If you are a regular reegle-blog reader you know that reegle is undergoing a total redesign at the moment and that some now features (like the reegle map) will be added soon. But … to improve not “only” the look and feel we have meet some other challenges – one of the most important is to improve our so-called “knowledge map“. This ontology behind reegle necessary to help the user to find the best search results by suggesting related terms / phrases. The inital k-map was done in 2005 and constantly improved but an investigation showed that there is a lot of potential. Ok, so we knew we have to improve that – the question was: how …

The sparkling science project

We found a very interesting project, called “sparkling science“, a project funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research. The aim of the project is to integrate pupils into an academic process and work together with universities, researchers and business-projects. At the Vienna University of Technology we found a group called “Funset Science” who are trying to “Develop an ontology-based multi-agent architecture for the knowledge exchange and process control in virtual enterprises” … perfect … Last November I met Mr. Merdan (TU Wien) and Mr. Koppensteiner (TGM) and we discussed how we could cooperate. The idea of the project “ECORE³ – Expert Concept for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency” was born. Yesterday we completed the first stage (defining the aims) and a group of 5 students is investigating the possibilities to improve the reegle knowledge map at the moment. These students will do the technical part to improve the ontology and help us to transfer the exisiting map in a new format. To improve the content of this ontology another cooperation was established. A group of students from the “TGM Kolleg – Erneuerbare Energien” will contribute to this project with input on renewable energy technologies.

We are happy about this valuable cooperations and are very optimistic that this great cooperation will enhance the search capabilities of reegle and are looking forward to the outcomes.

The students created a blog (in german) to inform about the actual status of their project.

Below you can see a video about “sparkling science” (in german)