"[...] Mazzagatti calls this new data structure the Triadic Continuum, in honor of the theories and writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the least well-known scientific geniuses of the late 19th century. Peirce, who is recognized as the father of pragmatism, is also known for his work in semiotics, the study of thought signs. Using Peirce's theoretical writings on how thought signs are organized into the structure of the human brain, Mazzagatti extrapolated a computer data structure that is self organizing - in other words, a data structure that naturally organizes new data by either building on the existing data sequences or adding to the structure as new data are introduced"
I quote: "Mazzagatti continued research into how Peirce's sign theory could be adapted to create a logical structure composed of signs that could be used in computers. Using Peirce's theoretical writings on how thought signs are organized into the structure of the human brain, Mazzagatti extrapolated a computer data structure that is self organizing - in other words, a data structure that naturally organizes new data by either building on the existing data sequences or adding to the structure as new data are introduced. "
The fishnet organization is a new organizational form which, among others, emerged in scientific literature in the field of organization theory in the past 20 years. Questions to ask here include: how to develop and maintain such a dynamic and heterarchic structure, described with the metaphor of a fisher's net, in a real organization? How to find knowledge and abilities which are fundamental in constructing such a structure? It seems obvious that without an adequate information system this task would be almost impossible. Thus we present organizational and information tools which are needed for the development and maintenance of this dynamic organization.
The Open Protein Structure Annotation Network (TOPSAN) is a wiki designed to collect, share and distribute information about protein three-dimensional structures, and to advance it towards knowledge about functions and roles of these proteins in their respective organisms. TOPSAN will serve as a portal for the scientific community to learn about protein structures and also to contribute their expertise in annotating protein function.
Knowledge has generally existed within strict disciplinary boundaries, creating barriers against the free flow of information. The boundaries between disciplines reduces the ability of researchers to fully assess the work that has been accomplished and can lead to redundancy and to situations in which scholars are "reinventing the wheel" when they could instead be advancing knowledge into new frontiers.
Is there a solution? There is if we take the time to create a cross-disciplinary understanding of knowledge representation and organization. The solution would require a comprehensive, interdisciplinary effort from scholars in diverse disciplines including communications, sociology, anthropology, information science, biology, computer science and philosophy.
The Structure for Encompassing Extensible Knowledge (SEEK) is a model I propose to explore the possibilities for knowledge integration theoretically, technologically and from the perspective of human management.
This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis
of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures.
A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with
a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of
the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development.
These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for
Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web
Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way
to focus its development on key communicational and representational
requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the
development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic
approaches to discover the Web's topology, or its graph-like structures,
are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially
embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and
governance are also reviewed.
The scholarly literature forms a vast network of academic papers connected to one another by citations in bibliographies and footnotes [1]. The structure of this network reflects millions of decisions by individual scholars about which papers are important and relevant to their own work. Therefore within the structure of this network is a wealth of information about the relative influence of individual journals, and also about the patterns of relations among academic disciplines. Our aim at eigenfactor.org is develop ways of extracting this information.
The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) defines a communication protocol used to exchange biological annotations. It is motivated by the idea that such annotations should not be provided by single centralized databases, but should instead be spread over multiple sites. Data distribution, performed by DAS servers, is separated from visualization, which is done by DAS clients.
DAS is a client-server system in which a single client integrates information from multiple servers. It allows a single machine to gather up sequence annotation information from multiple distant web sites, collate the information, and display it to the user in a single view. Little coordination is needed among the various information providers.
DAS is heavily used in the genome bioinformatics community. Over the last years we have also seen growing acceptance in the protein sequence and structure communities.
The content of Informal Coalitions is summarized below.
Preface
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Highlights the high failure rate of organizational change programs.
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Sets out the background to, and origins of, the informal coalitions perspective.
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Identifies some of the key features that distinguish Informal Coalitions from other books that repackage the more conventional approaches to organizational change.
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Outlines the broad structure of the book and how readers can get the best out of it.
DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to make sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data.
The HuWY project aims to support young people's eParticipation in policies about the Internet and its governance, through a distributed discussion. HuWY partners provide information, support and organise influential audiences for young people's suggestions. The Hub websites hold supporting information and structured space for results and feedback from policy-makers. Young people choose the topics and questions, host the discussions on their web pages and post the results on the Hubs.
To manage information quality (IQ) effectively, one needs to know how IQ changes over time, what causes it to change, and whether the changes can be predicted. In this paper we analyze the structure of IQ change in Wikipedia, an open, collaborative general encyclopedia. We found several patterns in Wikipedia's IQ process trajectories and linked them to article types. Drawing on the results of our analysis, we develop a general model of IQ change that can be used for reasoning about IQ dynamics in many different settings, including traditional databases and information repositories.
The DBpedia community uses a flexible and extensible framework to extract different kinds of structured information from Wikipedia.
The DBpedia information extraction framework is written using PHP 5. The framework is available from the DBpedia SVN (GNU GPL License).
The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists and nature enthusiasts from around the world. On more than 10,000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history (phylogeny).
Each page contains information about a particular group, e.g., salamanders, segmented worms, phlox flowers, tyrannosaurs, euglenids, Heliconius butterflies, club fungi, or the vampire squid. ToL pages are linked one to another hierarchically, in the form of the evolutionary tree of life. Starting with the root of all Life on Earth and moving out along diverging branches to individual species, the structure of the ToL project thus illustrates the genetic connections between all living things.
The Flamenco search interface framework has the primary design goal of allowing users to move through large information spaces in a flexible manner without feeling lost. A key property of the interface is the explicit exposure of category metadata, to guide the user toward possible choices, and to organize the results of keyword searches. The interface uses hierarchical faceted metadata in a manner that allows users to both refine and expand the current query, while maintaining a consistent representation of the collection's structure. This use of metadata is integrated with free-text search, allowing the user to follow links, then add search terms, then follow more links, without interrupting the interaction flow.
s Richard MacManus recently predicted, in 2008 we'll witness the rise of semantic web services. From the native support for Microformats in Firefox 3, to the New York Times' utilization of rich headers metadata, to this week's release of the Social Graph API by Google, semantics are starting to slip onto the web. The impact is being felt because large companies are really starting to focus on structured information.
In the same vein, last week Reuters - an international business and financial news giant - launched an API called Open Calais. The API does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events. This technology is the next generation of the Clear Forest offering, which Reuters acquired last year. We have profiled Clear Forest on ReadWriteWeb and in this post we will look at what Reuters opened up and why.
Faviki is a social bookmarking tool which allows you to tag webpages you want to remember with Wikipedia terms. This means that everybody uses the same names for tags from the world's largest collection of knowledge.
Thanks to DBpedia, which extracts structured information from Wikipedia and represents it in a flexible data model, these tags are reference to objects which are categorized automatically, keeping your and your friend's bookmarks and interests well organized.
"The value of any individual piece of knowledge is about the value of any individual piece of lego," Wilbanks said in a keynote address to the Open Access and Research Conference held in Brisbane last week.
"It's not that much until you put it together with other legos."
He says the ability to connect knowledge brings scientific revolutions. For example Watson and Crick's breakthrough on the structure of DNA involved them reading all the scientific papers on nucleotide bonding and encoding it in the form of a physical model, says Wilbanks.
But this kind of "human scale" analysis is no longer feasible in an age when automated laboratory processes generate vast amounts of information faster than the human mind can process it.
"For example, we have 45,000 papers about one protein or one gene," says Wilbanks.
He says a scientist might once have analysed the impact of one drug on one gene, but now pipetting robots are capable of analysing 25,000 genes at a time.
"Most of the research says the smartest of us can handle five or six independent variables at once - not 25,000," he says
In order to keep data structures in Semantic CrunchBase close to the source API, I used a 1-to-1 mapping between CrunchBase JSON keys and RDF terms (with only a few exceptions). This was helpful for people knowing the JSON API, but it wasn't easy to interlink the converted information with existing SemWeb data such as FOAF, or the various LOD sources.
Making sense of the world is a ubiquitous activity, taking place around the margins of what we know. At work, your boss says, "Can you give a presentation next week on how wireless will affect our business?" Or perhaps, you join a new committee, and wonder "Who are these people? Who is in charge? What is our mission? What are we really going to do?" Maybe you move to a new neighborhood, and you try to make sense of the streets, schools, parks, shopping, and neighbors. Or you say to yourself, "I really need to get an updated cellphone-what has been happening with the current set of features, costs, plans and new gadgets?" Sensemaking can be a core professional task in itself, as for researchers, designers, or intelligence analysts. It arises when we change our place in the world or when the world changes around us. It arises when new problems, opportunities, or tasks present themselves, or when old ones resurface. It involves finding the important structure in a seemingly unstructured situation. It is an activity with cognitive and social dimensions, and has informational, communicational, and computational aspects.
This paper presents two design patterns for the hypermedia domain: `Navigational Contexts' and `Information on Demand'. They are applied in two different aspects of hypermedia applications design: the design of healthy navigational structures and the design of understandable and usable hypermedia interfaces, respectively. These two patterns are part of an effort for developing a Pattern Language for that domain.