Back from the UE IKS Project held last week in Salzburg, Austria with 60+ participants from various FOSS-/CMS-communities, universities and vendors.

One of the main goal of this project is to let existing CMS leverage semantics-based technology for use within their own systems.

As already mentioned by David Decraene back in 2007 in a nice and short introduction to RDFa, OWL and Microformats:

“For ontological data to truly be useful, you need to somehow tie current web content with semantic classes and instances. OWL has failed miserably in this respect so far. It is much like a far away island of Eden, and a man without a canoe. All the important data could be there but no-one knows how to reach it.”

… and the situation did not really evolve for the last two years.

Interestingly major search vendors are now more heavily pushing webmasters in order to be able to access to publically available web pages from a more structured manner either in RDFa or at least with some kind of support for basic Microformats. Google recently announced support for “Rich Snippets” and Yahoo is already offering its new SearchMonkey alternative for a couple of months. Pressure on various content providers will perhaps finally come from major search engines and some increased needs from customers to get better and enhanced SEO. So Drupal (read this interesting blog entry from Dries Buytaert, CTO of Acquia), Jahia but also all the other (W)CMS vendors are now getting more and more concerned by getting back in touch with  Semantic Web technologies.

This UE project starts then exactly at the right moment. However similar to all these other UE-funded projects we all heard about I was first quite skeptical about the possible deliverables applied to a fast moving industry such as the CMS one (remember: this is a 4 years UE project!). I think I was not alone to share this first feeling (e.g: Bertrand Delactretaz blog’s entry about it). I can now say that the Salzburg Research which was leading this project did a terrific job during this two days to carefully listen to our needs and to move from a long-term oriented academical approach to more short term objectives with a collaborative open source minded spirit.

As Bertrand is mentioning it in his blog entry we left this first Workshop with some concrete short term oriented action plans (a semantic search engine, a common ontology project for CMS vendors, a semantic rich text editor or the completion of new UX guidelines in term of implementing state-of-the-art Semantic UI). Such first milestones will serve as a basis to try to make all the CMS vendors and academics work together, deliver some concrete and useful piece of code for everybody and finally create a more fertile ground to initiate more complex semantic projects.

There should be more information about all these projects soon on the IKS web site. You can already access to some unofficial notes of the meeting on Quaiku or subscribe to the open IKS mailing list if you are interested to get more information.