Group items tagged

A fantastic read to wake up your brain and help it see the trappings of false illusions and patterns around you. 

s Richard MacManus recently predicted, in 2008 we'll witness the rise of semantic web services. From the native support for Microformats in Firefox 3, to the New York Times' utilization of rich headers metadata, to this week's release of the Social Graph API by Google, semantics are starting to slip onto the web. The impact is being felt because large companies are really starting to focus on structured information. In the same vein, last week Reuters - an international business and financial news giant - launched an API called Open Calais. The API does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events. This technology is the next generation of the Clear Forest offering, which Reuters acquired last year. We have profiled Clear Forest on ReadWriteWeb and in this post we will look at what Reuters opened up and why.

Andreas Hotho's talk more specifically addressed the search for methods to identify tags which describe the same concept (or a more specific / a more general concept respectively) within a folksonomy. He suggested two approaches: 1. Applying measures directly to folksonomy statistics, allowing to describe tags as a vector; e.g. co-occurrence frequency and FolkRank could serve as a similarity measure (with these two having a tendency towards high-frequency tags) or a cosine method (which is more likely to produce "siblings") 2. Looking up tags in an external thesaurus/vocabulary (for instance achieving semantic grounding by mapping a tag and its most similar tags with Wordnet Synsets)

A small, digital book startup thinks it has a solution to the age-old student lament: overpriced textbooks that have little value when the course is over. The answer? Make them open source -- and give them away.

The Semantic Web is necessary, but not sufficient to provide better technological support for online communities. Web services cannot be described independently of how they are used, because communities of practice use services in novel, unexpected ways. Although semantics are very important to create more 'intelligent' web services, what has been lacking so far is some formal notion of context of use. As Piers Young summarizes it, "that's where the problem of effectiveness starts getting addressed." Contextual elements like the community of use, its objectives and communicative interactions are thus important starting points for conceptualizing the pragmatic layer.

Zemanta is a service that's focused on helping the blogger/content creator make the process of creating their content simpler and easier. As you write, Zemanta processes all of your text (like a spell checker in a word processing program does) and suggests things to you. Currently, Zemanta suggests stories/posts/research you might want to read as you compose your post, images you might want to include in the post, words you might want to hyperlink out with, and tags for search engines and other services to use to discover your content.

But I've never seen a service that brings social bookmarking and semantic search together the way AntStorm does. The service works on two major fronts: first, AntStorm allows you to upload your bookmarks, tag them, share them, and access them from any computer you choose, and second, AntStorm uses your tagged bookmarks to power a semantic search engine that will help you find new sites and services that match your interests.

While I understand the principles behind AntStorm's voting system for regulatory purposes, I wondered if it would be more useful for voting to occur from any user after the fact, similar to StumbleUpon or Reddit. My main concern about the voting system was that it would require too much time on the part of the group members, who would need to vote for every single item submitted to a group. To this concern, Wilson explained that the AntStorm voting system is designed to work effectively without participation from all group members, and Wilson's hope for AntStorm is to have such dedicated group members that will have only a handful of interest groups, enabling them to readily devote time towards those topics which are of greatest importance to them.

Here's an important question for all of us: How do you make sense of something that's big and complicated? Say… something like why your users aren't passionate about your product?

Sensemaking is the way in which people understand the world at large scale: how they decide what kind of goals are reasonable to try for and what kinds of strategies are worth trying or using. Sensemaking is related to what the military call situational awareness.

Sensemaking is a process designed to enable groups of people to see patterns that were once hidden to them and develop a common understanding of what is required to address an issue. While the sensemaking (and subsequent intervention design) process will result in the production of artefacts (reports, lists of action items, descriptions of the current situation etc) much of the value is derived through participation in the process. It is not a process where you say 'make sense of this and tell me the answer'. Much of the benefit comes from determining 'what it means' for yourself. Sensemaking is beneficial at an individual level as our values and assumptions are tested and either confirmed or found wanting.

Using stories to trigger conversations and intepretations of behaviours is powerful.

Social capital is the invisible stock of connections between people that makes collaboration possible. It basically measures trust and how people really care for one another. When members of a group know each other very well and share the same values, social capital is high. When they don't and have no shared awareness of the situation facing the group, the same words can mean very different things to them, and the trust level is low. Social capital and culture go hand in hand.

If companies cannot develop a culture of knowledge sharing and innovation, it's primarily because they are having a hard time measuring the benefits. All metrics of intangibles -and KM in particular- are shaky, and the most promising ones, based on network analysis (VNA) still have a long way to go before they become generally accepted practices. In the meantime, organizing a knowledge market might be the best way to go. Let's imagine what it would look like… First, a separate organization for shared knowledge services would have to be set up, if it doesn't exist already. For lack of a better phrase, let's cal it the corporate university. The problem is that corporate universities, when they exist, are focused on executive programs, which is a very small part of the problem.

how tagging transforms the solitary browsing experience into a social one

Bringing Wisdom to Emerging Technology We are at an amazing and critical juncture in human history. If we continue on our current path, we face many potential disasters: overpopulation, shortages of water, oil, and raw materials, financial instability, disease, terrorism, war, and the destruction of species and ecosystems (eg. see Jeffrey Sachs "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet"). But the next few decades will also bring advances in science and technology which may dramatically improve our lives. It is remarkable that we are simultaneously on the verge of major revolutions in biology, neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and fundamental physics.

Cognitive Edge is focused on rejuvenating management practices to better equip organisations when addressing intractable problems or seizing new opportunities in uncertain and complex situations. Where traditional approaches have failed to deliver success, Cognitive Edge techniques enable the emergence of fresh and insightful solutions seen from multiple perspectives.

Later in GLUT, Wright touches on how the card catalog of libraries became separated from the main library content, the actual books. Libraries became so big and accumulated so many volumes that it was no longer feasible to store the metadata for each volume with the volume. So that information was collected and stored elsewhere. This is important because the computational world we all inhabit has similarly been shaped by resource constraints. In our case the original constraints are long gone, but we continue to live in their shadow.

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.