I spent this week at Salzburg Research in Austria attending the kick-off meeting of the Interactive Knowledge Consortium, a €6,5m EU-funded project to introduce semantic capabilities into open source content management systems.

Nemein is participating in the project as one of the six industrial partners. For the next four years we will be working together with cool CMS companies like Day and Nuxeo, as well as with some of the leading European researchers in the field of Semantic Web.

The plan is reasonably simple: we will try to figure out what kind of semantic features would make sense to CMS end-users, and then based on that develop the user interface conventions and tools that various participating CMSs can apply. Once the case has been proven with the initial participating systems, we will then help other CMS projects to implement the same stack in order to set off a wave of semantically-enhanced websites across the Europe.

For us in the Midgard community this is well-timed, as we're anyway concentrating much effort on the new "Vinland" series in order to build a set of content management tools that can carry us through the next ten years of web evolution, as the old Midgard series did since 1999.

The project will be a good chance to leverage our experiences with Microformats and apply them to the "uppercase semantic web". Use cases range from smarter queries into content inside a Midgard repository to automatic maintenance tools utilizing semantic content in external resources.

In addition to taking Midgard to a new level as a CMS, it will be great to collaborate again with several familiar faces from the old days of OSCOM - people like Bertrand from Day, Sandro from InitMarketing and Alexander from Alkacon.

Technorati Tags: iks-project, semanticweb