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Unstructured Information Management applications are software systems that analyze large volumes of unstructured information in order to discover knowledge that is relevant to an end user. UIMA is a framework and SDK for developing such applications. An example UIM application might ingest plain text and identify entities, such as persons, places, organizations; or relations, such as works-for or located-at. UIMA enables such an application to be decomposed into components, for example "language identification" -> "language specific segmentation" -> "sentence boundary detection" -> "entity detection (person/place names etc.)". Each component must implement interfaces defined by the framework and must provide self-describing metadata via XML descriptor files. The framework manages these components and the data flow between them. Components are written in Java or C++; the data that flows between components is designed for efficient mapping between these languages. UIMA additionally provides capabilities to wrap components as network services, and can scale to very large volumes by replicating processing pipelines over a cluster of networked nodes.

Businesses are moving beyond marketing in virtual worlds and are exploring other applications of virtual worlds (see a recent BusinessWeek article & slideshow). Enabling collaboration among remote workers is one such application (see our past posts and paper on this topic). A variety of virtual world options or platforms have been available for supporting remote work and these include Second Life, Qwaq, Forterra, and Tixeo. Last week I had the rare opportunity to see an emerging virtual world called Wonderland, the product of an open source project, Project Wonderland, sponsored by Sun Microsystems. During a conference call with our colleague Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems, Becky Jestice and I were lucky enough to get a tour of Wonderland. Nicole graciously spent over an hour to show us some of the impressive features of Wonderland. The tour was so impressive that I want to devote a post to some key aspects of Wonderland: * Virtual meeting participants can use voice to communicate with one another; * If necessary, participants can connect to a Wonderland meeting via telephone; * Private conversations between participants are possible in a virtual meeting; * Participants can share applications; and * Anyone can try out Wonderland (see instructions below).

OpenSimulator is a 3D Application Server. It can be used to create a 3D Virtual World (ala Second Life(tm)), and includes facilities for creating custom avatars, chatting with others in the environment, building 3D content in world, and creating complex 3D applications in world. OpenSimulator can also be extended via loadable modules or web service interfaces to build more custom 3D Applications. OpenSimulator is released under a BSD License, making it both open source, and commercially friendly to embed in products.

Croquet is a powerful open source software technology that, in the form of the Croquet Software Developer's Kit (Croquet SDK), can be used by experienced software developers to create and deploy deeply collaborative multi-user online vitual world applications on and across multiple operating systems and devices. Derived from Squeak, the Croquet system features a peer-based messaging protocol that dramatically reduces the need for server infrastructures to support virtual world deployment and makes it easy for software developers to create deeply collaborative applications. Cobalt is a National Science Foundation-sponsored effort to develop an open source virtual world browser and authoring toolkit application based on the Croquet technology.

The Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Method (OOHDM) (and its successor, the Semantic Hypermedia Design Method, SHDM) allow the concise specification and implementation of hypermedia (web) applications. This is achieved based on various models describing information (conceptual), navigation and interface aspects of these applications, and the mapping of these models into running applications, in various environements.

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.

This document defines a concise bounded description of a resource in terms of an RDF graph [5], as a general and broadly optimal unit of specific knowledge about that resource to be utilized by, and/or interchanged between, semantic web agents. Given a particular node in a particular RDF graph, a concise bounded description is a subgraph consisting of those statements which together constitute a focused body of knowledge about the resource denoted by that particular node. The precise nature of that subgraph will hopefully become clear given the definition, discussion and example provided below. Optimality is, of course, application dependent and it is not presumed that a concise bounded description is an optimal form of description for every application; however, it is presented herein as a reasonably general and broadly optimal form of description for many applications, and unless otherwise warranted, constitutes a reasonable default response to the request "tell me about this resource".

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.

Triplify provides a building block for the semantification of Web applications. Triplify is a small plugin for Web applications, which converts database content into RDF or JSON feeds and provides a Linked Data interface.

Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)-the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references-and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and-on many major research and library sites-find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one's personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).

Triplify is based on the definition of relational database queries for a specific Web application in order to retrieve valuable information and to convert the results of these queries into RDF, JSON and Linked Data. Experiences showed that for most web-applications a relatively small number of queries (mostly between 3-7) is sufficient to extract the important information. After generating such database views the Triplify software can be used to convert the view into an RDF, JSON or Linked Data representation, which can be shared and accessed on the (Semantic) Web.

zembly is a new kind of application development environment that lends the power of the crowd to you, so you can do more, faster. It's kind of like a wiki, but for applications.

Welcome to the National Center for Biomedical Ontology's BioPortal. BioPortal is a Web-based application for accessing and sharing biomedical ontologies. New features in BioPortal 2.0 include: * Full ontology navigation using Flash visualization * Web-service access to BioPortal content and capabilities, which enables developers to use our BioPortal services in their tools. * Ability to add Marginal Notes to classes in BioPortal ontologies, a feature that enables the community to comment on ontologies and to discuss their contents * Ability to create Point to Point Mappings between concepts in different BioPortal ontologies * Bulk export of ontology-to-ontology mappings in RDF format * Navigation of multiple ontologies, which enables users to have several ontologies opened simultaneously in different tabs in the user interface * URIs for all ontology content, which enable developers to access and share BioPortal content from their applications * Improved support through Protégé for ontologies in OWL format

Quick, incremental updates, along with heavy user involvement, are key characteristics of an emerging software development paradigm championed by a new generation of Web 2.0 start-ups. The new process, which some champions call "application development 2.0," contrasts markedly with the traditional corporate waterfall process that separates projects into several distinct phases, ranging from requirements to maintenance. Nonetheless, application development 2.0 can bring significant benefits to corporate IT shops if managers and developers are willing to change.

Building Search Applications: Lucene, Lingpipe, and Gate (Paperback)

Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications.

The Virtual Worlds Roadmap seeks to increase the success rate of virtual world-based ventures and the productivity of investment through the publication and distribution of state-of-the-art thinking and analysis on Visions of what value virtual world technology will bring to specific applications Technical and business barriers to achieving that value Case studies on successes to date A roadmap and timeline for achieving mass adoption of specific applications. The Virtual Worlds Roadmap is a commons-based peer production effort. Everyone is invited to take part by commenting on published drafts, volunteering as an author or working group participant, and attending workshops.

Integrate. Relate. Infer. Share. IRIS is a semantic desktop application framework that enables users to create a "personal map" across their office-related information objects. IRIS includes a machine-learning platform to help automate this process. It provides "dashboard" views, contextual navigation, and relationship-based structure across an extensible suite of office applications, including a calendar, web and file browser, e-mail client, and instant messaging client.

Carneades is an argument mapping application, with a graphical user interface, and a software library for building applications supporting various argumentation tasks.

Rapid advances in information technologies continue to drive a flood of data and analysis techniques in ecological and environmental sciences. Using these resources more effectively and taking advantage of associated cross-disciplinary research opportunities poses a major challenge to both scientists and information technologists. These challenges are now being addressed in projects that apply knowledge representation and Semantic Web technologies to problems in discovering and integrating ecological data and data analysis techniques. In this paper, we present an overview of the major ontological components of our project, SEEK ("Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge"). We describe the concepts and models that are represented in each, and present a discussion of potential applications of these ontologies on the Semantic Web