After several weeks of stressful work and late nights I finally managed to wrap up a first draft of my licentiate thesis with the working title “An approach to promote semantic interoperability of emerging learning object metadata”. Although it feels nice to take a step back and let the text rest for a while I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about the whole thing right now. I mean, from my perspective the thesis is quite nice and contains all the stuff you’re supposed to have in a thesis. The only problem I have with my perspective is that it’s not at all objective but rather biased, and lacks any prior experience from dissertation authoring, which makes it unreliable to say the least. So at the moment I try my best to enjoy the calm before the storm. The first draft was actually due a week ago, but as an article me and two of my colleagues wrote for ICALT 2009 had been recommended for submission to the IEEE TLT journal we decided to focus on that one. In my (again biased) viewpoint the paper now has a more clear message and overall a more solid argumentation. Anyhow, better get back to my coffee before it gets too cold, laters!

Back on track again after the holidays during which I have spent most of my time cursing my poor Prolog skills in a course about artificial intelligence. Unfortunately the last assignment in the course was a bit too time consuming for the hectic schedule of a Ph D student, but hopefully it is possible to present it at a later stage. Today I picked up my early draft of my licentiate thesis again to continue on the theory part of the cape. The master plan is to have a somewhat readable version of the cape in mid February..hrm yeah well we will see about that. Alongside of the thesis I am polishing the camera ready version of our contribution to the WMUTE 2010 conference, which to my relief got accepted as a full paper..finally I have all my articles in place for my lic! In the paper we elaborate on the potential of using Linked Data to enrich UGC (User Generated Content) with RDF and interconnect systems supporting TEL via the data level, and for my future studies I aim to realise these ideas in real settings at our research centre. Besides the WMUTE contribution, our best paper award for the paper we presented at ICALT 2009 have payed off; we have been invited to publish an extended version of the paper as a journal article in the IEEE TLT. This feels really exciting and we are currently working on a prototype experiment in order to improve the validity of the original paper. Our aim is to have something submittable during January/February this year. Alright better get back to my lic, have a nice day!

Today I decided to set up an instance of the Pinetree system to better demonstrate how it works. We still are thinking about how to implement moderation for CRUD operations in Pinetree, which is why this particular instance of the system is read-only (i.e. it is only possible to perform GET requests). As the API of the system is published it should not be too hard to get the idea of how other types of operation works. Please note that the system is not professionally hosted in any way so do not expect it to be accessible 24/7. Enough rambling from my side; the demonstration of the Pinetree system can be found here. Now I need to get back to teaching obligations, oh the joy!