Group items tagged

RPI's Tetherless World Constellation will address this emerging area of "Web Science," focusing on the World Wide Web and it's future use. Faculty in the constellation will explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, will enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and will develop new technologies and languages that expand the capabilities of the Web. We will use powerful scientific and mathematical techniques from many disciplines to explore the modeling of the Web from network- and information- centric views. Our goals will include making the next generation web natural to use while being responsive to the growing variety of policy and social needs, whether in the area of privacy, intellectual property, general compliance, or provenance. The Tetherless World Constellation will design new techniques to explore social, scientific, and legal impacts of the evolving technologies deployed on the Web.

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.

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.

This paper is based on a study of personal experience narratives told by witnesses of the September 11th attacks in calls to C-SPAN. Drawing on research on narratives of ordinary and extraordinary experiences and witnessing, the author offers a framework for analyzing the structure and function of eyewitness accounts. Analysis focuses on methods callers use to show and tell the audience where they were, what they were doing, and what they were thinking at the time of the attacks. Verbal, visual, and structural features of these narratives are highlighted, with particular attention given to orientation and ideation components of the narratives. The design of these components and their location within the callers' stories are shown to construct the narratives as eyewitness accounts, position the callers and audience members as witnesses, and engage all in a therapeutic sensemaking process.

The W3C OWL 2 Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a Semantic Web language designed to represent ontologies - information about how individuals are grouped and fit together in a particular domain. OWL can represent rich and complex information about classes of individuals and their properties. OWL is a logical language, where every construct has a well-defined meaning, meanings that fit together to support exact and useful representation of many different kinds of information. OWL groups information into ontologies in the form of documents that can be stored and transmitted across the World Wide Web in the same way that data and other kinds of information are and that can be completely and effectively processed by tools that extract the information implicit in an ontology.

This habitat of excellence is designed and maintained by scientists for scientists from various disciplines e.g. veterinary and human virology, bioinformatics, epidemiology, immunology and clinical analysis etc. From here on, you will find a series of services, starting with our EpiFlu Database (led by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics) providing secure storage and the analysis of genetic, epidemiological and clinical data.

Apache Synapse is designed to be a simple, lightweight and high performance Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) from Apache. Based on a small asynchronous core, Apache Synapse has excellent support for XML and Web services - as well as binary and text formats. The Synapse engine is configured with a simple XML format and comes with a set of ready-to-use transports and mediators. We recommend you start by reading the QuickStart and then trying out the samples.

Global (e.g. organization-wide) patterns emerge from everyday 'local' (i.e. one-to-one or small-group) conversations. The more that people (in interaction) make sense of events and take action in particular ways, the more likely they are to make similar sense and take similar actions in the future. That is, from an informal coalitions perspective, these patterns are not formed by managerial dictat or design but by the nature of the everyday sensemaking that has gone before.

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 NeuroCommons project seeks to make all scientific research materials - research articles, annotations, data, physical materials - as available and as useable as they can be. We do this by both fostering practices that render information in a form that promotes uniform access by computational agents - sometimes called "interoperability". We want knowledge sources to combine meaningfully, enabling semantically precise queries that span multiple information sources. Our work covers general data and knowledge sources used in computational biology as well as sources specific to neuroscience and neuromedicine. The practices that we develop and promote are designed to play well on the Semantic Web. We view our technical work not as creating a new service or content library, although we do both, but rather as helping to promote the growth of semantically linked scientific information.

Unstructured Information Management applications are software systems that analyze large volumes of unstructured information in order to discover knowledge that is relevant to an end user. UIMA is a framework and SDK for developing such applications. An example UIM application might ingest plain text and identify entities, such as persons, places, organizations; or relations, such as works-for or located-at. UIMA enables such an application to be decomposed into components, for example "language identification" -> "language specific segmentation" -> "sentence boundary detection" -> "entity detection (person/place names etc.)". Each component must implement interfaces defined by the framework and must provide self-describing metadata via XML descriptor files. The framework manages these components and the data flow between them. Components are written in Java or C++; the data that flows between components is designed for efficient mapping between these languages. UIMA additionally provides capabilities to wrap components as network services, and can scale to very large volumes by replicating processing pipelines over a cluster of networked nodes.

As my thesis work, I created and evaluated a programming system for middle school girls called Storytelling Alice that presents programming as a means to the end of storytelling. Storytelling Alice includes high-level animations that enable users to program social interactions, a gallery of characters and scenery designed to spark story ideas, and a story-based tutorial.

The Web Science Research Initiative brings together academics, scientists, sociologists, entrepreneurs and decision makers from around the world. These people will create the first multidisciplinary research body to examine the World Wide Web and offer the practical solutions needed to help guide its future use and design.

The purpose of this study was to improve the quality of students' online discussion of assigned readings in an online course. To improve the focus, depth, and connectedness of online discussion, the first author designed a text-focused Wiki that simultaneously displayed the assigned reading and students' comments side by side in adjacent columns. In the text-focused Wiki, students were able to read the assigned text in the left column and type their comments or questions in the right column adjacent to the sentence or passage that sparked their interest. In post-participation surveys, data were gathered about students' experiences in the text-focused Wiki and prior experiences in threaded discussion forums. Students reported more focus, depth, flow, idea generation, and enjoyment in the text-focused Wiki.

SenseMaker™ is one of the few software systems to be built on basis of natural rather than management science. It is designed to augment rather than replace human decision making. SenseMaker™ is supported by the open source Cognitive Edge methods and the unique Cognitive Edge Network of consultants, academics and other practitioners across the world. It has the ability to form a bridge between formal structured systems in an organisation and the free tagging of social computing. It enables serendipitous un-biased encounters with data in the context of need.

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and downloading all toolbars is madness! That's where SocialMarker.com comes in, the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.

GRIA is a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) designed to support B2B collaborations through service provision across organisational boundaries in a secure, interoperable and flexible manner.

AGROVOC is a multilingual, structured and controlled vocabulary designed to cover the terminology of all subject fields in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and related domains (e.g. environment).

Sphinx is a full-text search engine, distributed under GPL version 2. Commercial license is also available for embedded use. Generally, it's a standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant fulltext search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages. Currently built-in data sources support fetching data either via direct connection to MySQL or PostgreSQL, or using XML pipe mechanism (a pipe to indexer in special XML-based format which Sphinx recognizes).

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.