Group items tagged

The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data. Like the web of hypertext, the web of data is constructed with documents on the web. However, unlike the web of hypertext, where links are relationships anchors in hypertext documents written in HTML, for data they links between arbitrary things described by RDF,. The URIs identify any kind of object or concept. But for HTML or RDF, the same expectations apply to make the web grow: 1. Use URIs as names for things 2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names. 3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information. 4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

People are changing the way that they consume online information, as well as their expectations about its delivery. The social nature of the Web brings with it an expectation of interaction with information and modern Web design is reflecting that. There are now alternate forms of navigation including the ability to browse by user, tag clouds, tabbed navigation etc. Advances in technology along with these shifts in user expectations are affecting the way that information is laid out on a webpage. Today's websites are aiming for intuitive and usable interfaces which are continuously evolving in response to user needs. Website designers are approaching information design differently and designing simple, interactive websites which incorporate advancements in Web interface design, current Web philosophies, and user needs. Information design for the New Web is simple, it is social, and it embraces alternate forms of navigation.

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.

"We don't think we have the right kind of tools to help decision makers plan for the future," said Jack Fellows, the vice president for corporate affairs of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a consortium of 71 universities. Comment: this is an opportunity for improved sensemaking tools.

Rich countries acknowledge their historic role in pushing up global temperatures but they say that emerging giants like China and India must also step up to the plate and take quantifiable action. Developing and poorer nations hit back with the argument that the industrialised world should lead by example, and foot the bill for clean-energy technology and coping with global warming's inevitable impacts.

The temptation to interpret model noise as forecast information invades our living rooms every night. TV weather-forecast maps look so realistic it is hard not to over-interpret tiny details - to imagine that the band of rain passing over Oxfordshire at noon next Saturday requires postponing a barbecue. Rain may indeed be likely somewhere in the area sometime on Saturday, but the details we see on TV forecasts are noise from the models. I think we are having exactly the same problem with climate projections.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC), a clean, renewable energy source that has the potential to free many economies from their dependence on oil.

Virtual worlds are governed not only by the source code used to develop the world, but also by civil code documents that establish a governance structure that constrains the interactions of users of the virtual world and regulates relationships among stakeholders of the virtual world. While previous research has examined specific aspects of these documents, this paper analyzes these governing documents as a totality. By examining the totality of and the interplay among the governing documents of a number of established social worlds, this paper seeks to discover insights that can prove valuable both for scholarly understanding of social world governance and for the various stakeholders of social worlds. Following this analysis, the paper offers a set of policy recommendations and considerations to facilitate the development of governing documents that more democratically and equally serve the needs and rights of all stakeholders in virtual worlds. The paper concludes that virtual worlds and their governing documents are boundary objects with agency, in that they are the result of interactions among stakeholder groups and in turn reshape the relationships among those stakeholder groups.

In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives. We review the challenges to studying human extinction risks and, by way of example, estimate the cost effectiveness of preventing extinction-level asteroid impacts.

A course in information studies was partly held in the virtual world of Second Life. Second Life was used as a platform to deliver lectures and as a place for organizing group assignments and having discussions. Students' opinions about Second Life were studied and compared to their opinions about more traditional methods in education. The results show a lower threshold for participation in lectures. According to the students, Second Life should not replace face-to-face education, but it could serve as an excellent addition to other more traditional methods and platforms used in education. The students also considered that lectures held in Second Life were much more "fun" than those using other methods. This particular aspect, and its effect on learning outcomes, requires further research. This research demonstrates that Second Life has potential as a learning environment in distance education.

In 1981, based on a decade of Club's [Club of Rome] research, Peccei wrote: "The future will either be the inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future" (Peccei, 1981).

The IRS soon may keep a closer watch on the thousands, if not millions, of small firms and the self-employed that have sprouted up in virtual worlds.

The U.S. intelligence agencies' internal wiki Intellipedia has gotten glowing press reports and accolades, as well as input from thousands of analysts. However, the wiki still struggles to make a permanent home in the spy agencies, according to one of its evangelists.

The OpenKnowledge team responded to the UK's Grand Challenge Project for information-driven healthcare with a proposal to "completely change the way patients view the management of their healthcare pathways."

The present research analyses the 'social visualization' tool Sense.us, a commercial interactive Web application in which U.S. Census data are visualized. Sense.us was developed as a tool for social data exploration and interaction, in which it would be worthwhile to pay attention to the socio-cultural values that have driven the collection and categorization of the underlying U.S. Census datasets. It is argued that closer attention to value driven U.S. Census statistics would greatly enhance the social appeal of Sense.us, and would be a logical next step in the development of online social visualization tools. In order to allow for explicit socio-cultural values of statistics in online visualizations, three strategies are offered: pro-active annotation; more attention to visual aesthetics; and, a tighter integration of user profiles and represented data.

This paper surveys information architecture in the context of digital libraries. Key concepts are defined as well as common attributes of information architectures in general. Communications standards - including hybrid TCP/IP-OSI, CORBA, and Web services - are explored, as well as the history of information architecture and related models. A number of digital library projects are analyzed with a focus on their distinct architectures. The key role of information architecture in the design and development of the twenty-first century digital library is detailed throughout.

complex brains and sophisticated cognition have arisen multiple times in independent lineages of animals during the earth's evolutionary history.

Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.