Group items tagged

DiGRA is the association for academics and professionals who research digital games and associated phenomena. It encourages high-quality research on games, and promotes collaboration and dissemination of work by its members

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.

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.

# The primary intention of creating aTags is not the categorization of the document, but the representation of the key facts inside the document. Key facts in the biomedical domain might be, for example, "Protein A interacts with protein B" or "Overexpression of protein A in tissue B is the cause of disease C". # An aTag is comprised of a set of associated entities. The size of the set is arbitrary, but will typically lie between 2 and 5 entities. For example, the fact "Protein A binds to protein B" can be represented with an aTag comprising of the three entities "Protein A", "Molecular interaction" and "Protein B". Similarly, the fact "Overexpression of protein A in tissue B is the cause of disease C" can be represented with an aTag comprising of the four entities "Overexpression", "Protein A", "Tissue B" and "Disease C". # Each document or database entry can be described with an arbitrary number of such aTags. Each aTag can be associated with the relevant portions of text or data in a fine granularity. # The entities in an aTag are not simple strings, but resources that are part of ontologies and RDF/OWL-enabled databases. For example, "Protein A" and "Protein B" are resources that are defined in the UniProt database, whereas "Molecular Interaction" is a class in the branch of biological processes of the Gene Ontology. They are identified with their URIs.

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary - Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

A system and method for organizing knowledge in such a way that humans can find knowledge, learn from it, and add to it as needed is disclosed. The exemplary system has four components: a knowledge base, a learning model and an associated tutor, a set of user tools, and a backend system. The invention also preferably comprises a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow these components to work together, so that other people can create their own versions of each of the components. In the knowledge web a community of people with knowledge to share put knowledge in the database using the user tools. The knowledge may be in the form of documents or other media, or it may be a descriptor of a book or other physical source. Each piece of knowledge is associated with various types of meta-knowledge about what the knowledge is for, what form it is in, and so on. The information in the knowledge base can be created specifically for the knowledge base, but it can also consist of information converted from other sources, such as scientific documents, books, journals, Web pages, film, video, audio files, and course notes. The initial content of the knowledge web comprises existing curriculum materials, books and journals, and those explanatory pages that are already on the World Wide Web. These existing materials already contain most of the information, examples, problems, illustrations, even lesson plans, that the knowledge web needs. The knowledge base thus represents the core content (online documents or references to online or offline documents); the meta-knowledge that was created at the time of entry; and a number of user annotations and document metadata that accumulate over time about the usefulness of the knowledge, additional user opinions, certifications of its veracity and usefulness, commentary, and connections between various units of knowledge.

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.

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

WikiProteins enables community annotation in a Wiki-based system. Extracts of major data sources have been fused into an editable environment that links out to the original sources. Data from community edits create automatic copies of the original data. Semantic technology captures concepts co-occurring in one sentence and thus potential factual statements. In addition, indirect associations between concepts have been calculated. We call on a 'million minds' to annotate a 'million concepts' and to collect facts from the literature with the reward of collaborative knowledge discovery. The system is available for beta testing at http://www.wikiprofessional.org

The World Federation of UN Associations is an independent, non-governmental organization with Category One Consultative Status at the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and consultative or liaison links with many other UN organizations and agencies. The Millennium Project functions under the auspices of WFUNA. The Millennium Project of WFUNA is a global participatory futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities. The Millennium Project manages a coherent and cumulative process that collects and assesses judgements from its several hundred participants to produce the annual "State of the Future", "Futures Research Methodology" series, and special studies such as the State of the Future Index, Future Scenarios for Africa, Lessons of History, Environmental Security, Applications of Futures Research to Policy, and a 700+ annotated scenarios bibliography.

The recent announcement by Microsoft of a bid to acquire Yahoo! in a hostile takeover provides stark evidence of the continuing complexity of the intersection of computing and media businesses battling for dominance in the global market. Just as in the case of Time-Warner and AOL (Klein, 2003), the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo! deal is about convergence. The big difference, however, is the new context of threats and opportunities which have led to Redmond's latest effort to deploy its legendary financial muscle in pursuit of corporate goals of market domination. This difference emerges from changing conditions of networked media-computing which are in part associated with the rise of Web 2.0 and which provide an essential clue to understanding why Web 2.0 occupies such an important position in contemporary thinking about the Internet. As I will explain in this paper, Web 2.0 can itself be understood fully only by locating its emergence and significance within the broad movement of convergence of old and new media forms.

SMORE is a tool that allows users to markup their documents in RDF using web ontologies in association with user-specific terms and elements. The aim of this software is as follows: To provide the user with a flexible environment in which he can create his web page without too many hindrances involving markup To allow the user to markup his document with minimal knowledge of RDF terms and syntax. However, the user should be able to semantically classify his data set for annotation i.e. breakup sentences into the basic subject-predicate-object model To provide a reference to existing ontologies on the Internet in order to use more precise references in his own web page/text. The user can also create his own ontology from scratch and borrow terms from existing ontologies To ensure accurate and complete RDF markup with scope to make modifications easily

From the start of the 21st century, a new form of employment has emerged in developing countries. It employs hundreds of thousands of people and earns hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Yet it has been almost invisible to both the academic and development communities. It is the phenomenon of "gold farming": the production of virtual goods and services for players of online games. China is the employment epicentre but the sub-sector has spread to other Asian nations and will spread further as online games-playing grows. It is the first example of a likely future development trend in online employment. It is also one of a few emerging examples in developing countries of "liminal ICT work"; jobs associated with digital technologies that are around or just below the threshold of what is deemed socially-acceptable and/or formally-legal.

Sensemaking is the process through which humans put together understanding of related information. Sensemaking has been said to involve changes in cognitive representations during a human information processing task. Collection sensemaking involves understanding a collection of media entities, as a whole. One example of a sensemaking task is to compare the damage from Hurricane Katrina to homes, personal effects, and community buildings in different areas of New Orleans. Connected visual and semantic representations provide perspective to support users involved in collection sensemaking tasks. A zoomable map organizes images based on location at varying scales. Multiscale clusters based on zoom level organize images associated with events. The clusters afford contextualized thumbnail browsing and also maintain uniform information density on the map. Metadata enhances context and memory in the process of collection sensemaking.

The Web is ephemeral. Pages change frequently, and it is nearly impossible to find data or follow a link after the underlying page evolves. We present Zoetrope, a system that enables interaction with the historical Web (pages, links, and embedded data) that would otherwise be lost to time. Using a number of novel interactions, the temporal Web can be manipulated, queried, and analyzed from the context of familar pages. Zoetrope is based on a set of operators for manipulating content streams. We describe these primitives and the associated indexing strategies for handling temporal Web data. They form the basis of Zoetrope and enable our construction of new temporal interactions and visualizations.

The State of the Future 2008 report is out now from the World Federation of UN Associations Millennium Project, with an updated analysis of the 15 global challenges that its worldwide panel have been analysing for 12 years now.

My topics of main interest are: 1) Associative Tags; 2) Agreement, Disagreement, discourse; 3) Corporate Semantic Web, 4) Are upper level ontologies/vocabularies not so bad after all?, 5) Cleaner schemas and ontologies

The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) is one of the largest and most prestigious professional associations of its kind. Formed as the American Society of Zoologists through a 1902 merger of two societies, the Central Naturalists and the American Morphological Society, its focus has remained to integrate the many fields of specialization which occur in the broad field of biology. Throughout most of its history the society was known as the American Society of Zoologists and changed its name to the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in 1996 to reflect the scientific breadth, integrative approaches, and interests of its membership across all disciplines of biology. The SICB is organized around disciplinary divisions, each relevant to a major segment of biology.

Ashoka is the global association of the world's leading social entrepreneurs-men and women with system changing solutions for the world's most urgent social problems. Since 1981, we have elected over 2,000 leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows, providing them with living stipends, professional support, and access to a global network of peers in more than 60 countries.

The Historical Event Markup and Linking project provides a means of coordinating and navigating disparate historical materials on the internet. It includes 1. an XML schema for historical events which describes the events' participants, dates, location and keywords; the schema associates these with source materials in print or on the web. 2. XSLT stylesheets that combine conforming documents and generate lists, maps and graphical timelines out of them. Heml integrates these resources using the Cocoon2 web publishing engine.