kinkon GmbH, which operates the portal kinkon.de for child-appropriate surfing on the Internet, and Attensity Europe GmbH have concluded an extensive technology partnership agreement. Central to this agreement is the use on kinkon.de of the open-source platform developed by Attensity, SMILA, which enables users of the kinkon portal to conduct highly intelligent search.
On kinkon.de, parents can work with their children to decide which websites the children should be allowed to access. Based on the social-media principle, parents create a kind of “community” which allows them to benefit from the website ratings of other parents. This results in a web-based catalog of child-appropriate websites in which users can conduct an intelligent, topic-based search. Thus kinkon.de offers families greater security as they use the Internet while it also promotes the development of children’s media skills.
SMILA as a basis for innovative applications
SMILA’s versatility and performance were recently validated in a joint project between kinkon and the University of Trier. Based on SMILA, an expansion of kinkon.de was quickly developed to ensure that child-appropriate websites are regularly monitored for any negative changes in their content or tone. Whenever such changes are identified, the website is automatically subjected to an additional approval process. The same component is also used for classifying websites for the web-based catalog on kinkon.de, which is a great help to kinkon GmbH editors.
The use of SMILA has made it possible to drastically reduce the complexity of this process. SMILA features numerous interfaces to various applications and tools, a high level of scalability for this integration and strong intelligent search performance. It allows for the integration of other applications, which makes it an ideal tool for cooperative projects with institutions and universities.
“As open-source software, SMILA lets us save money and ensures a high level of flexibility,” explains Peter Sanner, kinkon’s co-founder and CEO. “It makes a great deal of sense for us to use a framework like SMILA. Even if we were to change search technologies entirely, it would save us the trouble of reprogramming connections to systems and substantial amounts of logic programming.”
“Applications and portals for child-appropriate surfing on the Internet are very important today, and their importance will only increase in the future. This is very clear from current discussions of policy in this area. We are delighted to have the opportunity to collaborate with kinkon.de and contribute our technological expertise to a showcase project like this one,” notes Dr. Stefan Wess, general manager of Attensity Europe GmbH.
Technological background: SMILA as an open-source framework
The open-source framework SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture) was developed within the ORDO project, which is part of the IT research program THESEUS. SMILA is a standardized infrastructure for information management and integration, based on the programming platform Eclipse. Since June 2008, SMILA has been an official Eclipse project. Attensity Europe and brox IT-Solutions GmbH are the main initiators of SMILA, and have provided most of its developers and contributors.
About kinkon
kinkon GmbH, located in the city of Kaiserslautern, is the company behind kinkon.de, which provides families and their children with a safe space for communicating and surfing the Internet. This browser- and operating system-independent platform received multiple awards even before it was officially launched.
For further information, go to www.kinkon.de
On kinkon.de, parents can work with their children to decide which websites the children should be allowed to access. Based on the social-media principle, parents create a kind of “community” which allows them to benefit from the website ratings of other parents. This results in a web-based catalog of child-appropriate websites in which users can conduct an intelligent, topic-based search. Thus kinkon.de offers families greater security as they use the Internet while it also promotes the development of children’s media skills.
SMILA as a basis for innovative applications
SMILA’s versatility and performance were recently validated in a joint project between kinkon and the University of Trier. Based on SMILA, an expansion of kinkon.de was quickly developed to ensure that child-appropriate websites are regularly monitored for any negative changes in their content or tone. Whenever such changes are identified, the website is automatically subjected to an additional approval process. The same component is also used for classifying websites for the web-based catalog on kinkon.de, which is a great help to kinkon GmbH editors.
The use of SMILA has made it possible to drastically reduce the complexity of this process. SMILA features numerous interfaces to various applications and tools, a high level of scalability for this integration and strong intelligent search performance. It allows for the integration of other applications, which makes it an ideal tool for cooperative projects with institutions and universities.
“As open-source software, SMILA lets us save money and ensures a high level of flexibility,” explains Peter Sanner, kinkon’s co-founder and CEO. “It makes a great deal of sense for us to use a framework like SMILA. Even if we were to change search technologies entirely, it would save us the trouble of reprogramming connections to systems and substantial amounts of logic programming.”
“Applications and portals for child-appropriate surfing on the Internet are very important today, and their importance will only increase in the future. This is very clear from current discussions of policy in this area. We are delighted to have the opportunity to collaborate with kinkon.de and contribute our technological expertise to a showcase project like this one,” notes Dr. Stefan Wess, general manager of Attensity Europe GmbH.
Technological background: SMILA as an open-source framework
The open-source framework SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture) was developed within the ORDO project, which is part of the IT research program THESEUS. SMILA is a standardized infrastructure for information management and integration, based on the programming platform Eclipse. Since June 2008, SMILA has been an official Eclipse project. Attensity Europe and brox IT-Solutions GmbH are the main initiators of SMILA, and have provided most of its developers and contributors.
About kinkon
kinkon GmbH, located in the city of Kaiserslautern, is the company behind kinkon.de, which provides families and their children with a safe space for communicating and surfing the Internet. This browser- and operating system-independent platform received multiple awards even before it was officially launched.
For further information, go to www.kinkon.de
