Group items tagged

"The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for “popular” sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags."

The paper shows that the tags users choose are not chaotic, but rather quickly converge to a common descriptive set of tags that is almost unchanging over time. Perhaps once the tags have stabilized, coherent URI-based identification schemes could emerge?

Nice paper, thanks. Categories / tags / subjects / topics / issues ... that's what I'm working with right now. p.s. sure would be nice if the email notification included the source URL. I'm far more likely to download the PDF when I see something like www2007.org/paper635.pdf

Complexity grows as technology, environment and economy become more interconnected. Complex Reasoning considers how each element affects and is affected by others. Seed™ models your theories of how a change in one element of a system creates changes in other elements. It then simulates their dynamic behavior and communicates your learning.

This is a brief sketch of the kind of upper ontology I envision to support an ontological treatment of semiotics, which in turn would support sign-based ontologies of complex systems.

'"A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole" In this paper, I am trying to lay out a new form of computation, which focuses on the harmony reached in a system. This type of computation in some way resembles certain recent results in chaos theory and complexity theory. However, the orientation of harmony-seeking computation is toward a kind of computation which finds harmonious configurations, and so helps to create things, above all, in real world situations: buildings, towns, agriculture, and ecology. I try to show that this way of thinking about computation is closer to intuition and personal feeling than the processes we typically describe as "computations." It is also more useful, potentially, in a great variety of tasks we face in building and taking care of the surface of the Earth, and quite different in character since it is value-oriented, not value-free. Examples are taken from art, architecture, biology, physics, astrophysics, drawing, crystallography, meteorology, dynamics of living systems, and ecology'

A sixty-six page think piece

This article explores relationships between players and the owners of the massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) they inhabit. Much of the language around these large scale communities currently focuses on "management." Viewing these complex social systems as essentially mechanical in nature has led to a preoccupation with creating or retrofitting systems which can be constantly monitored, tuned, regulated, and controlled. Though the language often turns to things like "cheating," "griefing," and "disruption of the magic circle," the underlying anxiety about unruliness, transgressiveness, and the emergent nature of these spaces as sites of culture needs to be more fully addressed, as well as the early formulations of the "imagined player" that shape the design process. Players are central productive agents in game culture and more progressive models are needed for understanding and integrating their work in these spaces. Drawing on the long tradition of participatory design this piece explores some alternative frameworks for understanding the designer/player relationship are proposed.

ECOSPACE pursues the vision that by 2012 every Professional in Europe is empowered for seamless, dynamic and creative collaboration across teams, organisations and communities through a personalised collaborative working environment. ECOSPACE contributes to this vision through 4 main objectives: * The definition of innovative work paradigms through the analysis of eProfessionals and their related organisation. * The design and development of an open standards, service-oriented architecture for complementary and alike systems. * A collaboration middleware and services to enable seamless and instant collaboration among knowledge workers in group forming networks, beyond organisational boundaries. * The creation of new tools that simplify the complexity of collaboration in dynamic work environments and which enable users for creative and knowledge intensive tasks.

This is the official website of the TAGora project, a STREP project funded by the European Commission in the framework of the FET proactive initiative "Simulating Emergent Properties in Complex Systems".

Trends in programming language development and adoption point to Python as the high-level systems integration language of choice. Python leverages a vast developer-base external to the Neuroscience community, and promises leaps in simulation complexity and maintainability to any neural simulator which adopts it. As more and more simulators support Python, model development times can be drastically reduced by promoting code sharing and reuse across simulator communities. As a result, modellers can devote their software development time to innovating new simulation tools such as network topology databases, stimulus programming, analysis and visualisation tools, and simulation accounting, to name a few.

ECOSPACE pursues the vision that by 2012 every Professional in Europe is empowered for seamless, dynamic and creative collaboration across teams, organisations and communities through a personalised collaborative working environment. ECOSPACE contributes to this vision through 4 main objectives: * The definition of innovative work paradigms through the analysis of eProfessionals and their related organisation. * The design and development of an open standards, service-oriented architecture for complementary and alike systems. * A collaboration middleware and services to enable seamless and instant collaboration among knowledge workers in group forming networks, beyond organisational boundaries. * The creation of new tools that simplify the complexity of collaboration in dynamic work environments and which enable users for creative and knowledge intensive tasks.

The problem with social networking services is that you do not control a social network, which can behave in highly unpredictible ways according to the theory of complex systems, especially if the strategic intent of its originator is not clear. For me, no human society, whether in the real world or in the virtual world, can survive without some form of visible leadership, i.e. someone who symbolizes what the brand stands for. I don't know about Facebook, and I honestly do not understand where it is going. But for Wikipedia, there is a big risk remaining faceless. In France, Wikipedia is said to be in the hands of the far left of the political spectrum, and manipulating content accordingly. It might be true or not, but if nobody stands up against this accusation, it might prevail in the end. Perception is reality.