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We want to make all the world's content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais. Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application.

All conferences and research events have much informal related content spread around the Internet, including abstracts, papers, presentations and audio/visual material. Locating this content can be difficult and time-consuming. Using semantic web tools, IUGO is investigating how to organise and provide access to this valuable information.

"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

The concept of representation format, or type, permeates all technical areas of digital repositories. Policy and processing decisions regarding object ingest, storage, access, and preservation are frequently conditioned on a per-format basis. In order to achieve necessary operational efficiencies, repositories need to be able to automate these procedures to the fullest extent possible. JSTOR and the Harvard University Library are collaborating on a project to develop an extensible framework for format validation: JHOVE (pronounced "jove"), the JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment.

Linked Data is a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data on the Semantic Web. The practice emphasizes Web access to data using existing Web technologies such as URIs and HTTP. It also emphasizes links between related Web resources.

Research funding decisions and research evaluation are currently almost exclusively based on peer-review. Peer-review is well suited to ensure quality, but helps little to achieve impact. ParticipatoryResearch adds the stakeholder dimension to research funding and evaluation. In an ideal world those research projects should get funded which will ultimately benefit its stakeholders most. Individuals (such as peer reviewers) can often hardly realistically access the potential benefit of a certain research proposal. Better results can be achieved by relying on the intelligence of a whole community by employing prediction markets (being the best general institutions we know for aggregating information). In such a prediction market for research ideas stakeholders bet or vote about which research results will benefit them most. The highest-ranked research ideas according to the stakeholder benefit should ultimately get funded.

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!'s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.

StemBook is a comprehensive, open-access collection of original, peer-reviewed chapters covering topics related to Stem Cell Biology

The COMMUNIA Thematic Network aims at becoming a European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion of existing and emerging issues concerning the public domain in the digital environment - as well as related topics, including, but not limited to, alternative forms of licensing for creative material; open access to scientific publications and research results; management of works whose authors are unknown (i.e. orphan works).

Researchers in the School of Computer Science at the University's Malaysia Campus are exploring 'granular computing' - a computer paradigm that looks at groups or sets of information, called information granules, rather than the high level of detail at which data is currently processed. By looking at data in this way, new patterns and relationships emerge - which could potentially give us access to new types of computer modelling in a range of fields, including process control and optimisation, resource scheduling and bioinformatics.

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.

Making Government Information More Accessible

SMILA is an extensible framework for building search solutions to access unstructured information in the enterprise. Besides providing essential infrastructure components and services, SMILA also delivers ready-to-use add-on components, like connectors to most relevant data sources. Using the framework as their basis will enable developers to concentrate on the creation of higher value solutions, like semantic driven applications etc.

The Yahoo! BOSS API allows you to access the Yahoo! search index with new levels of freedom. You can rearrange the results, change their look, have unlimited requests, mash the results with other resources, and you don't even have to let people know that Yahoo! is powering the page. Many people are busy mashing the BOSS results with internal data sets, proprietary logic, and new visual interfaces.

The global spread of the H5N1 avian influenza has already extensively damaged economies worldwide and food security in developing countries. The spread of infection to new ecosystems results in viral adaptation to new hosts, including humans, which inevitably amplifies the potential for pandemic flu. H5N1 represents an unprecedented model of how influenza infections may become widespread. It is recognized that avian influenza viruses may be the progenitors of the next human pandemic virus, and for this reason their genetic evolution should be monitored and investigated in a timely manner. The full support of the international scientific community is therefore urgently required to better understand the spread and evolution of the virus, and the determinants of its transmissibility and pathogenicity in humans. This in turn demands that scientists with different fields of expertise have full access to comprehensive genetic sequence, clinical, and epidemiological data from both animal and human virus isolates.

"Cobalt" is an open source virtual world browser and construction toolkit application being developed at Duke University. Cobalt will make it possible for people to easily create, publish, access, and participate in a network of linked virtual worlds. Currently in pre-alpha and built using the Croquet open source software platform, Cobalt uses peer-based messaging to eliminate the need for virtual world servers and makes it very simple to create and share secure virtual worlds that run on all major software operating systems.

Solving the "digital divide" in Africa will not put food in mouths, knowledge in heads, clean water in households, or make healthcare accessible to those who need it most. Leveraging knowledge, skills, and capacities holds out the possibility of doing all of these things. This is what extending knowledge infrastructure is about: building robust and sustainable networks and communities that mobilize a broad range of information practices, institutions, and technologies (old and new) - and put these in the service of locally-defined needs, aspirations, and broad developmental goals. This report summarizes current thinking and action around African knowledge infrastructures.

This is a sub-project of the BioMoby project. It aims to develop tools in Java in order: * to access BioMoby registries, allowing all features provided by such registries, including but not limited to registering and deregistering of the BioMoby services and their parts, discovering them, and understanding their data in various formats (such as RDF), * to create Java implementations of BioMoby services, especially to help service providers with creating BioMoby data containers (input and output data) without exposing providers to the complexity of the XML required and produced by BioMoby services, and finally

The confluence of computers, communications, and databases is quickly creating a distributed database where many applications require real-time access to both temporally accurate and multimedia data. This is particularly true in military and intelligence applications, but these required features are needed in many commercial applications as well. We are developing a distributed database, called BeeHive, which could offer features along different types of requirements: real-time, fault-tolerance, security, and quality-of service for audio and video. Support of these features and potential trade-offs between them could provide a significant improvement in performance and functionality over current distributed database and object management systems. In this paper, we present a high level design for BeeHive architecture and sketch the design of the BeeHive Object Model (BOM) which extends object-oriented data models by incorporating time and other features into objects, resulting in a highly reflective architecture.

The basic premise of the system is that users can tag items into their online archives and befriend other users to share access to part or all of their items saved. The real differentiation, however, is found in the feature set.