Markus Luczak-Rösch: "loomp can help journalists to manage their notes, interview logs, references, addresses, etc."
20.04.2009
Searching for a killer application for the Semantic Web a young research team from FU Berlin developed loomp, a multifacetted annotation tool for various information types, workflows and media channels. Tassilo Pellegrini (SWC) talked to project leader Markus Luczak-Rösch about motives behind and prospects for a Corporate Semantic Web leveraged by loomp.
The Coporate Semantic Web tool "Loomp" has recently been awarded by the German funding agency Profund for "best business plan". What have been reasons for the jury to decide this way?
The contest is an FU internal addition to the business plan contest Berlin-Brandenburg. The plans which were written by students and employees of the FU Berlin are rated in two additional categories: scientific value and social relevance. The unique selling point of loomp is the simplicity of generating semantic content which allows technically unexperienced users to become part of the Web of data. If loomp becomes as successful as Wordpress was, it may be the catalyst for the Web of data, and that could have strong social relevance, I guess.
You can gain an impression of loomp by visiting www.loomp.org.
What exactly does loomp do? Why do you call it a Corporate Semantic Web tool?
Well, first of all, you can call it a Corporate Semantic Web tool as well as you can call it a public Semantic Web tool. The major reason why it is labeled with Corporate Semantic Web is because it is an outcome of our research project having the same name.
But, for sure, loomp addresses the business context in a special way. In detail: We have found various use cases especially in knowledge and content intense domains. The most interesting one is the journalists use case. Consider journalists which research and write articles and editors which revise and publish the work of journalists.
Journalists research specific topics on demand and access various information sources for this purpose, e.g. websites, books, related articles, and human informants. Only few journalists use digital devices for this task and even fewer apply information management systems. To transfer the finished article to the responsible editor at the publishing house the people use free text documents and email communication. Finally, an editor revises and releases the articles for his department. loomp can help journalists to manage their notes, interview logs, references, addresses, etc. loomp helps to link an article to its information sources.
On the side of the publishing houses editors use loomp to revise and edit articles written by journalists. They can add additional annotations to articles and possibly interlink them. Finally, they choose a publishing channel for the work (e.g. such as a blog, an RSS feed, a wiki, or print) and release them. The benefits of loomp in this context are manifold. loomp features a semantic search engine and thus decreases effort of finding information that a user has created before. Based on the semantic annotations the content provider can offer content and target group specific services, e.g. providing related information or accurately fitting commercials.
What inspired you to develop such an application and how long have you been working on it?
Since I recently answered nearly the same question in another context I really enjoy telling the story again. There is the following anecdote about the inspiration for loomp: I had a sleepless night last year thinking about and working on my research topics. Then I thought that it is a pity that nobody had implemented such a LAMP compatible semantic information space, yet. I sent an email to my wife's account to save the notes of this idea. Two weeks later I still thought that the idea is good, discussed it with my partners, and we just started to design the system.
But seriously, there is an obvious overall inspiration. Everyone searches for the killerapplication that solves all those personal information management issues. Remember that I sent an email to my wife's email account just because I wanted to keep the notes in my sent mailbox which I can access via webmail from anywhere in the world at anytime. The information does not need any specific visualization since the most important aspect is that I can find and access it! That loomp provides multiple content reuse and flexible cross-media (or at least cross-channel) publishing is because this is another big problem for people in knowledge intense domains: Trying not to do the same work twice.
These two inspirations are the reason why loomp is different from wikis and semantic wikis. Wikis think in hypertext which is for visualization, semantics are an additional task. loomp thinks in semantics which is for finding information, visualization can flexibly and individually added on demand later.
We started the system design in October 2008 and the software development runs since December 2008. We are currently in 0.1 alpha state but envision a 0.2 beta at the end of april.
What are your future plans with loomp? What are the next steps? Where do you want to go?
We are at a strategic important point right now. The decision whether loomp will be a downloadable open source product or not is not finally made. I think when we reach the stable 1.0 version of the system and release it in the wild there will be a business model behind, no matter whether loomp is open source or not.
Furthermore, we are actually in dialogue with some key contacts from German publishing houses to gain feedback about loomp. We also plan to participate in two more business plan contests. Parallel to that we are working hard on advancing the 0.1 alpha towards a 0.2 beta version which will be the first version that provides proper linked data in the sense of the four principles. Furthermore, we developed a technology roadmap which gives a direction until the end of 2009 including features like automatic annotation support and multimedia integration.
About Markus Luczak-Rösch
Markus Luczak-Rösch recieved a diploma in computer science from the Freie Universität Berlin in September 2007. From 2001 until January 2008 he worked at the Deutsches Studentenwerk e.V. as the responsible person for the Web-based information systems of the federation of 58 Studentenwerke in Germany. In January 2008 Luczak-Rösch joined the Corporate Semantic Web workgroup at the Freie Universität Berlin and works as a graduate research associate in the same named research project. He is also involved in lectures in computer science and entrepreneurial education. His doctoral research focuses ontology engineering, especially aspects of ontology evolution, ontology maintenance and cost-benefit estimation for ontologies. Beside his work at the university Luczak-Rösch is entrepreneur with a venture called lumano - inteligent systems GbR, which he co-founded in spring 2008 and which provides consulting and software development in the field of modern Web technologies. Markus Luczak-Rösch is co-founder and co-maintainer of loomp, together with Ralf Heese and Radoslaw Oldakowski.