Group items tagged

This project will 1. Provide useful findings about * why and how people use electronic information * how system design features affect how well systems meet the needs of users * how system design features affect the actual use of systems. 2. Apply diverse user-research interpretations to the inquiry, in order to * focus on both commonalities and diversities in findings and interpretations * develop boundary-bridging concepts that enable more effective application and collaboration in both system design and user research.

The exponential growth of diverse types of biological data presents the research community with an unprecedented challenge and opportunity. The challenge is to stay afloat in the flood of biological data, keeping it as accessible, up-to-date, and integrated as possible. The opportunity is to cultivate new models of data curation and exchange that take advantage of direct participation by a greater portion of the community.

BioForge was created to encourage online collaborations between diverse research groups under BiOS-based licensing schemes. CAMBIA believes that enabling technologies in the life sciences need to remain available to anyone to improve or use in new innovations, both commercial and non-commercial.

NKOS is devoted to the discussion of the functional and data model for enabling knowledge organization systems (KOS), such as classification systems, thesauri, gazetteers, and ontologies, as networked interactive information services to support the description and retrieval of diverse information resources through the Internet.

A new Species-Environment Relations (SER) modeling approach depicts key ecological functions (KEFs) and key environmental correlates (KECs) of terrestrial plant and animal species, as part of a regional assessment of the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project. Assessing KEFs of species is one facet of understanding management effects and ecological integrity of ecosystems. A relational database was developed that ties species' KEFs with their key habitats, KECs, and distribution maps. In this way, potential management activities can be evaluated for how they influence: habitats and environmental correlates; associated plant, invertebrate, and vertebrate species; the array of ecological functions associated with those species; geographic functional ecology; and potential effects on ecosystem productivity, diversity, and sustainability.

Biophysical economics is characterized by a wide range of analysts from diverse fields who use basic ecological and thermodynamic principles to analyze the economic process. The history of biophysical thought is traced from the 18th-century Physiocrats to current empirical research, with emphasis on those individuals who contributed to the development of biophysical economic theory. Attention is also given to a critique of the neoclassical theory of natural resources from a biophysical perspective, and how recent empirical biophysical research highlights areas of neoclassical theory which could be improved by a more realistic and systematic treatment of natural resources.

TAPIR started up as a research project in June 2001. In 2002 the project is sponsored by NORDINFO and the Research Council of The Danish Ministry of Culture. TAPIR aims at investigating the potentials of applying the diversity of cognitive representations pointing to scientific full-text documents following the principle of poly-representation. Poly-representation (or multi evidence) implies to utilize the cognitively different overlapping interpretations, also over time, made by different actors participating in interactive IR. Such cognitive overlaps derive, for instance, from the authors own perceptions of their work (titles, full-text terms), from human indexing (e.g. descriptors), or from citations given to the work by other authors. The assumption is that the more cognitively different the representations simultaneously pointing to a document are, the higher is the probability that the document is relevant to a given set of criteria.

Welcome to Open Context, a free, open access resource for the electronic publication of primary field research from archaeology and related disciplines. Open Context provides an integrated framework for users to search, explore, analyze, compare and tag items from diverse field projects and collections.

BiOS is a response to inequities in food security, nutrition, health, natural resource management and energy. Our goal is to democratise problem solving to enable diverse solutions through decentralised innovation. Open Source We promote an innovation paradigm that focuses on a distinction between the tools of innovation and the products. We promote licenses that couple rights with responsibilities to foster efficient development, improvement, sharing and use of technology. Open Science We create and share new biological enabling technologies and platforms that can be used to deliver innovations. We develop new licensing and distributive collaboration mechanisms that have resonance with the open source software movement, but are tailored for biological innovation. Open Society We enhance the transparency, accessibility and capability to use all the tools of science, whether patented, open access or public domain.

Knowledge has generally existed within strict disciplinary boundaries, creating barriers against the free flow of information. The boundaries between disciplines reduces the ability of researchers to fully assess the work that has been accomplished and can lead to redundancy and to situations in which scholars are "reinventing the wheel" when they could instead be advancing knowledge into new frontiers. Is there a solution? There is if we take the time to create a cross-disciplinary understanding of knowledge representation and organization. The solution would require a comprehensive, interdisciplinary effort from scholars in diverse disciplines including communications, sociology, anthropology, information science, biology, computer science and philosophy. The Structure for Encompassing Extensible Knowledge (SEEK) is a model I propose to explore the possibilities for knowledge integration theoretically, technologically and from the perspective of human management.

"In today's world, adaptability, creativity, and innovativeness appear to be preconditions for organizations and individuals to thrive. These qualities don't fit well with the industrial business model; they aren't amenable to monitoring and pricing. We need people who aren't focused only on payoffs but do the best they can to learn, adapt, improve, and deliver results for the organization. Being internally motivated to bring these qualities to bear in a world where insight, creativity, and innovation can come from anyone, anywhere, at any time is more important than being able to calculate the costs, benefits, risks, and rewards of well-understood actions in well-specified contexts. Alongside creativity, drive, flexibility, and diversity, we must include social conscience and authentic humanity when trying to design cooperative systems."

As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.