Hello, I would like to share the news with the TurboGears community because our project is based on it. I hope it would be of interest to all. The shortcuts are http://project.askspree.de/ or www.askspree.de
Here is the long story: In November 2007, we have started a research project on social search with couple of other colleagues in Deutsche Telekom Labs, Berlin, Germany (hint: anything with a magenta T, including T-Mobile belongs to DT). The idea is/was to create a knowledge exchange network where questions asked by users are converted to bag of words and mapped to a taxonomy of topics and then passed on to the relevant experts who can answer it over a chat system. The whole application runs in the browser, so it is very Web 2.0, a buzzword we used to sell it to the management to get funding -which went to students and servers ;) Back then, Turbogears and even python was very new for me. But instead of going for Java, I have pushed TG as the technology of choice based on factors such as documentation (the book was just out), beauty of python (a superb language for students to learn and use) and amazing python library support (such as NLTK). All this in an environment (Tech. Univ. of Berlin) where people eat, breathe, and talk only Java. After a year, we have a fully functioning prototype (anyone can check it): www.askspree.de Tons of publications on machine learning, usability, and system aspects: http://spree.dai-labor.de/documentation/ And after convincing the management a brand new open source project under the AGPL licence! I should say that this may even be the very first open source project DT has ever done until now (as I am told by management and lawyers): http://project.askspree.de/ As the project manager, I am proud to share what we have accomplished: - Lots of publications with my fellow researchers and PhD students - 4 MS theses (diplomarbeit in Germany) - The engine of Spree system will be used by T-Mobile international as part of internal projects... The credit for the success of course belongs to all the team: http://www.askspree.de/about?page=5 Unfortunately, I and my T-Labs fellows have just overseen the programming effort due to lack of time and our focus on research-side rather than implementation (These days I am allocating more time for TG coding but in other projects). Therefore, the programming success belongs completely to PhD students Robert, Winfried, as well as other students in the team: Milena and Mitra. Actually, the prototype was almost complete in August but processes of big companies are much slower than developing a web app. with TG! The reason why I want to share all these is not only to get attention to our open source project. (It may be difficult to jump into the code of a 50MB package but we had no option of adopting a more open approach earlier. I barely managed to get approval for open sourcing last month.) The other reason is: I would like to thank all the people who have contributed to Turbogears and all the open source components we have used. Without them, we would not be able to do half of it and it would be much less fun. Thank you very much! If anyone is interested in our project, do not hesitate to get involved or give feedback. This is the first time I am dealing with open source from the other side and as a novice, I welcome comments/ suggestions. I really would like to see our efforts benefit a broader audience. I close with recent developments: two other students are working on bringing our matching technology to Facebook and SecondLife as part of their MS theses. Again, TG is used on the back end. You can learn about it from the project website (or my homepage) as things progress and I will try to update the community if there is interest. Best regards, Tansu ----------------------------------------------------- Tansu Alpcan Deutsche Telekom Laboratories http://www.tansu.alpcan.org ----------------------------------------------------- PS: For some reason my previous attempt at posting this failed. I have waited for a moderator to approve my message for couple of days now and decided to retry... --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TurboGears" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/turbogears?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
