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From the start of the 21st century, a new form of employment has emerged in developing countries. It employs hundreds of thousands of people and earns hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Yet it has been almost invisible to both the academic and development communities. It is the phenomenon of "gold farming": the production of virtual goods and services for players of online games. China is the employment epicentre but the sub-sector has spread to other Asian nations and will spread further as online games-playing grows. It is the first example of a likely future development trend in online employment. It is also one of a few emerging examples in developing countries of "liminal ICT work"; jobs associated with digital technologies that are around or just below the threshold of what is deemed socially-acceptable and/or formally-legal.

Quick, incremental updates, along with heavy user involvement, are key characteristics of an emerging software development paradigm championed by a new generation of Web 2.0 start-ups. The new process, which some champions call "application development 2.0," contrasts markedly with the traditional corporate waterfall process that separates projects into several distinct phases, ranging from requirements to maintenance. Nonetheless, application development 2.0 can bring significant benefits to corporate IT shops if managers and developers are willing to change.

Trends in programming language development and adoption point to Python as the high-level systems integration language of choice. Python leverages a vast developer-base external to the Neuroscience community, and promises leaps in simulation complexity and maintainability to any neural simulator which adopts it. As more and more simulators support Python, model development times can be drastically reduced by promoting code sharing and reuse across simulator communities. As a result, modellers can devote their software development time to innovating new simulation tools such as network topology databases, stimulus programming, analysis and visualisation tools, and simulation accounting, to name a few.

This article is a guide for collection developers at the point of considering a metadata schema for their digital collection. The nine questions asked in this article will assist a developer in clarifying how he wants the collection to be organized, described, and used. This article uses examples to illustrate how these questions guided the development of a digital collection built at the University of Southern California.

The OBO Foundry is a collaborative experiment involving developers of science-based ontologies who are establishing a set of principles for ontology development with the goal of creating a suite of orthogonal interoperable reference ontologies in the biomedical domain. The groups developing ontologies who have expressed an interest in this goal are listed below, followed by other relevant efforts in this domain.

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 GridSphere portal framework provides an open-source portlet based Web portal. GridSphere enables developers to quickly develop and package third-party portlet web applications that can be run and administered within the GridSphere portlet container. Here you will find the GridSphere portal framework available for download and documentation related to the installation and development of portlets using GridSphere.

Croquet is a powerful open source software technology that, in the form of the Croquet Software Developer's Kit (Croquet SDK), can be used by experienced software developers to create and deploy deeply collaborative multi-user online vitual world applications on and across multiple operating systems and devices. Derived from Squeak, the Croquet system features a peer-based messaging protocol that dramatically reduces the need for server infrastructures to support virtual world deployment and makes it easy for software developers to create deeply collaborative applications. Cobalt is a National Science Foundation-sponsored effort to develop an open source virtual world browser and authoring toolkit application based on the Croquet technology.

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, has challenged the way that reference works are used and understood, and even the way that the collective enterprise of knowledge construction and circulation is itself conceptualized. The article presents an ethnographic study of Wikiversity, an educationally-oriented sister project to Wikipedia. It begins by providing an overview of the orientations and aims of Wikiversity, which seeks to provide for participants both open educational contents and an open educational community. It then undertakes a detailed examination of this project's emerging, overlapping communities and cultures by providing descriptions produced through a combination of ethnographic techniques. These descriptions focus on the experiences of a participant-observer in the context of an 11-week course developed and delivered via Wikiversity, titled Composing Free and Open Online Educational Resources. These descriptions are discussed and interpreted through reference to qualitative studies of the more developed dynamics of the Wikipedia effort - allowing this study to trace the possible trajectories for the future development of the fledgling Wikiversity project. In this way, this paper investigates the communal and cultural dynamics of an undertaking that - should it meet only with a fraction of Wikipedia's success - will be of obvious significance to education generally.

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.

The mission of The Pelican Web is to collect and analyze knowledge on obstacles to sustainable development, and to publish the monthly, free subscription, open access PelicanWeb Journal of Sustainable Development. The e-journal provides a monthly digest on current research pursuant to human solidarity, ecological sustainability, and both secular and religious non-violence.

Yahoo! GeoPlanet helps bridge the gap between the real and virtual worlds by providing an open, permanent, and intelligent infrastructure for geo-referencing data on the Internet. In practical terms, Yahoo! GeoPlanet is a resource for managing all geo-permanent named places on Earth. It provides the geographic developer community with the vocabulary and grammar to describe the world's geography in an unequivocal, permanent, and language-neutral manner. Developers can geo-enable their applications by using GeoPlanet to traverse the global spatial hierarchy, identify the geography relevant to their users and their businesses, and in turn, unambiguously geotag, geotarget, and geolocate data across the Web.

The current research agenda is to examine all the significant dimensions of sustainable development in order to integrate the resulting multi-dimensional knowledge and make it available in a form suitable for use sustainable development groups.

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium of leading biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods allowing scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. Our visionis that all biomedical knowledge and data are disseminated on the Internet using principled ontologies, such that they are semantically interoperable and useful for improving biomedical science and clinical care. Our resources include the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library, the Open Biomedical Data (OBD) repositories, and tools for accessing and using this information in research. The Center collaborates with biomedical researchers conducting Driving Biological Projects to enable outside research and stimulate technology development in the Center. The Center undertakes outreach and educational activities (Biomedical Informatics Program) to train future researchers to use biomedical ontologies and related tools with the goal of enhancing scientific discovery.

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.

SWiM is a semantic wiki for collaboratively building, editing and browsing a mathematical knowledge base. Its pages, containing mathematical theories, are stored in OMDoc, a markup format for mathematical knowledge. Our long-term objective is to develop a software that facilitates the creation of a shared, public collection of mathematical knowledge (e.g. for education) and serves work groups of mathematicians as a tool for collaborative development of new theories.

This article describes the motivation for and development of a project I have called PepysMap. PepysMap was inspired by the excellent 'blog of the diary of Samuel Pepys run by Phil Gyford 1. Phil posts diary entries day by day (currently for the year 1662). Each blog post contains the text of the diary entry hyperlinked to pages containing detail of people, places and cultural artifacts referenced from the text. The goal of PepysMap is to shadow the development of the Pepys blog by creating a topic map for each diary entry, showing the relationships between people, places and cultural artifacts.

Grockit is about questioning together. To this end, we are developing an online learning game where people can teach each other. Our organization is about the space where learning and technology meet. By combining our years of experience as teachers and developers, we are creating a place where learners can meet other learners. You can read more about our thoughts on learning and technology in our blog. You can also learn more about how we live and work at Grockit.

This is the homepage for an ongoing research and development project named PATIKA - Pathway Analysis Tools for Integration and Knowledge Acquisition. Within this project so far, among others, an ontology has been defined; a pathway database (which integrates and interfaces with several public pathway databases) has been constructed; and some software tools have been developed for effective integration, querying, analysis, and manipulation of pathway data.

NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations.