Last week, IE members Alberto Abián, Elena Mena and Raquel Rebollo were attending to the Technical Course on Federation of Learning Repositories for Agriculture, Food & Environment (AgLRs) which took place at FAO Sub-regional Office for Central and Eastern Europe (SEUR) in Budapest.

The main task for the IE members in this course was to learn about spcecific architectures to interconnect Learning Repositories and to expain the technology behind the Organic.Edunet Web Portal.

Alberto, Raquel and Elena in cold Budapest - Nov.2009

IE members Alberto Abian and Salvador Sanchez are currently in Rome to attend to the Organic.Edunet 6th project meeting which is taking place in the FAO premises in the city. Main task for IE in this meeting is to introduce the first fully functional version of the Organic.Edunet portal. IE members are also participanting in other sessions related to the evaluation of the quality of the learning objects uploaded to the portal, pilot trials requirements, multilingual issues in the portal, and others.

The Roman Coliseum

On the social side, the eternal city of Rome needs no presentation. In fact the sessions take up almost all the available time so it is difficult to do any touristic activity apart from the joint dinners we are all having after everyday’s sessions. In the photo below, one view of today’s session about the basics of the evaluation plan.

General view of one of the sessions

After a very fast taxi course from the Fumicino airport to the center of Rome, IE members Alberto Abian and Salvador Sanchez-Alonso reached the FAO premises where they organized the a workshop about the Organic Ontology created for the Organic.Edunet project. It has been a very good opportunity to look closer at what we have been doing during the last 6 months and to improve the current Organic Agriculture and Agreoecology ontology with the help of a bunc of experts from the Organic.Edunet consortium and from FAO. An important part of the meeting was devoted to the presentation of the Moki tool, aimed at easing the collaborative creation and improvement of ontologies. This tool has been created as part of the Aposdle project, whose representative Marco Rospocher participated in the ontology workshop.

In the photo below, UAH members with other participants in the workshop posing in the Philippines room at the FAO building.

From left to right: Nikos Palavitsinis, Alberto Abian, Marco Rospocher and Salvador Sanchez

Last week, IE members Miguel-Ángel Sicila and Ramiro Cano were attending the MTSR 2009 conference, held in Milan, in the University of Milano-Bicocca. This bianual conference aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners who share a common interest in metadata, its representation, its semantics and its diverse applications to Information Systems.

Apart from the conference, there was a little time for entertainment, including the social dinner which took place at the wonderful location of Grand Hotel Villa Torretta.

From left to right: Ramiro Cano, Miguel-Ángel Sicilia, Cristian Cechinel and Juan Manuel Dodero

This week the 3rd edition of the International Conference on Internet Technologies and Applications (ITA 2009) is taking place in Wrexham, North Wales. ITA is a series of bianual conferences usually held in september, where the athmosphere and the good ambiance between all the participants make of it one of our favourite conferences around.

IE regularly contributes one or more papers reporting on the research being carried out during the last year. In ITA 2009 our presentation was about the integration of semantic web frameworks in SOA architectures (check out the full presentation here).

From left to right: Vic Grout and Rich Picking (conference chairs), Thomas Gottron, Stuart Cunningham and Salvador Sánchez-Alonso

This photo was taken during the mediaeval Welsh banquet celebrated in the Ruthin Castle as part of the social program of the conference. It shows IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso relaxing with our old friends and colleagues of the CAIR research group of the Glyndwr University lead by Prof. Vic Grout (first one from the left) .

Last week, IE member Leonardo Lezcano attended the SSFW09 workshop, held in Milan, where he presented an approach titled “Integrating Disease And Diagnosis Semantics In Clinical Archetypes”. This workshop was a follow up to the first workshop on Signs, Symptoms and Findings: Towards an Ontology for Clinical Phenotypes held in Dallas in 2008. The aim of both meetings was to achieve a better understanding of the pathogenesis of human disease in order to develop effective diagnostic, therapeutic and prevention strategies. This Milan edition was organized by the DISCo Bioinformatics Group at the University of Milano-Bicocca.
The workshop audience was pleased to watch the presentation of Nicola Guarino, one of the key names in the ontologies domain, as well as the one of Barry Smith, perhaps the most vociferous advocate of the philosophical approach to the study of ontologies in informatics.

SSFW09 participants

From left to right: Leonardo Lezcano, Gianluca Colombo, Daniele Merico

Last week Miguel-Angel was visiting Dublin City University as external examiner of Mark Melia Ph.D. dissertation on “constraint-based validation of e-learning courseware” (having Claus Pahl as supervisor).  As can be appreciated in the happiness Mark exhibits in the picture below, the evaluation was fairly successful for him.  

In the picture, left to right: Mark, Miguel-Angel and Claus Pahl.

This week Dr. Richard Messnarz, executive director of ISCN, visited Alcalá de Henares to attend to Eurospi 2009. IE group was contacted by some members of ISCN to explore paths for collaboration in the framework of the Knowledge Partnership program for Process Improvement that ISCN is carrying out, but also  to exchange ideas on future joint proposals for EU funded projects. Richard and the rest of the people we met were very nice and kind, and very keen to start a collaboration with our group, by the way. In the photo below, chairmen of EuroSPI and IE members Miguel Angel and Salvador sharing table and some friendly conversation in El pollo de Alcala, where we had lunch together.

From left to right: Miklos Biro, Kerstin Siakas, Miguel Angel Sicilia, Salvador Sanchez-Alonso and Richard Messnarz.

Nikos Manouselis arrived in Madrid yesterday from Athens. Dr. Manouselis, from GRNet Athens, is the project manager in the Organic.Edunet project and one of our best partners in Europe. He will be in Spain during the summer so that we can plan and organise a few things we collaborate together in.

Dr. Manouselis gave a very interesting talk on collaborative filtering in technology-enhanced learning to our students and Faculty, and he will be working with us in related topics during his stay with us.

These days, IE member Salvador Sanchez is in Athens to strengthen links with the GRNet group lead by Dr. Nikos Manouselis. During his stay, Salvador will be working on the design of the Organic.Edunet portal, as well as attending a few sessions for planning future joint project proposals, and meeting PhD students.

Remains of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

In such a long stay in Greece it is almost mandatory to visit the Oracle of Apollo, established in the 8th century BC in Delphi. In this place on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, Apollo -who was in Greek mythology the god of light and truth-, dispensed oracular wisdom through the Pythia. It is well known that this oracle at Delphi was visited by kings, philosophers and politicians, whose decisions were often influenced by the oracle’s responses. It was so important in the antiquity that ancient Greeks even established a right and a precedence for consulting the oracle: the promanteia.