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On the occasion of the celebration of the International Year of Planet Earth in (2008), the Department of Geography of the University of the Aegean in Lesvos, Greece, is organizing the international conference "Studying, Modeling and Sense Making of Planet Earth". The UNESCO Natural Sciences Sector has granted support to the conference.

The 2008 NMC Conference Proceedings features ten papers including case studies; a tutorial; introductions to current topics such as storytelling, digital media, and fair use; descriptions of special services, tools, and information technology support programs developed at member schools; and discussions of new media and pedagogy.

Computational Collective Intelligence (CCI) is most often understood as an AI sub-field dealing with soft computing methods which enable making group decisions or processing knowledge among autonomous units acting in distributed environments. Web-based systems, social networks and multi-agent systems very often need these tools for working out consistent knowledge states, resolving conflicts and making decisions. The aim of this conference is to provide an internationally respected forum for scientific research in the computer-based methods of collective intelligence and their applications in (but not limited to) such fields as semantic web, social networks and multi-agent systems.

n the IS field there is a growing recognition of the importance of theorizing the IT artifact and its organizational and societal context from a pragmatic and action-oriented perspective. Over the years, a number of events and journal special issues have been devoted to this topic (e.g. the Language/Action Perspective workshops 1996-2005 and special issues of CACM and Data and Knowledge Engineering, the Understanding Sociotechnical Action workshops and special issue of IJTHI, the Action in Language, Organizations and Information Systems conferences and EJIS special issue, and the Pragmatic Web conference). The aim of SIGPrag is to provide a much needed centre of gravity and to facilitate exchange of ideas and further development of this area of IS scholarship.

Knowledge Federation 2008 Conference. Dubrovnik, Croatia

ESSENCE is an immersive internet experiment, and a face-face conference. It invites human-centred technologists, climate scientists, policymakers, and any other stakeholder with a view on some part of the climate change debate, to experience and reflect on a new generation of software tools. Build, structure, summarise and navigate the science and policy arguments underpinning climate challenge. Think of it as a visual Wikipedia, a collective intelligence, to organise the key issues, options and arguments.

Proceedings of the 3rd Semantic Wiki Workshop (SemWiki 2008) at the 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008) Tenerife, Spain, June 2nd, 2008

TechCrunch50 is broadcasting the conference live with their partner UStream which means our fans and supporters can watch our presentation live this morning during the 10:30 Pacific time session on gaming. We've included the live broadcast of the event here. Wish us luck and we look forward to welcoming you into the Akoha community of players soon. Updated 14:39. Our presentation went really well. If you missed it, you can watch the recorded version below.

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).

All conferences and research events have much informal related content spread around the Internet, including abstracts, papers, presentations and audio/visual material. Locating this content can be difficult and time-consuming. Using semantic web tools, IUGO is investigating how to organise and provide access to this valuable information.

"The value of any individual piece of knowledge is about the value of any individual piece of lego," Wilbanks said in a keynote address to the Open Access and Research Conference held in Brisbane last week. "It's not that much until you put it together with other legos." He says the ability to connect knowledge brings scientific revolutions. For example Watson and Crick's breakthrough on the structure of DNA involved them reading all the scientific papers on nucleotide bonding and encoding it in the form of a physical model, says Wilbanks. But this kind of "human scale" analysis is no longer feasible in an age when automated laboratory processes generate vast amounts of information faster than the human mind can process it. "For example, we have 45,000 papers about one protein or one gene," says Wilbanks. He says a scientist might once have analysed the impact of one drug on one gene, but now pipetting robots are capable of analysing 25,000 genes at a time. "Most of the research says the smartest of us can handle five or six independent variables at once - not 25,000," he says

Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Search (SemSearch 2008) at the 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008) Tenerife, Spain, June 2nd, 2008.

Scratch is a simple, easy-to-learn programming language designed at MIT's Media Lab that lets anyone create and share video games and animated stories. Introduced just over a year ago, it has already attracted a wide following--particularly among kids aged 8 to 15--and a variety of uses that its creators never imagined. Now, Scratch users from around the world are gathering for the first of what is planned as an annual conference to discuss the software and its uses and to share ideas.

The SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.

Proceedings of the Conference Knowledge Construction in E-learning Context: CSCL, ODL, ICT and SNA in education (2008) Cesena, Italy, September 1-2, 2008.

Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Intelligent Support for Exploratory Environments held in conjunction with the EC-TEL'08 Conference Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 17th, 2008.

ESSENCE: E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change is an immersive internet experiment, culminating in a face-face conference. We want to build a collective intelligence resource on the climate change debate. This is analogous to Wikipedia, but decidely not enforcing a "neutral point of view". We are going to put through their paces tools tuned for mapping the key issues, options, arguments and evidence on the different dillemmas - and reflect on how effective the current tools are.

Web 3.0: Personalization, Reasoning Or Openness?

On January 07, 2009, OASIS announced the submission of a draft charter for a new OASIS Technical Committee to define an integrated collaboration object model supporting a complete range of enterprise collaboration activities. The proposed data model is based upon the Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM), to be contributed by Oracle to the ICOM TC. The new standard model, interface, and protocol would support contextual collaboration within business processes for an integrated collaboration environment which includes communication artifacts (e.g., email, instant message, telephony, RSS), teamwork artifacts (such as project and meeting workspaces, discussion forums, real-time conferences, presence, activities, subscriptions, wikis, and blogs), content artifacts (e.g., text and multi-media contents, contextual connections, taxonomies, folksonomies, tags, recommendations, social bookmarking, saved searches), and coordination artifacts (such as address books, calendars, tasks) etc.

WebWise 2.0: The Power of Community: Selected papers from the Ninth Annual WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums