The EU-funded IKS Project invites FOSS companies and projects to take part in building a software stack for knowledge management that is Open Source.

IKS is funded with 6.5 million Euros by the European Union and 2 million Euros are being invested by the consortium partners which makes up for an overall budget of 8.5 millions. The project will run for 4 years.

Financial support is available for 50 yet to be selected companies/organizations who agree to evaluate the IKS software stack as early adopters as well as 100 individuals who are members of a related FOSS project and who would like to actively engage in IKS project development. The budget for contributors to IKS is meant to alleviate the entry hurdles, e.g. for travel and accommodation for attending the IKS workshop end of May.

The premier focus of IKS is on FOSS content management systems and how they can make use of the to-be-developed IKS technology to let content objects behave the way they are supposed to across varying applications. Additionally, IKS also aims at cooperating with FOSS projects helping to implement semantics-aware software.

Wernher Behrendt, one of the initiators of IKS, exemplifies the project’s vision as follows:

Think of a task that has been defined in a project management software. Ideally, the project management software allows you to edit the task as you would expect it, for example, you can extend the ending date in case the work will take longer. Now, what happens if you want to transfer your work plan to the Web content management system that powers your Web site to display it to the public?

You will most likely create a screenshot of the work plan in the project management software, upload the screenshot in your WCMS and include it on a Web page. In between, you have lost all information about what a task is and how another application should treat it in case you want to edit it within the imported work plan.

This is where IKS comes to the rescue, because its software stack will not only provide a layer that takes care of metadata information (e.g. Ontologies, RDF, …), but will also be able to deal with information on how to process a content object across different applications.

If you’d like to join, IKS provides further information on its Web site and how to get in contact with them. Contribute to IKS as a…

• CMS vendor
• CMS end user
• Open Source developer
• CMS consultant, regional technology transfer organization, anyone else

InitMarketing has made its calendar of world-wide conferences and trade fairs related to Free and Open Source Software, IT and specific industries available to the public.

It currently includes 122 events in 17 countries taking place in 2009. 43 of them in Germany, 69 in USA. We use this calendar when planing events for our customers, thus we’ll regularly update it. Please let us know of any events which are not on our radar yet by commenting to my blog or commenting at the bottom of the events page.

Looking for a useful DocBook XML editor, I came across XXE which is not Open Source, but freely available as a “standard edition”. Definitely worth to give it a try.

Bob Stayton has released DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide, an online book covering “all aspects of DocBook XML publishing tools, including installing, using, and customizing the XSL stylesheets and processing tools.”

via Michael Smith, xmlhack

Volker John just arrived at LinuxTag. We started talking about our installer and Conesys, then Christian Egli popped in and asked a question about my Open Office Doc Book tutorial. While discussing a solution to the problem, Volker pointed me to his presentation Using Open Office for ETDs. There you’ll find some more infos on using DocBook in Open Office. Finally, Christian and Volker started their engines (notebooks) and started playing with OOo.

That’s what I love about LinuxTag: people meet, people solve concrete problems, on the spot, find new infos, learn some more - and enjoy the great atmosphere.

UPDATE:

Note that my tutorial is about 1.1beta1, Volker’s about 1.1beta2 which is easier to handle in respect to DocBook.

Rasmus is in favour of a Web app for the PHP documentation group. “Let’s give it a try”, he said at the PHP documentation group meeting at LinuxTag. Christian from Bitflux and me will see how the Bitflux Editor Next Generation can be used for Mozilla-based online translation of the manual inside of a Web app that fits the workflow requirements of the PHP documentation group (sepcifically the synchronisation of CVS and documentation Web app).

UPDATE

Just talking to Goba at LinuxTag, he sits next to me (hi :). These are the points we have to take care of:

- URLs are referenced with entities anywhere in the DocBook XML, see http://cvs.php.net/co.php/phpdoc/entities/global.ent?login=2&r=1.120

- some more entities are used for ready made paragrpahs (e.g. “This function is experimental…”), see http://cvs.php.net/co.php/phpdoc/en/language-snippets.ent?login=2&r=1.55

- taking a look at Livedocs, we should take care that we use the css definition attributes created by the PHP parsing the DocBook XML to format output in BXE NG

- browsing in the document is provided via Livedocs ToC. The idea is that translators choose a page from the ToC, and click on “edit” at the page. Then BXE NG will pop up an everything will be fine

UPDATe

Christian has a blog entry on this topic, too.

Lars wrote a great blogpost [1] on creating two columns output from DocBook in PDF.

[1] http://trieloff.net/docbook/archive/000365.html

Just found this weblog with a category on DocBook [1] and some very interesting entries by Lars Trieloff. Lars, why didn’t you tell me?

[1] http://trieloff.net/docbook/archive/cat_docbook.html

Sandro has written a tutorial [1] on OpenOffice with examples and discussion of the DocBook export filter. In general, he takes a look at OpenOffice Writer and its capabilities to serve as a WYSIWYG editor for DocBook XML.

[1] http://www.zzoss.com/projects/oowdbk

OpenOffice [1] 1.1 beta now supports DocBook [2] Import/Export as indicated by the feature list [3].

[1] http://www.openoffice.org
[2] http://www.docbook.org/
[3] http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/1.1beta/features.html