Group items tagged

The temptation to interpret model noise as forecast information invades our living rooms every night. TV weather-forecast maps look so realistic it is hard not to over-interpret tiny details - to imagine that the band of rain passing over Oxfordshire at noon next Saturday requires postponing a barbecue. Rain may indeed be likely somewhere in the area sometime on Saturday, but the details we see on TV forecasts are noise from the models. I think we are having exactly the same problem with climate projections.

Group sensemaking strikes me as more like science, if it isn't 'meta-science'. In other words, we want to make sense we all agree on that isn't just another kind of ideology or dogma, but based on objective reality. Where science, or at least the reductive approach, aggregates facts and data, sensemaking, like integrative methods, puts the facts into context with a larger environment. Sensemaking, in my view, is about understanding reality sufficiently well that one feels comfortable making statements about the future. That is, not necessarily making predictions, but anticipating future possibilities based on understanding how the world works.

IBM® LanguageWare® is a set of run-time libraries and an easy-to-use Eclipse-based development environment for building custom text analyzers in various languages. Deployable in Apache UIMA, these analyzers can expose the information buried in text to any application. The Eclipse-based tools makes creating analyzers simple and fast, even for non-technical users. The tools make it easy to build dictionaries, ontologies, and rules for identifying key information, relationships and meaning.

Computational Collective Intelligence (CCI) is most often understood as an AI sub-field dealing with soft computing methods which enable making group decisions or processing knowledge among autonomous units acting in distributed environments. Web-based systems, social networks and multi-agent systems very often need these tools for working out consistent knowledge states, resolving conflicts and making decisions. The aim of this conference is to provide an internationally respected forum for scientific research in the computer-based methods of collective intelligence and their applications in (but not limited to) such fields as semantic web, social networks and multi-agent systems.

As the need for fresh water increases, growing populations across the globe will increasingly turn to groundwater to slake their thirst. But where will we find that water? UNESCO's World-wide Hydrogeological Mapping and Assessment Programme (WHYMAP) created this map, along with several others, to serve as a guide to the world's groundwater resources in aquifers and other groundwater environments.

The Earth System Grid (ESG) integrates supercomputers with large-scale data and analysis servers located at numerous national labs and research centers to create a powerful environment for next generation climate research. This portal is the primary point of entry into the ESG.

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.

Introducing Acre: Freebase's integrated app development and hosting environment

The Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Method (OOHDM) (and its successor, the Semantic Hypermedia Design Method, SHDM) allow the concise specification and implementation of hypermedia (web) applications. This is achieved based on various models describing information (conceptual), navigation and interface aspects of these applications, and the mapping of these models into running applications, in various environements.

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.

Lively, for all its promise appears to be the shortest-lived entry thus far in launched commercial virtual environments. If you dumb something down far enough, very few people will actually want to use it. We're not ragging on Lively here. Instead, we're aiming to learn from its principles and performance. Let's introduce a new principle called necessary complexity.

The Protégé Axiom Language (PAL) extends the Protégé-2000 knowledge modeling environment with support for writing and storing logical constraints and queries about frames in a knowledge base. More than just a language, PAL is a plugin toolset that comprises engines for checking constraints and running queries on knowledge bases, as well as a set of useful user interface components.

The SMW+ User Forum is an online community for users and developers of Semantic MediaWiki+ in a commercial or production environment with the purpose to improve and extend Semantic Media Wiki+. SMW+ Forum fuses the social networking aspect of Web 2.0 with semantic technologies.

Make a mashup of any website using RoboMaker's easy-to-use point and click visual development environment.

Everything has to do with everything else. Fenfire is a Free Software project developing a computing environment in which you can express these relationships and benefit from them.

Today I finally plugged-in the Yahoo Boss Mashup Framework into the Google App Engine environment. Google App Engine (GAE) provides a pretty sweet yet simple platform for executing Python applications on Google's infrastructure. The Boss Mashup Framework (BMF) provides Python API's for accessing Yahoo's Search API's as well remixing data a la SQL constructs. Running BMF on top of GAE is a seemingly natural progression, and quite arguably the easiest way to deploy Boss - so I spent today porting BMF to the GAE platform. See also http://bossy.appspot.com/qa?query=who+is+brad+pitt+married+to

Tagging refers to the process by which users assign terms meaningful to them to a resource in the online environment. The rise of social bookmarking Web sites have skyrocketed tagging systems into the mainstream.

welcome to gnowsis, the Semantic Desktop environment published by the Knowledge Management Lab of the DFKI. Gnowsis is a reference implementation of parts of the Nepomuk Semantic Desktop framework. The Nepomuk project provides a standardized, conceptual framework for Semantic Desktops.Gnowsis can be used in research projects or by interested individuals to benefit from Semantic Web technologies.

Bookmark for You : web-based personal bookmarking environment

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.