Group items tagged

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.

Using the 1994, South Canyon fire in Colorado as a case study, this article suggests Taylor's (1993) concept of worldview functions as an important "frame" for organizational sensemaking (Weick, 1995a). Taylor argues that organizations use either an "activity" or "particle" orientation. An activity view focuses attention on organizational units while a particle view sees the organization from the point of view of the product or customer. Results from this study indicate that an organization's worldview functions as an overarching metaphor that influences sensemaking and decision-making processes, and that the worldview perspective in retrospective accounts may differ from that of the participants themselves.

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.

On January 07, 2009, OASIS announced the submission of a draft charter for a new OASIS Technical Committee to define an integrated collaboration object model supporting a complete range of enterprise collaboration activities. The proposed data model is based upon the Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM), to be contributed by Oracle to the ICOM TC. The new standard model, interface, and protocol would support contextual collaboration within business processes for an integrated collaboration environment which includes communication artifacts (e.g., email, instant message, telephony, RSS), teamwork artifacts (such as project and meeting workspaces, discussion forums, real-time conferences, presence, activities, subscriptions, wikis, and blogs), content artifacts (e.g., text and multi-media contents, contextual connections, taxonomies, folksonomies, tags, recommendations, social bookmarking, saved searches), and coordination artifacts (such as address books, calendars, tasks) etc.

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium of leading biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods allowing scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. Our visionis that all biomedical knowledge and data are disseminated on the Internet using principled ontologies, such that they are semantically interoperable and useful for improving biomedical science and clinical care. Our resources include the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library, the Open Biomedical Data (OBD) repositories, and tools for accessing and using this information in research. The Center collaborates with biomedical researchers conducting Driving Biological Projects to enable outside research and stimulate technology development in the Center. The Center undertakes outreach and educational activities (Biomedical Informatics Program) to train future researchers to use biomedical ontologies and related tools with the goal of enhancing scientific discovery.

The Future of the Internet - a federating theme for activities on future networks, software and service architectures, networked media systems and the Internet of Things. Over the last 20 years society, economy and technology evolved in many directions and into new areas. Many of these evolutions have created opportunities which must be taken into account when crafting future Networks.

Eurovoc is a multilingual thesaurus covering the fields in which the European Communities are active; it provides a means of indexing the documents in the documentation systems of the European institutions and of their users. The European Parliament, the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, the national and regional parliaments in Europe, some national government departments and European organisations are currently using this controlled vocabulary.

More than 40 years ago the fragmentation of scientific knowledge was a problem actively discussed but without much visible progress toward a solution; perhaps people then had the consummate wisdom to know that no problem is so big that you can't run away from it.

In order to meet the emerging needs of e-Researchers, the DART project proposes a comprehensive end-to end approach to developing a new system for managing research activity and publication.

People in organizations actively construct the environment that they attend

For the past few months I've been an active member of Twine.com; a beta semantic web app riddled with AI to help us organize, share and discover information. The beta is still under heavy construction, but at this point in time, I've migrated entirely from Del.icio.us, personal wikis and similar online services and over to Twine.

This ethnographic study investigates how a project group deals with the contradiction between distributed knowledge in boundary-spanning collaborative processes and the expectation that software systems will provide unified, codified knowledge. Group and individual activities were observed over a period of 18 months, to examine the ways knowledge was presented, recognized, shared, or otherwise managed during joint design of business process and IT systems change. The study explores how knowledge and expertise were translated across organizational boundaries, and identifies four stages in the development of group understanding of how to manage sensemaking and expertise across knowledge boundaries: focus on defining shared goals; acknowledging and sharing tacit knowledge about organizational practice; identifying external influences; and explicit knowledge generation.

Essays and research supporting the idea that global warming poses a clear threat to humanity, that it is largely caused by human activity, and that solutions to the problems of climate change lie within human reach.

Yesterday, together with my colleague Ricardo Sueiras of PwC UK, we had a demo of Connectbeam the entreprise social bookmarking appliance. Connectbeam is an enterprise social networking tool using shared bookmarks and tags as a way to connect people. Basically it connects people who use the same content, on the grounds that it is likely that they have similar activities or interests, and will benefit from knowing each other.

It has been recognised that failures within an organisation can often be related to the over simplification of the belief structures that are used in decision making.2 Distributed cognition is a framework that can be used for analysing complex distributed settings to explain how the social activities within these impact the cognitive processes of the participants.� Rather than focussing on the mind, the material world is seen as being central.� It shows how important it is that participants in a setting can look at their own interpretations and discus these with others before deciding which actions to take.

Working with Tine 2.0 is fun and eases the workaday life! Due to its enormous user acceptance it activates synergies in your whole organisation. Tine 2.0 is an open source business collaboration software covering Groupware, CRM and ERP aspects.

AKTive Media is an ontology based cross-media annotation (Images and Text) system. Our goal is to automate the process of annotation by suggesting knowledge to the user in an interactive way while the user is annotating and hence minimizing user effort. The system actively works in the background, interacting with web services and queries our central annotational store to look for context specific knowledge.

A new Species-Environment Relations (SER) modeling approach depicts key ecological functions (KEFs) and key environmental correlates (KECs) of terrestrial plant and animal species, as part of a regional assessment of the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project. Assessing KEFs of species is one facet of understanding management effects and ecological integrity of ecosystems. A relational database was developed that ties species' KEFs with their key habitats, KECs, and distribution maps. In this way, potential management activities can be evaluated for how they influence: habitats and environmental correlates; associated plant, invertebrate, and vertebrate species; the array of ecological functions associated with those species; geographic functional ecology; and potential effects on ecosystem productivity, diversity, and sustainability.

Newropeans is a trans-European political project founded to democratise the European Union. We will stand for elections to the European Parliament in 2009 in all 27 member states. We are building a large network of Europeans and an organisation voicing the common expectations of European citizens. Our projects and activities will increasingly influence the public agenda. Newropeans is built and financed by its members and supporters, independent from EU and national institutions.

Metre-wide cracks in the ground suddenly split open, as red-hot rock and ash are thrown violently into the air amid searing temperatures. It's like a vision of how the Earth behaved in prehistoric times. Except these events have happened within the last three years in Ethiopia's Afar region. What's more, a matter of days ago there was more extreme volcanic activity there, with reports of the country's biggest eruption to date - and the largest recorded lava flow in scientific history.