So, in days four and five we man­aged to build a team (thanks to Helen): me, Rabeeh Abasi, Sofia Ange­l­etou, Aurona Ger­ber and Alta van der Merwe. We star­ted think­ing on an two-​day imple­ment­able pro­ject, we argued a lot on what a per­son needs when is trav­el­ling to another coun­try, and the solu­tion come at the bar (thanks to Asun, who chased us out of the school build­ing) where we star­ted dis­cuss­ing cul­tural dif­fer­ences — as we were a het­ero­gen­eous group: two south afric­ans, one greek, one romanian and one pakistani. In the end we decided to build an onto­logy that can model what are the social norms that gov­ern dif­fer­ent situ­ations (such as vis­it­ing some­body, court­ship, etc.) in dif­fer­ent cultures.

We also focused (and argued a lot) on the use of some onto­logy pat­terns, such as situ­ation, agent-​role and role-​task. We were on Sat­urday the second group to present our mini-​project, all the other present­a­tions had a sig­ni­fic­ant fun factor and imple­ment­a­tion plans, and couple of them had real pro­to­typ­ical implementations.

And we won! it seems that the com­plex­ity of the mod­el­ling effort and the san­ity of the open research ques­tions we launched did this. I’m per­son­ally still puzzled about it.