LEARNTEC is the leading international trade fair and convention for vocational education, learning and information technology. It provides information about different approaches to learning, using online and traditional media, which are both effective and free of time constraints.

At this year's edition, Prof. Rudi Studer, director at FZI and professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, was invited for a talk on Knowledge Management 3.0, in which he presented the MATURE approach and the people tagging demonstrator as a lightweight semantic approach to knowledge management.

MATURE organized a track at this year's edition of the Professional Training Facts conference, which is an "industry meets science" event targeted at "learning - competence - performance". The MATURE track was about continuous competence development, focussing on one of the main aspects of MATURE: the continuity of learning in organizations.

Andreas Schmidt represented MATURE and its approach to competency definitions at the informal IEEE LTSC WG20 meeting. Its goal was to establish a - standardization body independent - group that develops a shared understanding of competency data management. A position statement was presented and lively discussed:

At this year's edition of the International Conference on Knowledge Management (I-KNOW 09), the MATURE has taken the opportunity to raise the awareness of the community for MATURE and to present the first year's results.

On the first day, there was an entire session on knowledge maturing from an organizational perspective:

On July 2, 2009 LTRI (London Metropolitan University) hosted the successful MATURE Workshop on User Centred Requirements Processes for E-Learning and Knowledge Management – A European-Wide Perspective. The day enabled the cross fertilisation of ideas between MATURE and other key European projects, research centres and individuals. The formal presentations and discussions were of a high quality and the slides from these can be viewed by following the links for talks in the agenda (above). Furthermore, the informal discussion over coffee and lunch were insightful and wide-ranging.

MATURE presented its progress of the first year to three distinguished experts in the field in a very constructive atmosphere. The reviewers have shown a high degree of interest in the topic of knowledge maturing and engaged in an inspiring dialogue with the consortium.
The project management approach, the team spirit and coherence as well as the progress on empirical, conceptual, and technical level were highly appreciated. The project "exceeded the expectations" of both the EC and the independent reviewers.

The official project deliverables, summarizing the results of the first year, are now online available under http://mature-ip.eu/result/deliverables-year-1 as PDF. 

The MATURE consortium was pleased to welcome almost 20 representatives of partners from different countries like Germany, Switzerland, Spain, United Kingdom, or Israel, both from industry and research (about two thirds from industry). Their background was very different, but all of them had a shared interest in the topic of knowledge maturing support in organizations. The event took place at FZI in Karlsruhe, and consortium representatives gave a brief overview of the activities of the first year of MATURE.

We are please to announce that we can welcome two new associate partners to our growing network, which help us to reach out to a wider audience and bring in their international experience, IFIP and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences.