Collaborative Knowledge Construction

Participate in the CKC challenge and assess the state of the art for the tools for collaborative knowledge construction 

The goal of the CKC challenge is to use the current state of the art for the tools as a jumping off point to collect and discuss requirements for such tools; features that users need; features that they like or dislike.

Anyone can participate! There will be prizes for the most active challenge participant and for the participant that provides the most interesting or insightful feedback. We will discuss the challenge results at the CKC 2007 workshop at WWW 2007 in Banff. However, you do not have to attend the workshop to take part in the challenge (and we will mail you the prize if you win and do not come to Banff!). We will make all feedback results and the summary of the workshop discussion public.

Here are the steps for participating in the challenge:

1. Choose a user name and register for the challenge. Please use the same user name for all the tools (there is no singe registration process). The user name that will work in all the challenge tools should have only letters and numbers (no spaces, underscores, etc.) and should be no longer than 10 characters.
2. Read the challenge task. We chose the domain that is familiar to many of us: conferences, publications, research topics, etc. Wouldn't you want to see information about yourself and your papers in all the demo tools? Read more details on the domain in the description of the challenge task. However, feel free to be creative and don't feel constrained by the description.
3. Try out several of the participating tools between April 16 and April 30 and follow the instructions in the challenge task. You don't have to enter the same information in each tool. All the tools will start with roughly the same information (papers and first authors for the CKC workshop) but will likely have different information by the time you log in. There is no information sharing among the tools. Note: Tools in the challenge are quite different from one another and can represent different types of information. Some tools support editing of schema or ontology only; some focus on adding structure to organizing bookmarks or publications; some support editing both ontology and instances. Some tools have discussion and chat facilities (try those out!).
4. If you have questions about the tools or would like to discuss other issues in the challenge, subscribe and post to the challenge mailing list. Before posting a question, please check out the lists archives.
5. Fill out feedback forms. There are two types of forms: (1) feedback specific for each of the tools that you try; (2) general form (not specific to any of the tools) to discuss what you think your ideal tools for collaborative construction of structured knowledge should look like.
6. Invite your friends and colleagues to participate in the challenge.
7. Join us in Banff (if possible)!