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Posted By admin on June 4, 2012

Recently, we discussed extensions of the Gi2MO Ontology that fit it to the specifics of mobile devices as well as deliberation platforms in general. Now, we would like to share another story of an initiative independent from Gi2MO project but connecting with our ontology research.

InnoWEB is an ongoing project by the Mondragon University, ISEA institute and companies from Mondragon Corporation. One of the goals of the project is to establish and evaluate a collaborative innovation platform based on social software.

In this setting, the Gi2MO Ontology is being used for publishing idea metadata and sharing it with other web applications.

Mondragon researchers created a number of their own ontology extensions to map the specifics of innovation pipelines applied in the Mondragon cluster companies. The Mondragon Gi2MO Wave ontology reuses some of the existing Gi2MO concepts but also introduces a number of new ones. Most notably, a more strict view on Idea Descriptions by defining a particular set of allowed ones like Outcome, Target, Technology, Market etc.

The collaborative platform that Mondragon uses during their evaluations with companies is based on Drupal and as an extension of cooperation with Gi2MO project they also utilize our RDFme solution for publishing and consuming the data within the InnoWEB platform.

If you would like to know more about the results of Mondragon studdies and how they use Semantic Web metadata in InnoWEB, check out a related publication from the 17th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising (ICE 2011): “A Case Study on the Use of Community Platforms for Inter-Enterprise Innovation” by Felix Larrinaga, Igor Santos, Osane Lizarralde, Alain Perez.

Additionally, you can see the specification of Gi2MO Wave extension published at our own website.

Category: news, ontology | No Comments »
Tags: collaboration, extension, gi2mo, idea management, innoweb, mondragon, ontology, rdf, schema, semantic web, xml

Posted By admin on May 22, 2012

We are happy to announce another talk from Gi2MO project entitled: “Mining sentiments in Idea Management Systems as a tool for rating ideas“.

The presentation is based on a short paper by the same title and shall discuss the usefulness of opinion mining algorithms for Idea Management Systems. In particular, we will present the results of research on automatic extraction of opinions from idea comments and compare idea metrics generated based on opinion polarity (positive/negative) to contemporary metrics like comment count, community up/down rating etc.

The talk shall be given on 29th of May, during a workshop on Large Scale Idea Management and Deliberation Systems collocated with the 10th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP2012) in Marseille, France.

As usual, the presentation slides and paper itself shall be made available after the talk.

If you would like to know more about our opinion mining research in context of Idea Management, check out our previous paper on modeling and linking opinions.

Update: The workshop has finished now, so we provide the presentation slides and the accepted version of the paper:

• presentation slides [PDF]
• paper accepted for the Idea Management workshop at COOP2012 [PDF]

Category: general, news | No Comments »
Tags: conference, coop2012, cooperative systems, gi2mo, idea, idea management, ims, metric, opinion mini, paper, presentation, ranking, research, sentiment analysis, workshop

Posted By admin on April 30, 2012

Following our recent increase in the development activities, we are happy to introduce a yet another addition to IdeaStream family. The IdeaStream Similarity module allows to connect ideas with a number of different relationships. In particular, the module adds a new functionality that activates after the idea submission and allows the innovator to mark duplicates to his idea or any other relationships that he finds suitable.

At the moment the module suggests similarities based on full text keyword search of idea descriptions and their titles.

In addition, we provide quite extensive management facilities that allow for the Idea Management System administrator to:

• add new relationship types
• manage relationships for every idea individually
• customize relationship creation and similarity interface based on user roles or user groups

On top of the above, we included a functionality where the administrator can approve or reject the suggestions of innovators (or optionally set all to be automatically approved without any moderation activities).

Just like the Recommendation module, the IdeaStream Similarity is a border-line case between research prototype and production ready component so we distribute it separately until it gets fully tested.

The credits for developing the module go to Javier Espinosa Garcia.

If you would like to try it out be sure to update your IdeaStream base modules to v1.5.3a for a full experience and next head over to dedicated IdeaStream Similarity Gi2MO Apps page to read all about new features and download the module.

Category: applications, news | No Comments »
Tags: apps, code, detection, drupal, duplicate, gi2mo, idea, idea management, ideastream, linked ideas, linking, management, open, open source, relationship, similarity, software

Posted By admin on April 12, 2012

If you follow our blog closely, you might have noticed news about our collaboration with IMC Technologies on including elements of Gi2MO Ontology in deliberation platforms to support building consensus from ideas that propose different solutions to a single problem.

We went one step forward and are happy to announce a talk that will take place during the 21st International World Wide Web Conference in Lyon (WWW2012).

More precisely the presentation entitled “Building Consensus via a Semantic Web Collaborative Space” will be given by George Anadiotis from IMC, on Tuesday April 17th as part of the workshop on Semantic Web Collaborative Spaces (SWCS2012).

While the presentation is not going to be strictly about Idea Management, the interesting part is that it’s going to show how to expand the offering of Idea Management Systems into new areas of collaborative systems used for problem solving.

The upcoming presentation is based on a research paper by George Anadiotis, Konstantinos Kafentzis, John Pavlopoulos, and Adam Westerski. As usual, both the slides and the paper shall be made available at Gi2MO Docs page after the presentation.

Update: As promised we provide the presentation slides and the accepted version of the paper that is available in the proceedings of the SWCS2012 workshop:

• presentation slides [PDF]
• paper accepted for the SWCS2012 workshop [PDF]

Category: general, news, ontology | No Comments »
Tags: collaborative, conference, deliberation, edialogos, gi2mo, idea management, imc, ontology, open, platform, research, scientific, swcs2012, system, use case, workshop, www, www2012

Posted By admin on April 3, 2012

We are happy to introduce a new concept to the Gi2MO IdeaStream family: customizable data services and rich clients that feed on Idea Management data. To demonstrate the power of new IdeaStream features we have implemented an iPhone application!

The Gi2MO Stats app shows how the status of many different Idea Management Systems can be monitored live in a single application using Gi2MO Ontology Model and RDF/XML in the backend.

In practice, the app is a fairly simple utility that allows to add panel per each IMS and display:

• name of the currently tracked instance
• number of ideas, comments, contests and reviews
• information about last posted idea, comment and contest

The entire app is heavily immersed in the technological background of Gi2MO research and based on a new concept of IdeaStream Services: customizable REST Web Services that can be configured by the IMS administrator using SPARQL or SPARQLScript queries. The core of server-side functionality is delivered by a new version of RDFme v1.7, while the new update of IdeaStream module automatically installs a number of demo services related to Idea Management.

In summary, the new IdeaStream Services are based on RDFme implementation of a SPARQL Data Endpoint and some custom logic for generating RDF metadata and it’s smart indexing. Think – regular Drupal Search with ability to define custom output and offering metadata browsing as opposed to full-text keyword search. If you would like to know more on how to configure RDFme and start creating new IdeaStream Services head over to the apps section guide.

With regard to the iPhone application, We did not put the application in the Apple’s Appstore, therefore a requirement to load it into your devices is having a jailbroken system or an Apple Developer License of your own (so e.g. you can make ad hoc distributions yourself). The code of the application is available as open-source in the apps section.

Category: applications, news | No Comments »
Tags: app, code, data, endpoint, gi2mo, ideastream, iphone, ontology, open, opensource, rdf, semantic, services, sparql, web

Posted By admin on March 29, 2012

The Gi2MO project has started with the a metadata schema proposal for the Idea Management Systems. Keeping in mind how much we went forward since that time (almost two years!), we would like to refresh the specification to accomodate the new developments that we did not take into account before. Below you can see a shiny new diagram that presents the current state of our proposal.

The ontology did withstand the test of time quite well, so the changes are rather minor: some new references and a few optimisations that we figured out during experiments with our open-source Idea Management solution – IdeaStream. Also, after experiences with Consensus ontology and Gi2MO Types we decided to fully migrate to SKOS for describing any controlled vocabularies related to Idea Management System (idea categories, review types etc.).

If you would like to know the details be sure to check out the refreshed ontology specification.

Category: news, ontology | No Comments »
Tags: diagram, idea management, idea management system, ideastream, linked data, mapping, metadata, ontology, open source, opensource, rdf, refresh, update, xml

Posted By admin on February 29, 2012

We are happy to announce a new addition to our open-source Idea Management System – IdeaStream. In fact, it’s such a grand and distinctive feature that we decided to create a new module so that administrators can choose if they actually want to install or not the new functionality.

IdeaStream Analytics adds a new panel with charts and tables that summarize the activity and progress in the Idea Management System. The panel is accessible via the admin menu and it’s visibility can be fully customized via Drupal access privileges system.

The main screen presents a summary of statistics related to ideas and other content types.

Aside of the general statistics, the module brings table views for: ideas, contests and reviews. Each of those allow to browse and filter content together with its basic statistics. Furthermore, via designated subpanels, it is possible to view a number of statistics visualized on charts for specific content types.

Also, as a bonus, the IdeaStream Analytics module supports our recent addition of Gi2MO Types taxonomy. Due to its’ research nature, we still did not include the taxonomy by default in IdeaStream installation. However, if the taxonomy has been installed manually (see guide) our Analytics module will detect it and provide a new tab that displays statistics on Idea Characteristics.

The goal for adding this module was to demo how easily such visualisation and statistics can be added due to the open nature of Drupal. Furthermore, we still remind that additional visualisations and statistics (arguably more sophisticated) can be achieved via exporting data to RDF/XML and using external tools such as Idea Browser or Idea Analyst that we presented some time ago.

The module is recommended for use with IdeaStream v0.1.5 or newer. At the moment we distribute IdeaStream Analytics in a separate package to IdeaStream and it can be downloaded from our apps section. Before we include it the IdeaStream release bundle, we would like to hear your opinions (via mail or Gi2MO Ideas)!

Category: applications, news | No Comments »
Tags: analytics, app, calculations, charts, drupal, gi2mo, gi2mo types, graphs, idea management, idea management system, ideastream, ideastream analytics, ims, module, open source, opensource, rdf, software, statistics, summerize

Posted By admin on February 21, 2012

The primary focus of Gi2MO is to run investigation in the area of Idea Management Systems. However, when presented an opportunity, we are eager to engage in new areas where our expertise can be of service. We would like to bring to light one of such projects that used our Idea Management knowledge model for data integration in deliberation systems.

In particular, we teamed up with a greek company called IMC Technologies that leads the eDialogos project – a social networking platform that allows to organize discussions, manage problem areas on various topics and reach a consensus in a collaborative way.

As part of our research, we aided IMC to apply the Gi2MO ontology for modeling the innovation processes that emerge during problem-solving discussions. In practice, this entailed connecting ideas with problems in a distributed network of deliberation systems. For preliminary results of our joint work please refer to the eDialogos Consensus ontology specification.

For more details on the positioning of Idea Management technologies in deliberation systems see a publication called “Semantics-powered Virtual Communities and Open Innovation for a Structured Deliberation Process” by George Anadiotis et al. (or related presentation slides).

Category: general, news, ontology | No Comments »
Tags: collaboration, consensus, deliberation, discussion, edialogos, gi2mo, imc, integration, ontology, semantic, semantic web, specification, web

Posted By admin on February 16, 2012

Most of the recent Gi2MO progress was focused on research activities, now we have something more development oriented to announce: a new version of our open-source Idea Management System, Gi2MO IdeaStream! Normally, we would just bump the version without any news posts but this time the update is quite considerable and its most important part is: Idea Contests.

Contests play an important role in Idea Management ecosystem. They are focus sessions where organizers invite innovators to collaborate on particular topics and within a given timeframe. We already started to bring some attention to this topic in previous version of IdeaStream (v0.1.4 added private contests) but this time we focused more on the user interface changes and visibility of the contests.

In the new IdeaStream version, the top bar for filtering has been remodeled to bring more attention to contests from the very start. Now, it allows to choose between browsing ideas or contests, as well as change filtering options depending on what is currently displayed.

In addition, the idea contests have a new theme that displays some basic stats and aggregates the submitted ideas. Also, Idea Contests are now supplied with a workflow status that allows to close or open them for submission of new ideas.

The other elements of the interface have also been updated to reflect the changes with contests, for example idea snippets now display information about the associated contest.

Aside of the highlighted changes there are lots of minor additions and bug fixes, for details see the changelog in the install.txt file. If you wish to test IdeaStream v0.1.5 in action head over to the IdeaStream apps section to download the newest release.

Note: If you are not doing a fresh installation and just updating from an older IdeaStream version to the new one, make sure to run the [your ideastream url]/update.php , it allows the module to make some important changes that allow the new version to work correctly. Also, remember to backup your data before proceeding with the upgrade.

Category: applications, news | No Comments »
Tags: contest, gi2mo, idea, idea management, ideastream, new, open, open source, opensource, release, source, system

Posted By admin on December 10, 2011

Following the earlier introduced concept of Linking Enterprise Data for Idea Management, we have constructed a simple demonstrator that shows how to rank ideas and suggest idea reviewers based on the links between idea creator and his extended profile information in the HRMS (Human Resources Management System).

Our implementation assumes the links between systems have been made and exploits them to extract personal data and compare it with idea metadata. In particular, we compare the skills of people with the topics of ideas that they created and use information from the CVs to rank the overall knowledge of the person in the relation to a given idea. Since the implementation is only supposed to be a proof of concept we use fairly simple calculations for ranking.

For privacy reasons we present the demo of the application with some fabricated data to give an overall impression how the solution works (IdeaStream | HRMS Data Endpoint).

For the application source code and the module integrating it with IdeaStream please see the apps section. Credits for constructing the application and integraiting it with IdeaStream go to Daniel Quilón González. The prototype has been constructed as part of the demonstrators for the Resulta project.

As a reminder, the presented application and the use case are one of many that we have pointed out earlier. For more concepts like this check out the Linked Enterprise Data for Idea Management or read our research paper on this topic.

Category: applications, news | No Comments »
Tags: app, demo, enterprise, hrms, idea, idea management system, ims, linked data, ranking, recommendation, recommender, suggestion, talent, talent management