Group items tagged

"The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for “popular” sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags."

The paper shows that the tags users choose are not chaotic, but rather quickly converge to a common descriptive set of tags that is almost unchanging over time. Perhaps once the tags have stabilized, coherent URI-based identification schemes could emerge?

Nice paper, thanks. Categories / tags / subjects / topics / issues ... that's what I'm working with right now. p.s. sure would be nice if the email notification included the source URL. I'm far more likely to download the PDF when I see something like www2007.org/paper635.pdf

Open, distributed, social. * About The DiSo Project * Blog * Links * Chat About The DiSo Project Silo free living. Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides/legs/arms/spokes - pick your connection: Information, Identity, and Interaction. DiSo (dee * zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: "to build a social network with its skin inside out".

The confluence of computers, communications, and databases is quickly creating a distributed database where many applications require real-time access to both temporally accurate and multimedia data. This is particularly true in military and intelligence applications, but these required features are needed in many commercial applications as well. We are developing a distributed database, called BeeHive, which could offer features along different types of requirements: real-time, fault-tolerance, security, and quality-of service for audio and video. Support of these features and potential trade-offs between them could provide a significant improvement in performance and functionality over current distributed database and object management systems. In this paper, we present a high level design for BeeHive architecture and sketch the design of the BeeHive Object Model (BOM) which extends object-oriented data models by incorporating time and other features into objects, resulting in a highly reflective architecture.

It has been recognised that failures within an organisation can often be related to the over simplification of the belief structures that are used in decision making.2 Distributed cognition is a framework that can be used for analysing complex distributed settings to explain how the social activities within these impact the cognitive processes of the participants.� Rather than focussing on the mind, the material world is seen as being central.� It shows how important it is that participants in a setting can look at their own interpretations and discus these with others before deciding which actions to take.

The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) defines a communication protocol used to exchange biological annotations. It is motivated by the idea that such annotations should not be provided by single centralized databases, but should instead be spread over multiple sites. Data distribution, performed by DAS servers, is separated from visualization, which is done by DAS clients. DAS is a client-server system in which a single client integrates information from multiple servers. It allows a single machine to gather up sequence annotation information from multiple distant web sites, collate the information, and display it to the user in a single view. Little coordination is needed among the various information providers. DAS is heavily used in the genome bioinformatics community. Over the last years we have also seen growing acceptance in the protein sequence and structure communities.

X-Media addresses the issue of knowledge management in complex distributed environments. It will study, develop and implement large scale methodologies and techniques for knowledge management able to support sharing and reuse of knowledge that is distributed in different media (images, documents and data) and repositories (data bases, knowledge bases, document repositories, etc.). The project started in March 2006 and will last for 4 years. It has a budget topping Euro 13.6M, (9.9M from the EU). 15 partners are involved from UK, Germany, Italy, France, Slovenia, Greece and Norway.

Designing Information Technology to Support Distributed Cognition

ZooKeeper is a high-performance coordination service for distributed applications. It exposes common services - such as naming, configuration management, synchronization, and group services - in a simple interface so you don't have to write them from scratch. You can use it off-the-shelf to implement consensus, group management, leader election, and presence protocols. And you can build on it for your own, specific needs.

The project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a website. Distribution will also be possible via paper, CD, or DVD. Our goal initially is to focus on content development and Web distribution, and we will work with relevant authorities to facilitate dissemination by other means when bandwidth is unavailable or inadequate. The goal is to make textbooks available to the many who cannot afford them.

Bossa is an open-source software framework for distributed thinking - the use of volunteers on the Internet to perform tasks that use human cognition, knowledge, or intelligence.

DISTRIBUTED COGNITION AND COMPUTER SUPPORTED COLLABORATIVE DESIGN: THE ORGANISATION OF WORK IN CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING

Federating Distributed Social Data to Build an Interlinked Online Information Society

The aim of the EU FP 7 Large-Scale Integrating Project LarKC is to develop the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC, for short, pronounced "lark"), a platform for massive distributed incomplete reasoning that will remove the scalability barriers of currently existing reasoning systems for the Semantic Web.

SMOB is a distributed / decentralised microblogging system built on RDF and Semantic Web technologies, mainly SIOC and FOAF. Currently, we have simple prototypes of a publishing and an aggregating service, less than 100 lines of PHP code each. Code at http://code.google.com/p/smob/

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.

CK-12, a non-profit organization launched in 2006, aims to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide. Using an open-source, collaborative, and web-based compilation model that can be manifested as an adaptive textbook - termed the "FlexBook", CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational web texts.

This ethnographic study investigates how a project group deals with the contradiction between distributed knowledge in boundary-spanning collaborative processes and the expectation that software systems will provide unified, codified knowledge. Group and individual activities were observed over a period of 18 months, to examine the ways knowledge was presented, recognized, shared, or otherwise managed during joint design of business process and IT systems change. The study explores how knowledge and expertise were translated across organizational boundaries, and identifies four stages in the development of group understanding of how to manage sensemaking and expertise across knowledge boundaries: focus on defining shared goals; acknowledging and sharing tacit knowledge about organizational practice; identifying external influences; and explicit knowledge generation.

An individual may create or reinforce a relationship between two resources by applying a common tag or organizing them in a common folder. This has led to the exploration of techniques for building networks of resources, categories, and people using the social annotations. In order for these techniques to move from the lab to the real world, efficient building and maintenance of these potentially large networks remains a major obstacle. Methods for assembling and indexing these large networks will allow researchers to run more rigorous assessments of their proposed techniques. Toward this goal we explore an approach from the sparse matrix literature and apply it to our system, GiveALink.org. We also investigate distributing the assembly, allowing us to grow the network with the body of resources, annotations, and users.

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).

Our aim is to advance the state of the art in using ontologies for large-scale semantic applications in the distributed organizations. Particularly, we aim at improving the capability to handle multiple networked ontologies that exist in a particular context, are created collaboratively, and might be highly dynamic and constantly evolving.