Group items tagged

Semantic web atlas of postgenomic knowledge about human and mouse

Functional Requirements for Sharing Tag Data The TagCommons effort is operating something like a software project. The process is very lightweight, but has an important step that is often forgotten in discussions about ontologies and formats: for what purposes are we designing this? These days, a good way to look at functional requirements for software is to identify use cases and then derive engineering requirements. This was the first outcome of the working group, and the results are summarized here. We will describe the use cases first and then the requirements.

In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, linguists observed an artificial language evolve from random to ordered, naturally adapting in ways that assured its reproduction.

how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular

The problem with social networking services is that you do not control a social network, which can behave in highly unpredictible ways according to the theory of complex systems, especially if the strategic intent of its originator is not clear. For me, no human society, whether in the real world or in the virtual world, can survive without some form of visible leadership, i.e. someone who symbolizes what the brand stands for. I don't know about Facebook, and I honestly do not understand where it is going. But for Wikipedia, there is a big risk remaining faceless. In France, Wikipedia is said to be in the hands of the far left of the political spectrum, and manipulating content accordingly. It might be true or not, but if nobody stands up against this accusation, it might prevail in the end. Perception is reality.

The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc

The key to the semantic approach for Zigtag is that shared tags are just that - they are more precise than strings. They are not only words - they have definitions.

She suggested that we used the communication metaphor too much, assuming that all issues were either about listening or telling. Instead she argued we needed an interaction metaphor in which we communicate by action and more importantly interaction. Praxis makes perfect as we used to say. There is a fair amount of talk about story-listening and story-telling and much of it is useful. However, interaction is about collaborative story creation, something which I think has more inherent value.

Global Sensemaking Start making sense

With the economy in a slump and budgets being cut in traditional print and TV advertising campaigns many will be looking to the Web 2.0 world to reach their constituents. So what should be on your Web 2.0 radar for 2009? Web 2.0 gurus give you the low down.

Primarily, we want to create a new tool that uses the unique features of virtual environments to facilitate education, collaboration, and understanding. The output of many supercomputing applications - from astronomical simulations to medical models - is complex and often highly visual. Creating a persistent, standardized environment where these models can reside will make it easier to share and explore these data sets with other researchers. Also, for educators, ScienceSim will provide an interactive 3-D environment that can be used to explain complex concepts such as gravity [see video below] in a highly intuitive manner.

Communities and technologies are key to community informatics. These technologies cover a wide range, with sophisticated computer and networking technologies only being one end of the spectrum. Face-to-face and other non-computerized technologies can be just as important, if often not more so. ICTs should therefore always be read as covering this whole spectrum.

So, when it comes to terrorism, it only works because of technology, because a small number of people, almost always men, can use technology for leverage. Nineteen terrorists armed with sticks and stones could do very little to affect the United States of America. But 19 terrorists armed with jet fuel-laden aircraft ... The technology pushed their destructive capability way beyond where it would have been. Nineteen men against 300 million people. We would have never known they existed if they hadn't leveraged technology.

The primary issue I set out to discuss was the state of RDF vocabularies for microformats. Why is this important? A growing number of tools exist that convert microformats into RDF but in case everyone chooses different representations it will be significantly more difficult to interoperate. So in a small group we set out to document what we believe are the best practice mappings from microformats to RDF.

The raw truth is that the economy has grown faster when taxes were higher, but how can we explain that phenomenon?

The Environmental Appeals Board blocked the EPA from issuing a permit to a proposed coal plant addition near Vernal, Utah, about 150 miles east of Salt Lake City. Perhaps more importantly, the quasi-independent board, composed of four highly regarded, experienced judges, ruled that the EPA needs to develop a single nationwide standard for dealing with carbon dioxide.

The Bibliographic Ontology has just been published.

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.