Blogging about my IMI Master

I finished my first versions of the functional descriptions and handed them over to my supervisors to take a look at. Although I wrote I wanted to make some programming exercises I wasn’t able to get to that. I worked my way through the Microsoft Office Word binary format description to figure out that this is very hard to understand and even harder to get useful information for an implementation of a Word document reader.  I am looking into applications who are capable of reading different file formats including MS Office files, otherwise I would have to write two different thesis – one for my original topic and the other one about the MS Office binary format At the moment I have Tika from the Apache foundation which seems capable of reading MS Office binary formats. I will test that as a next step.

Another direction of research is the handling of metadata I will extract from the documents. One of the books I ordered is having a lot of useful information about that. RDF and OWL seem to be kind of a standard for handling metadata and then use those information for semantic web. Reading all the stuff is adding much more information I have to sort out. It is also important if this can be used with an existing system at my company.

Although my progress is slow at the moment I am confident to get a good system at the end. At the moment all the different pieces are fitting quite nicely together to a complete system.

This week went not very well for me. At the beginning of the week I got a cold including fever.  and I have a bad cough now. Therefore I was a bit limited in my actions. But now the good news- I read some very nice articles about meta data for learning objects which is quite similar to what I want to do. That  helped to get a better understanding and a good picture on that topic.

I worked on the functional description of the tasks the system should do. That is always a challenge as to describe these items. I will need some more iterations before I am happy with the result. Finally I was able to find documentation on how to work with Flash movies and the office documents. I will need to get the text and if I am able to work with information associated with the text like font size this can only be good for the project.

I ordered some more books now on text/data mining and looking forward to read them. Else I will work on the functional description and do some first programming exercises.

I am busy reading all kinds of books and articles belonging to my thesis, to get a good basis for the practical work itself. Besides the practical work I have to build a strong case that my work will be useful for the employees of the company and adds some value. That is making my work more interesting as I have to work on technical issues but also on social ones.

Anyway, I wrote already a few lines about two topics of my thesis. After the review of my professor I know that I have to work harder on using footnotes and references, even in my early drafts. Maybe especially in my early drafts so that I do not miss that later in my thesis.

I wrote my first entries on my wiki and printed those short texts later. Tikiwiki has solved the multi print quite comfortably by integrating a feature where you can select different wiki pages. The selected pages are combined on one html web page which you can print easily. It is not necessary to print each wiki page separately.

At the beginning of the week I visited the FU Berlin library to get access to the ACM Digital library. This was really easy and I can only recommend to everyone who needs scientific documents to visit the FU Berlin. At least for students it is really easy to get access. If you are well prepared it does not need a lot of time to get all papers. You can search at home in the ACM before you have to visit the FU Berlin library. Most important to say about the ACM library papers, some of them are really good and worth the extra effort to go the the FU library to get them.