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The new Open Semantic Collaboration Architecture Foundation aims at common standards in collaborative software. The OSCA Foundation brings together organisations and individuals interested in ensuring interoperability between desktops and collaborative environments. It provides a discussion and exchange forum as well as a meeting place for different stakeholder to explore joint interests and define and execute appropriate actions, aiming to ensure the continued evolution and standardisation of an open vendor- and platform-neutral interoperable collaborative environment architecture.

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.

The COMMUNIA Thematic Network aims at becoming a European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion of existing and emerging issues concerning the public domain in the digital environment - as well as related topics, including, but not limited to, alternative forms of licensing for creative material; open access to scientific publications and research results; management of works whose authors are unknown (i.e. orphan works).

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.

E-mail is no longer just e-mail, and it arguably hasn't been for some time. Webmail clients like Yahoo's have offered IM and calendar integration for a while, and now Gmail allows video chatting and embedded gadgets. Zenbe, a new startup, is bringing social features, collaboration, and a new perspective on our e-mail routine with things like a sharable wiki, discussions, and even a Twitter sidebar.

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.

ScienceBloggers discuss the advantages of open science and debate the necessity of the current peer-review system.

A course in information studies was partly held in the virtual world of Second Life. Second Life was used as a platform to deliver lectures and as a place for organizing group assignments and having discussions. Students' opinions about Second Life were studied and compared to their opinions about more traditional methods in education. The results show a lower threshold for participation in lectures. According to the students, Second Life should not replace face-to-face education, but it could serve as an excellent addition to other more traditional methods and platforms used in education. The students also considered that lectures held in Second Life were much more "fun" than those using other methods. This particular aspect, and its effect on learning outcomes, requires further research. This research demonstrates that Second Life has potential as a learning environment in distance education.

This exploratory study examines the relationships between article and Talk page contributions and their effect on article quality in Wikipedia. The sample consisted of three articles each from the hard sciences, soft sciences, and humanities, whose talk page and article edit histories were observed over a five-month period and coded for contribution types. Richness and neutrality criteria were then used to assess article quality and results were compared within and among subject disciplines. This study reveals variability in article quality across subject disciplines and a relationship between Talk page discussion and article editing activity. Overall, results indicate the initial article creator's critical role in providing a framework for future editing as well as a remarkable stability in article content over time.

This blog is a place for readers to discuss the beta version of our new book, "Evolving Collective Intelligence" by Douglas C. Engelbart, Valerie Landau, and Eileen Clegg. After reading the beta version, Do you have a quote to contribute? Clarifications on the content? An idea for another essay? Feedback will be input for our improved first edition, in keeping with Doug's philosophy of continuous improvement and collaboration. Please go to the "about" page.

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.

A list of Beehive features, from a Beehive introduction session yesterday (presented by VP and Chief Architect, Oracle Collaborative Technologies, Terry Olkin): * Contacts * Messages (email) * Wiki * Tasks * Conferencing * IM (transcripts) * Calendar * Documents * Discussions

Have you been over hearing people talk about microformats and thought to yourself "what are those?" In this post I provide a quick introduction, and discuss the various ways that microformats are changing the Web.

Webology is an international peer-reviewed journal in English devoted to the field of the World Wide Web and serves as a forum for discussion and experimentation. It serves as a forum for new research in information dissemination and communication processes in general, and in the context of the World Wide Web in particular. Concerns include the production, gathering, recording, processing, storing, representing, sharing, transmitting, retrieving, distribution, and dissemination of information, as well as its social and cultural impacts. There is a strong emphasis on the Web and new information technologies. Special topic issues are also often seen.

I was listening to Melvyn Bragg's radio program, In Our Time , this morning on my iPod. The topic was Albert Camus. In discussing his novel, The Stranger, one of the distinguished panellists felt that Camus was suggesting that meaning is not pre-inscribed in the world around us and we are continuously seeking meaning in an inherently meaningless world. I almost toppled off the step machine. Do we live in an inherently meaningless world? On first thought I think the answer is yes. The onus is on us to make sense of our world. By the way, Melvyn's podcast is a joy. I particularly like its eclectic nature. Today it's Camus, last week The Four Humours, and before that we had The Sassanian Empire, Discovery of Oxygen, Mutation and The Fibonacci Series.

Our goal in creating this site is to provide the basis for a thriving community of UIMA developers who can announce, discuss, design, share, and critique UIMA-compliant components, resources and solutions. The Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) is a software framework that supports rapid development and deployment of multimodal analytics - applications which provide value by processing human-readable text, audio and/or video in order to extract information, answer questions, summarize documents, etc.

Database systems are notorious for being hard to use. It is even more difficult to integrate data from multiple sources and collaborate on large data sets with people outside your organization. Without an easy way to offer all the collaborators access to the same server, data sets get copied, emailed and ftp'd--resulting in multiple versions that get out of sync very quickly. Today we're introducing Google Fusion Tables on Labs, an experimental system for data management in the cloud. It draws on the expertise of folks within Google Research who have been studying collaboration, data integration, and user requirements from a variety of domains. Fusion Tables is not a traditional database system focusing on complicated SQL queries and transaction processing. Instead, the focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing. We plan to iteratively add new features to the systems as we get feedback from users.

Seth Grimes is a business intelligence expert with a special interest in text analytics. In this conversation with host Jon Udell, he discusses how a new breed of tools is enabling companies to build "voice of the customer" applications that extract useful signals from the noisy chatter that's erupting everywhere online.

This document defines a concise bounded description of a resource in terms of an RDF graph [5], as a general and broadly optimal unit of specific knowledge about that resource to be utilized by, and/or interchanged between, semantic web agents. Given a particular node in a particular RDF graph, a concise bounded description is a subgraph consisting of those statements which together constitute a focused body of knowledge about the resource denoted by that particular node. The precise nature of that subgraph will hopefully become clear given the definition, discussion and example provided below. Optimality is, of course, application dependent and it is not presumed that a concise bounded description is an optimal form of description for every application; however, it is presented herein as a reasonably general and broadly optimal form of description for many applications, and unless otherwise warranted, constitutes a reasonable default response to the request "tell me about this resource".

Social architecture is the conscious design of an environment that encourages certain social behavior leading towards some goal or set of goals

Insightful discussion around the coining of the term "Social Architecture"