InsightNG

 It's always surprising just how polarizing the idea of gamification is. Some people love the concept of adding game-like elements to all different types of social and commercial interactions, while others hate it with a seething vehemence, either because they're "gamers" who hate seeing their favorite art form debased, or because they're anti-gamers, who don't [...]

Since the open data movement has shown no declining signals, several hubs, or data markets, have been released. This was a direct consequence of the need for ways to search all different data sets

Will the upsurge in activity around climate change and the food crisis repeat the cycle of the movement of movements over the past decade - momentary visibility then dissolution? Harry Halpin and Kay Summer say 'yes', unless different models of organising are embraced.

"Silk is an app for the web that helps you collect, sort and view the information that you need without making you comb through the data yourself. It also allows content creators to provide their content in a more structured manner on the web. This is an app that will allow you to better navigate the semantic web seas, also known as Web 3.0." 

The PANDA Project, a winner of this year's Knight News Challenge, is what developer Brian Boyer calls a "newsroom data application," a tool that helps find context and relationships on the fly. Boyer, the news applications editor at the Chicago Tribune, will lead the project, which plans to create a set of web-based open source tools that will allow any newsroom to set up their own PANDA to analyze data whenever the need arises.

Simply put, our brain is inherently well suited for some tasks, but ill suited for others. Unfortunately, the brain's weaknesses include recognizing which tasks are which, so for the most part we remain ignorantly blissful of the extent to which our lives are governed by the brain's bugs.

The opening keynote sessions at SemTech this week made one thing abundantly clear: Semantic technology is for business, and it's time to start putting it in practice there.

 "How do you quantify what makes a visualization good?"

We live in a world of ever more change and choice, a world where we have far more opportunity than ever to achieve our potential. That kind of world is enormously exciting, and full of options. But it is also highly disorienting, threatening to overwhelm us with sensory and mental overload.  In that kind of world, the ability to provide persistent context becomes paradoxically ever more valuable. Persistent context helps to orient us and connect us in ways that can accelerate our efforts to achieve our potential.

Web search engines have become indispensable tools for finding information online effectively. As the range of information, context and users of Internet searches has grown, the relationship between the search query, search interest and user has become more tenuous. Not all users are seeking the same information, even if they use the same query term. Thus, the quality of search results has, at least potentially, been decreasing. Search engines have begun to respond to this problem by trying to personalise search in order to deliver more relevant results to the users. A query is now evaluated in the context of a user's search history and other data compiled into a personal profile and associated with statistical groups. This, at least, is the promise stated by the search engines themselves. This paper tries to assess the current reality of the personalisation of search results. We analyse the mechanisms of personalisation in the case of Google web search by empirically testing three commonly held assumptions about what personalisation does. To do this, we developed new digital methods which are explained here. The findings suggest that Google personal search does not fully provide the much-touted benefits for its search users. More likely, it seems to serve the interest of advertisers in providing more relevant audiences to them.

This site is a demonstrator of the Information Workbench, a platform for Linked Data application development. Designed as a self-service platform, the Information Workbench provides you with all the tools and features you need to quickly build your personal Linked Data applications.

SemTech is the preferred industry platform for exhibitors to announce product launches and breaking news. Attendees will have the rare opportunity to view products and services from top industry insiders.

A social media profile represents a business' online identity. Therefore, it's crucial for businesses to spend time and effort in order to ensure that their social media profiles are informational, interesting and appealing to their fans/ followers. However, building an impressive profile and building a large follower base is only half the battle won.

Over the past year, we've witnessed a convergence of social, mobile and cloud computing prompting organizations around the globe to evaluate how they embrace the growing social business market. "Social" has become essential for organizations that want to remain competitive.

James Kelway started the Six Circles - an Experience Design Framework, as an enquiry into how different design principles can be applied to the field of digital product design. The principles studied led to the emergence of six core themes; persuasion, behavior, visual design, usability, interaction and content. The book describes the importance of these areas and how working systematically with these themes will require a holistic mindset and approach that require multi-disciplinary teams within organizations to ensure the creation of quality products. It is also serves as a way to judge the effectiveness of digital products using the six lenses described

Do you find that your employer is resistant to incorporating social learning tools to enhance the business?  Maybe, we just need to communicate the value better. First of all, let's get on the same page with what 'social learning' even means. Wikipedia defines social learning as:  learning that takes place at a wider scale than individual or group learning, up to a societal scale, through social interaction between peers.

Slides from my keynote this afternoon in Paris at the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT. Overview of where social business is, what the macro trends are, and the story about consumerization, big data, analytics, and much more.

Semantics can enhance a broad variety of information processing - search, integration, analysis, pattern extraction and mining, discovery, situational awareness, and question-answering. Consider search: a search system that could distinguish between "Merry Christmas" as a greeting and one of the 60 or so songs named "Merry Christmas" as cataloged in MusicBrainz (a community-created music encyclopedia; http://musicbrainz.org) would have a powerful semantic search capability.

What makes the cartoon light bulb of creativity go off over someone's head? What is the catalyst for groundbreaking inventions and innovative breakthroughs? In his illuminating new book, the journalist Jonah Lehrer explicates some now-classic case studies.

A new report from the Institute for Global Futures, Global Futures Forecast 2012, lays out the top trends that it believes will shape the coming year. It's looking ahead to a future that it says may be characterized by complex trends, accelerated change, hyper-competition, disruption, innovation and uncertainty, and that will demand a new way of operating. It recommends continuing investment in innovation in the U.S., as that is the central driver of US and global competitive advantage, and a requirement for achieving more stable growth. And it advises that organizations' leaders need to do a better job becoming long-range thinkers given that the accelerated pace of change means that the future is coming at us faster than ever before, and with change comes risk. What do such things have to do with the Semantic Web and semantic technologies? Apparently, quite a lot.