What Liip did after winning the IKS semantics UX contest

December 22, 2011 by loic

Some weeks ago, I had the pleasure to represent Liip AG at the IKS semantics UX contest (and win!). Winning the contest is one thing, translating the proposal in real work and seeing the results is another. In this blog post, I will present you what is being done, is going to be done and how things happened.

The background

Liip is currently developing a next generation open source CMS called the Symfony CMF. One aspect of this effort is to create an optimized content editor. The editor relies already on IKS-component (VIE) and the goal of this project was to add Apache Stanbol and semantic features to the editor.

The editor is still in a very alpha stage of development and we tried to focus on the integration of the IKS-components and the semantic features. At the same time, when the development team discovered a bug in the actual code or partner libraries, we tried to fix it directly as well.

The scope of the project

In the proposal that Liip wrote to win the contest, we focused on the three following areas of the editor.

Asset management

Auto-suggestion of images while editing content
Auto-tagging of image while uploading it
Making sure the backend and the work done in general is ready to handle other medias
Document how the current editor can be extended to handle other medias

Content relation

Auto-tagging of content
Auto-relationship of articles to get new navigation possibilities
Auto-linkage of external content

Editing experience

Local storage of changes
Make sure no work is lost in case of network failure or other server/browser disconnection

What’s happening

During the month of November and December, one of our development teams started working on the project. They have already completed the two first areas and our work was presented to IKS some days ago! It has been a lot of new experiences using the IKS technology stack and in particular learning how to integrate and use Apache Stanbol.I have personally just been involved in the final demo of the work and have been very impressed. The team managed to reach all the goals that we set and the solution works well and is fun to use. All the code produced can be found on Github, in the LiipVieBundleThe third area (Editing experience) will be realized as a Hackaton with many participants from around Europe where we will merge Liip’’s editor with the existing open source “CreateJS” project. This Hackaton will bring more than the editing experience improvements.We have already 14 participants and we expect to have a bit more in the end. The Hackaton can be found on Lanyrd

Conclusion

When this Hackaton will be over, we will have completed the proposal and will have a great use case for the quite impressive IKS technology stack!

Until then I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Great new year!

Loïc Schülé