Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Games (STEG'08)
The power of narration and imagination in technology enhanced learning, September 16, 2008
Europeana - the European digital library, museum and archive - is a 2-year project that began in July 2007. It will produce a prototype website giving users direct access to some 2 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers. The prototype will be launched in November 2008 by Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media.
I have the pleasure to announce that the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) has been born. (1YGF)
Formally established in Trento, Italy in April 2009, after an open meeting at the FOIS 2008 conference, IAOA is a non-profit, open association with the purpose of promoting interdisciplinary research and international collaboration at the intersection of philosophical ontology, linguistics, logic, cognitive science, and computer science, as well as in the applications of ontological analysis to conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering, knowledge management, information systems development, library and information science, scientific research and semantic technologies in general.
The Bibliographic Knowledge Network (BKN) is a project to develop a suite of tools and services to encourage formation of virtual organizations in scientific communities of various types.
BKN is a project started in September 2008 with funding by the NSF Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) Program. The major participating organizations are the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM), Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Perhaps this is a meme worth exploring more generally but I thought others might be interested in my story, partly because it illustrates how funding drives scientists, and partly because it shows how the combination of opportunism and serendipity can make for successful bedfellows.
Tagging is a process that associates keywords with specific content. We did a rough analysis in our paper (reference below), and computed how often a keyword used by a user to tag an URL appears in the page content. We found that, on average, the chance that a tag comes from the content is 49%. This process produced a conservative estimate of tag occurrence in content, since we did not account for situations such as content changes for a given URL (e.g., dynamic content), typos (e.g., "Ajaz" instead of "Ajax"), abbreviations (e.g., "ad" instead of "advertisement"), compound tags (e.g., "SearchEngine"), and tags written in languages other than that of the content.
A small, digital book startup thinks it has a solution to the age-old student lament: overpriced textbooks that have little value when the course is over. The answer? Make them open source -- and give them away.
Semantic Exchange is a collaborative industry news, research, and education initiative about all things web 3.0 and semantic web, and sponsored by industry leading semantic technology providers.
Panda, an open source project, will let any site owner willing to do a little coding and integration work to allow user video uploads and playback. Think YouTube in a box.
The software itself is free and will run on Amazon Web Services EC2, S3 and SimpleDB. You'll have to pay for the Amazon services, but this is a nice step forward from a variety of existing paid services out there like Zencoder, SesameVault and Hey!Watch. Panda handles all aspects of uploading, transcoding and streaming, handing things off to a Flash player like JW FLV Player by default.
Personal knowledge management is becoming one of the most critical skills that information workers like journalists, marketers and PR pros need to succeed today. Specifically, I am talking about the efficient collecting, processing and weeding of massive amounts of data. In this post I want to offer tips on how to take full advantage of tagging information in Gmail.
OpenSocial's API reference describes a number of classes ('Person', 'Name', 'Email', 'Phone', 'Url', 'Organization', 'Address', 'Message', 'Activity', 'MediaItem', 'Activity', …), each of which has various properties whose values are either strings, references to instances of other classes, or enumerations. I'd like to make them usable beyond the confines of OpenSocial, so I'm making an RDF/OWL version. OpenSocial's schema is an attempt to provide an overarching model for much of present-day mainstream 'social networking' functionality, including dating, jobs etc. Such a broad effort is inevitably somewhat open-ended, and so may benefit from being linked to data from other complementary sources.
Invariant study is fundamental to any scientific research, especially when the research domain is as complex as World Wide Web. Invariants are supposed to be constant within the specified research scope. By well understanding the invariants we may effectively improve the knowledge over many complicated issues. Therefore, it is unsurprisingly for us to see the discussion of invariant study in the new Web Science Research Initiative.
Zemanta is a service that's focused on helping the blogger/content creator make the process of creating their content simpler and easier. As you write, Zemanta processes all of your text (like a spell checker in a word processing program does) and suggests things to you. Currently, Zemanta suggests stories/posts/research you might want to read as you compose your post, images you might want to include in the post, words you might want to hyperlink out with, and tags for search engines and other services to use to discover your content.
But I've never seen a service that brings social bookmarking and semantic search together the way AntStorm does.
The service works on two major fronts: first, AntStorm allows you to upload your bookmarks, tag them, share them, and access them from any computer you choose, and second, AntStorm uses your tagged bookmarks to power a semantic search engine that will help you find new sites and services that match your interests.