IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced the launch of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Toolkit Union, a new open-source software community project organized to make document software more innovative, versatile and useful for business.
OPS4J stands for Open Participation Software for Java, and this community is trying to build a new, more open model for Open Source development, where not only the usage is Open and Free, but the Participation is Open as well. Removal of barriers, let more people in, have more fun and less politics. I have also seen Open Development as a term to describe this.
Think of it as Wiki brought to Coding. Wikipedia is of course the most outstanding example of open collaboration.
As a conversational process, the World Café is an innovative yet simple methodology for hosting conversations about questions that matter. These conversations link and build on each other as people move between groups, cross-pollinate ideas, and discover new insights into the questions or issues that are most important in their life, work, or community. As a process, the World Café can evoke and make visible the collective intelligence of any group, thus increasing people's capacity for effective action in pursuit of common aims.
World Pulse is an interactive global media enterprise that covers global issues through the eyes of women. We publish a magazine and link it to our global community newswire, called PulseWire, where women from over 130 countries, including from rural villages, are speaking for themselves and connecting to solve global problems.
The Biomedical Grid Terminology (BiomedGT) is an open, collaboratively developed terminology for translational research. BiomedGT builds on the strengths of the NCI Thesaurus, including concept orientation, description logic, and public accessibility. While the current terminology has been seeded with NCI Thesaurus content, it is being restructured to facilitate open content development. The goal is to evolve BiomedGT into a set of federated sub-terminologies, with content maintained by experts in the relevant research communities.
ECOSPACE pursues the vision that by 2012 every Professional in Europe is empowered for seamless, dynamic and creative collaboration across teams, organisations and communities through a personalised collaborative working environment. ECOSPACE contributes to this vision through 4 main objectives:
* The definition of innovative work paradigms through the analysis of eProfessionals and their related organisation.
* The design and development of an open standards, service-oriented architecture for complementary and alike systems.
* A collaboration middleware and services to enable seamless and instant collaboration among knowledge workers in group forming networks, beyond organisational boundaries.
* The creation of new tools that simplify the complexity of collaboration in dynamic work environments and which enable users for creative and knowledge intensive tasks.
This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis
of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures.
A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with
a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of
the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development.
These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for
Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web
Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way
to focus its development on key communicational and representational
requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the
development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic
approaches to discover the Web's topology, or its graph-like structures,
are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially
embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and
governance are also reviewed.
The DBpedia community uses a flexible and extensible framework to extract different kinds of structured information from Wikipedia.
The DBpedia information extraction framework is written using PHP 5. The framework is available from the DBpedia SVN (GNU GPL License).
This present report summarizes the insights and recommendations of a symposium on sensemaking, sponsored by the Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence, and held in Vienna, Virginia, on 23-25 October 2001.
There is a growing community interest in applying Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies in health care and life sciences areas including the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG ; http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/) and Medicine 2.0 (http://www.medicine20congress.com/). This has motivated us to explore how to intersect these two sets of technologies in the context of the HCLS Knowledge Base (KB).
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).
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).
HarvANA uses a standardized but extensible RDF model for representing the annotations/tags and OAI-PMH to harvest the annotations/tags from distributed community servers. The harvested annotations are aggregated with the authoritative metadata in a centralized metadata store.
In a striking departure from traditional methods of teaching, a new way for students to gain course credits is emerging. The Eduzendium initiative was proposed by Dr. Sorin A. Matei (Purdue University). In collaboration with Dr. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and now Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium, and a group of Purdue graduate students, he has designed a set of template policies, rules and educational methods that allow incorporating wiki style collaboration in the educational process. The policies have been pretested at Purdue and will soon be released to the educational community through Eduzendium.
The research team Edelweiss aims at offering models, methods and techniques for supporting knowledge management and collaboration in virtual communities interacting with information resources through the Web. This research will result in an ergonomic graph-based and ontology-based platform.
The crowdsourced feedback model provides a community setting for customers to share their ideas and expand on the ideas of other customers. The IdeaScale incentive and voting process is extremely important in harnessing this flow of customer ideas and making it an integral component of product innovation strategies.
Action research is a reflective process of progressive problem solving led by individuals working with others in teams or as part of a "community of practice" to improve the way they address issues and solve problems. Action research can also be undertaken by larger organizations or institutions, assisted or guided by professional researchers, with the aim of improving their strategies, practices, and knowledge of the environments within which they practice.
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