MATURE organizes next year's edition of the Professional Knowledge Management Conference (WM2011) in Innsbruck, Austria.

The Conference on Professional Knowledge Management provides a broad integrative overview of organizational, cultural, social and technical aspects on Knowledge Management. Focus of the conference is bringing together different research disciplines and sharing experiences gained in the different areas where knowledge management is being applied.

The conference is hosted and organised by Ronald Maier and his team in Innsbruck.

MATURE also organizes three workshops at this conference:

• MSKWM2011 - Motivationale, soziale und kulturelle Aspekte im Wissensmanagement
• POP11 - Putting ontologies into practise
• SAKM'2011 - Workshop on Behavioral Aspects of Situational Applications and Knowledge Mashups

Contributions both from science and practice are welcome. Deadline is October 24, 2010.

MATURE has conducted a large-scale empirical study as part of the second year with 139 interviews from companies in various business sectors and countries in Europe (and beyond, e.g., in China). The goal was to deepen the understanding of real world maturing practices and barriers to knowledge maturing. Towards that end, MATURE project members have engaged in conversations about knowledge maturing phases, activities, indicators, and barriers.

On May 11, the kick-off workshop for using the people tagging demonstrator as part of operational activities has taken place. Jenny Bimrose from University of Warwick and Simone Braun and Andreas Schmidt from FZI have introduced the people tagging system to an enlarged group of ten personal advisors at Connexions Northumberland after it had been substantially improved as a result of the participatory design phase with a core group from Connexions Northumberland.

Last week, the project has presented its results of the second year to the review panel. This encompassed the results of the representative studies and their implications on the knowledge maturing model as well as the demonstrator development, which brings together conceptual advances, architecture and integration work, and formative evaluation. The whole team has put tremendous effort in the preparation of the meeting, particularly because it was a very early project review.

We are proud to announce that our associate partner network has grown with two new partners from Portugal:

• Multicert 
• Maisis Information Systems

Representatives from those companies will join the associate partner meeting on April 16 in Vienna.

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: