking images from an OntoWiki 0.7.1 session last year which was arranged in the scope of the SoftWiki project.

We will meet in Duisburg this march and repeat the experiment with the OntoWiki theme which was introduced in 0.8. The results can lead to more GUI enhancements in the OntoWiki default theme and of course I’m looking forward to play around with this very cool technology!