I'm on my way back from Salzburg where the Salzburg Research team organized a great meeting for the IKS project. Flawless organization as usual, thanks and congrats!

Today's requirements workshop featured an impressive collection of very powerful brains (and nice people to hold them ;-) including, besides the usual IKS suspects, representatives from more than twenty CMS communities and companies.

I was a bit worried at first that IKS, being mostly in a requirements definition phase, didn't have much to show to those people, but today's brainstorming went very well, and the results exceed my expectations.

The most important result for me is agreeing to setup a prototype semantically enhanced search engine, that will use metadata and RDFa embedded in web pages to index content. This will provide the IKS community with a testbed for semantically enhanced websites, and allow us to demonstrate the usefulness of embedded semantic information by making full use of that for searching instead of just enhancing the display of search results. The extracted data might also be very useful for our academic partners to run experiments on real-life data that we're familiar with. We might not have to write lots of code to setup such a search engine, but it's important to have our own thing that people can also run behind firewalls, if needed to run experiments on private data.

The second result that I'm excited about is agreeing to work together on a prototype of a semantic rich text content editor, where you'll get functions like insert person or insert company besides the usual insert link and insert image functions. This will allow us to start making our customers more aware of the importance of semantic markup, in a way that's not too different from what they're doing now.

Last but not least in my list of results-that-got-me-excited-about-all-this is agreeing on the creation of a list of simple user stories that demonstrate what IKS is about, in a very simple and understandable way, while allowing us to define use cases and features that might be challenging to implement today.

More complete information about the meeting should be available from the IKS project blog in the next few days, make sure to subscribe to that. For now Bergie (who suggested the semantic editor project) has been taking notes on Quaiku if you're eager to learn more.

To take part in (or just follow) these projects, subscribe to the IKS mailing list which is going to be our communicatios hub.

Hope to see you there - in a week from now, as next week is my cycling-in-France/offline holiday. Looking forward to getting more familiar with the 29er before the next, more off-road trip in a few weeks.