4. Information management on the Web
“We’ve gained so much in the digital age. We get more entertainment
choices, and finding what we’re looking for is certainly fast. Best of all,
much of it is free. But we’ve lost something as well: the fortunate
discovery of something we never knew we wanted to find. In other
words the digital age is stamping our serendipity. [ ] Ah, the techies say,
no worries. We have Facebook and Twitter, spewing a stream of
suggestions about what to read, hear, see and do. We come to depend on
it to lead us to the funny article on TheOnion.com or the roving food cart
serving goat curry. It’s useful. [ ] and there is just too much information.
We can have thousands of people sending us suggestions each day –
some useful, some not. We have to read them, sort them and act upon
them.[ ] Everything we need to know comes filtered and vetted. We are
discovering what everyone else is learning, and usually from people we
have selected because they share our tastes”
(NY Times, August, 2 2009)
6. Why RENDER?
o The challenges of today’s Web
• purposefully access, process and manage
information, whilst remaining true to its
design principles, and leveraging diversity
o Comprehensive solutions needed
• infrastructure to store and access information
• methods and techniques to make sense out of it
• paradigms underlying the processes of Web-
based information provision and consumption
o Information management methods and techniques do
not reflect the plurality of opinions and viewpoints
expressed on the Web.
• filtering, aggregation and summarization, ranking,
presentation
o This affects the quality of the information
management services offered, and hampers true
collaboration
7. What will RENDER do about it?
o Develop methods, techniques, software and data sets that will leverage
diversity as a crucial source of innovation and creativity.
• scale to very large amounts of data and hundreds of thousands of users, but also to a
plurality of points of views and opinions
• realistic data sets
• open source extensions to popular communication and collaboration platforms
(MediaWiki, WordPress)
o RENDER’s results will be showcased
• diversity-aware Wikipedia
• diversity-minded access to journalistic content
• novel customer management support in global enterprises.
RENDER will help realize a world where information is acquired and shared in a
fundamentally different manner than the consensual approach promoted by
movements such as Web 2.0, and where communication and collaboration across
the borders of social, cultural or professional communities are truly enabled via
advanced Web technology, supporting one of the credos of European society:
“United in diversity”.
13. Some figures
o STREP with a duration of 3 years
o 7 partners from 5 countries
o With a budget of 4.193.565 !
o Coordinated by KIT
o 384 person months ~ 32 person years
o 7 work packages
o 54 deliverables
17. The work in Y1
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18. More information
Official Project Website
http://www.render-project.eu
Project Coordinator
Dr. Elena Simperl
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Germany
elena.simperl @kit.edu
