Jarosław Dobrzański’s blog
I use two online social services: LinkedIn (en) and GoldenLine (pl). My activities there mostly include adding people I know or work with to my connection lists. I think it’s a good idea to keep such list of friends; you never know, when you need to contact somebody you knew in the past. Also, one beautiful day, you may get a contact from a head-hunter 
Recently, I’ve updated my profiles on both those services. You can view them:
(LinkedIn)
(GoldenLine)
In less than two weeks I’ living DERI. I’m going back home in Poland. Amogn others, I’ll defend my Master’s Thesis.
Before leaving, we (myself, Filip Czaja and Władysław Bultrowicz) are supposed to present the result of our work. We gave the presentation today.
First, Filip introduced ourselves and showed the context of our work:
Continue reading ‘Summary of our work in DERI’
Web 2.0-styled buttons are quite popular these days. In fact, they look fine. Actually, I love them 
Today, I learned you don’t have to do it on your own with graphic software. I’ve found www.mycoolbutton.com - Web 2.0 buttons generator. It allows you to create a button in four steps:
Finally, with a few clicks you create a button and download it as a png file.
Today we submitted yet another article; this time for The 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC ‘07) that will take place in Busan, Korea, from November 11 to 15 (Thursday), 2007. I was the main author of the paper; i wrote it together with Sebastian R. Kruk, Tadhg Nagle, Edward Curry, and Adam Gzella. Its title is “IKHarvester - Informal eLearning with Semantic Web Harvesting”.
There is the abstract of the article:
Only recently, researchers and practitioners alike have begun to fully understand the potential of eLearning and have concentrated on new tools and technologies for creating, capturing and distributing knowledge. Focusing on the area of informal learning, this paper describes this emerging domain and assesses current semantic and Web 2.0 tools used in this field. Contributing to the body of research, the limitations of both sets of technologies are documented highlighting areas of definite improvement. Finally, semantic web harvesting technology as a solution is explored in the form of the IKHarvester tool.
There’s the direct link to the article.
As you’ve probably noticed, quite a few posts on my blog are directly related to eLearning, the Semantic Web, and Web 2.0. Yet, “Social Semantic Information Sources for eLearning” is the topic of my Master’s Thesis. This is the main area for the research I do in the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI).
I’ve already mentioned of two my (and others) articles related to that topic:
If you want to get a general idea of what that all is about, you can view my slideshow - “E-Learning on the Social Semantic Information Sources” on slideshare, or below. I have presented it on one of SemInf group, from eLearning cluster, (I belong to both) weekly meeting.
If there’s no presentation embeded, you can view it on slideshare
Some time ago, myself together with Sebastian R. Kruk, Adam Gzella, Bill McDaniel, and Tomasz Woroniecki wrote an article for EC-TEL 2007 - Second European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning that will take place in Semptember in Creete, Greece.
The title of the article is “E-Learning on the Social Semantic Information Sources”. In general, it relates to eLearning, Semantic Web, and Web 2.0. We propose a way of utilizing social tools for eLearning purposes.
Here you have the abstract:
“E-Learning on the Social Semantic Information Sources”
E-Learning grows on the fertile soil of the Internet technologies; it fails, however, to reach their full potential. With new, emerging technologies of the second generation Internet there is even more to be captured and adopted: knowledge sharing with blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking services. In this article we argue that those technologies can be adapted to improve user experience in e-Learning; we present an online social bookmarking system called social semantic collaborative filtering. SSCF supports SIOC metadata which ultimately transforms it in to a browser of blogs, fora, and other community sites. We show how a digital library system, such as JeromeDL, utilizing this technology can be used in the e-Learning process, which takes advantage of recent research in the Internet.
There is the direct link to the article.
We succeeded and the paper was submission for the conference was accepted. Now, who’s going to Greece? ;>
Anyway, another paper is on the way…
Recently, the SemInf group, which member I am, from DERI eLearning Cluster has set up new project: notitio.us.
Notitio.us is service for collaborative knowledge aggregation and sharing. It employs IKHarvester for retrieving RDF information about Web resources bookmarked by the users. Therefore, it is capable of indexing rich metadata, coming from various types of resources.
In contrary to bookmarking services, such as del.icio.us, notitio.us keeps rich, semantically interconnected metadata shared by the users using Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering. The resources not only can be shared with a bookmarking interface (SSCF), but also, based on the rich metadata, they can be searched and browsed using
TagsTreeMaps, a tags browser based on treemaps rendering algorithm, and MultiBeeBrowse, a collaborative browsing components. These components improve user browsing experience, utilizing metadata delivered by IKHarvester.
One of modules delivered by IKHarvester allows to expose aggregated metadata in LOM standard, which turns notitio.us
into a valuable source of learning objects based on informal knowledge, delivered by IKHarvester.
Remember my previous post about IKHarvester. There, Iâve briefly described how I collect metadata for blog posts which support SIOC. Then, I thought itâs a good idea to describe in one place what really IKHarvester is and how it works.
IKHarvester (Informal Knowledge Harvester) is a web service that characterizes with two core features: harvesting data, and providing it for eLearning frameworks. It benefits from the Semantic Web core postulate that demands rich descriptions of resource available online. Thus, the content of web pages is understandable not only with machines but also by machines.
Continue reading ‘IKHarvester’
I’ve created my first plugin for Firefox. It turned out to be easier than I thought. However, it was so easy beacause I didn’t have to interfere Forefox menu. If I hafd to, I would use XUL, which would be tough.
What I was supposed to do, was to add a link Post to notitio.us to articles on wiki that use MediaWiki engine. The link should be placed in the right menu in a box, where link Help is. I decided to use only JavaScript and test the code with GreaseMonkey plugin for Firefox. In short, GreaseMonkey allows to run a specified JavaScript on declared web pages.
So I ended up with the following JavaScript code:
// ==UserScript==
// @name IKHarvesterWikiPlugin
// @namespace http://notitio.us/IKHarvesterWikiPlugin
// @description Adds to Wikipedia pages "Post to notitio.us" link
// @include http://*wiki*/*
// @exclude *url=*
// ==/UserScript==
(function () {
var IKHarvesterWikiPlugin = {
addPostToNotiotiousLink: function() {
var li = document.createElement("li");
li.setAttribute("id", "notiotious");
li.setAttribute("title","Added by IKHarvester plugin");
li.innerHTML = ' \
<a title="Post to notitio.us" \
href="http://notitio.us/ikharvester/addLO.jsp?m=1&url='+
window.location.href+'\" \
style="color:red; font-weight:bold;">Post to notitio.us</a>'
document.getElementById("n-help").parentNode.appendChild(li);
}
}
IKHarvesterWikiPlugin.addPostToNotiotiousLink();
})();
I’ve tested with GreaseMonkey and it worked. So it could be used by anyone who used GreaseMonkey plugin. Then I stared to think how to create a real add-on to Firefox, an xpi file added to Firefox. I’ve found User Script Compiler, a service that compiles GreaseMonkey scripts to real add-ons. Compilation finished with success, and the plugin is available here
So, GreaseMonkey and User Script Compiler allow to create Firefox add-ons. The former can be used during development and testing stage, while the latter generates the final add-on. User Script Compiler creates JavaScript, xul, and other files that are required so that the plugin works. However, you can do it this way only if you don’t plan to add items to Firefox menu and taskbar. Actually, this way you can create only simple extensions. Anyway, sometime it’s just what you want
Users are familiar with indications of work performed in background since first versions of MS Windows. Besides being fancy, they are also informative.
AJAX, a Web 2.0 technique, aim at exchanging only small amounts of data with a server; this should be performed behind the scenes. If so, why not expose the moments when user interaction brings about reqest and response from a server? Remeber my previous post about using prototype.js for making AJAX request? I use prototype also for indicating background actions on web pages that support AJAX.
You’d never guess how easy it is to such indicator.
First, you must register an action which accurs in case of an AJAX-related event. The best way to do that is add the following code in the head section of the HTML code (remember to include prototype.js library before it!):
<script type="text/javascript">
<![CDATA[
Ajax.Responders.register({
onCreate: function(){ Element.show('spinner')},
onComplete: function(){Element.hide('spinner')}
});
]]>
</script>
Then, further in the code inside body section, add this:
<img alt="spinner" id="spinner" src="gfx/spinner.gif"
style="display:none;" />Actually, it’s all. Whenever you click an object which sends an AJAX request to the server, the indicator defined by img appears and is visible until the response is obtained.
Wonder, how to create an indicator animation? Generate one on ajaxload.info
