I am happy to announce that Claudia, Nela, Gregoire and I won one of the two best mini-project awards on the SSSW 2009, last week in Cercedilla near Madrid.
The original idea of our tutor, Enrico Motta , was to semantically represent schedules of conferences and summer schools. Following our interests in the Social Web we extended this with the idea to provide a way for semantic representation and interchange of Social Web activities (also referred to as life streams). On most academic events, people use their lifestreams to report on happenings, express opinions, share links and point out to important moments of the academic event. However, although those activities expressed in lifestreams all over the Social Web are highly related with specific events (Talks, Conference Sessions, Coffee Breaks…) they are not semantically interlinked with schedule data. Hence, relating them over various Social Websites becomes difficult.

Our team came up with a way to glue schedules together with activities that take part within them, using a small extension of Semantic Web Conference Ontology (that can be used to represent schedules), that captures semantics of users’ activities during an event.

The winning slides can be seen on slideshare. As you can see in the end, we have developed a mockup of systems that could use our Semantic Web solution to provide advanced functionalities to the users, clearly demonstrating the benefit of use of the Semantic Web Technologies.

Our ontology is just a beginning of the work on modeling lifestreaming and users’ activities on the Social Web. Members of our team will continue working on it, and we are accepting comments and suggestions on the topic hoping to create a useful, and socially agreed upon model.

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Apart from our mini-project, the same award was given to the the RDFa mini project, on which I have no links.