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RPI's Tetherless World Constellation will address this emerging area of "Web Science," focusing on the World Wide Web and it's future use. Faculty in the constellation will explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, will enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and will develop new technologies and languages that expand the capabilities of the Web. We will use powerful scientific and mathematical techniques from many disciplines to explore the modeling of the Web from network- and information- centric views. Our goals will include making the next generation web natural to use while being responsive to the growing variety of policy and social needs, whether in the area of privacy, intellectual property, general compliance, or provenance. The Tetherless World Constellation will design new techniques to explore social, scientific, and legal impacts of the evolving technologies deployed on the Web.

Central to Web 2.0 is the requirement for interactive systems to enable the participation of users in production and social interaction. Consequently, in order to critically explore the Web 2.0 phenomenon it is important to explore the relationship of interactivity to social power. This study firstly characterises interactivity in these media using Barry's (2001) framework differentiating interactivity from disciplining technologies as defined by Foucault. Contrary to Barry's model though, the analysis goes on to explore how interactivity may indeed function as a disciplining technology within the framework of a neoliberal political economy.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative arises from a small but lively meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute (OSI) on December 1-2, 2001. The purpose of the meeting was to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet. The participants represented many points of view, many academic disciplines, and many nations, and had experience with many of the ongoing initiatives that make up the open access movement. In Budapest they explored how the separate initiatives could work together to achieve broader, deeper, and faster success. They explored the most effective and affordable strategies for serving the interests of research, researchers, and the institutions and societies that support research. Finally, they explored how OSI and other foundations could use their resources most productively to aid the transition to open access and to make open-access publishing economically self-sustaining. The result is the Budapest Open Access Initiative. It is at once a statement of principle, a statement of strategy, and a statement of commitment.

This is a resource page for CCL's Visual Explorer™ with descriptions of the tool and its multiple uses for creative conversations and dialogue. VE™ supports strategy making, visioning, culture transformation, creative problem solving, coaching, classroom facilitation, teambuilding, visual sensemaking, resolving complex challenges, and leadership development.

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.

VE can be used in a wide variety of ways depending on the context. Here are the five basic steps for using VE to facilitate a group conversation around a shared question. These steps can be altered or elaborated for particular situations as described in the VE Guidebook. 1. Frame 2. Browse 3. Reflect 4. Share 5. Extend

This article explores relationships between players and the owners of the massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) they inhabit. Much of the language around these large scale communities currently focuses on "management." Viewing these complex social systems as essentially mechanical in nature has led to a preoccupation with creating or retrofitting systems which can be constantly monitored, tuned, regulated, and controlled. Though the language often turns to things like "cheating," "griefing," and "disruption of the magic circle," the underlying anxiety about unruliness, transgressiveness, and the emergent nature of these spaces as sites of culture needs to be more fully addressed, as well as the early formulations of the "imagined player" that shape the design process. Players are central productive agents in game culture and more progressive models are needed for understanding and integrating their work in these spaces. Drawing on the long tradition of participatory design this piece explores some alternative frameworks for understanding the designer/player relationship are proposed.

While online spreadsheets like Google Docs make it very easy for anyone to embed tabular data in websites, let's explore some new alternatives that you may find more useful depending on the requirement.

Perhaps this is a meme worth exploring more generally but I thought others might be interested in my story, partly because it illustrates how funding drives scientists, and partly because it shows how the combination of opportunism and serendipity can make for successful bedfellows.

Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think," has been much celebrated as a central inspiration for the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Less attention, however, has been paid to Bush's motivation for imagining a new generation of information technologies; it was his hope that more powerful tools, by automating the routine aspects of information processing, would leave researchers and other professionals more time for creative thought. But now, more than sixty years later, it seems clear that the opposite has happened, that the use of the new technologies has contributed to an accelerated mode of working and living that leaves us less to think, not more. In this talk I will explore how this state of affairs has come about and what we can do about it.

The contention made in this article is that ontologies are pivotal to several seemingly disparate technical endeavours that are currently emergent and have had more or less publicity. These include Event Driven Architecture (EDA), Complex Event Processing (CEP), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Master Data Management (MDM), which are supported by specific ontological initiatives most notably the Semantic Web, which is further leveraged by Model Driven Architecture (MDA). Furthermore how these efforts are all dependent on the adherence to common standards. These endeavours, and their complementary interrelationships, and specifically their relationship to ontology, are explored in more detail below.

There is a growing community interest in applying Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies in health care and life sciences areas including the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG ; http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/) and Medicine 2.0 (http://www.medicine20congress.com/). This has motivated us to explore how to intersect these two sets of technologies in the context of the HCLS Knowledge Base (KB).

Businesses are moving beyond marketing in virtual worlds and are exploring other applications of virtual worlds (see a recent BusinessWeek article & slideshow). Enabling collaboration among remote workers is one such application (see our past posts and paper on this topic). A variety of virtual world options or platforms have been available for supporting remote work and these include Second Life, Qwaq, Forterra, and Tixeo. Last week I had the rare opportunity to see an emerging virtual world called Wonderland, the product of an open source project, Project Wonderland, sponsored by Sun Microsystems. During a conference call with our colleague Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems, Becky Jestice and I were lucky enough to get a tour of Wonderland. Nicole graciously spent over an hour to show us some of the impressive features of Wonderland. The tour was so impressive that I want to devote a post to some key aspects of Wonderland: * Virtual meeting participants can use voice to communicate with one another; * If necessary, participants can connect to a Wonderland meeting via telephone; * Private conversations between participants are possible in a virtual meeting; * Participants can share applications; and * Anyone can try out Wonderland (see instructions below).

Evri opens up a whole new way to explore connections - between people, products, places, and things on the web and in the news. see also http://www.evri.com/garden.html

DynaQ stands for 'Dynamic Queries for document based, personal information spaces'. The goal of the project is to conceptualise and to develop a prototypical inquiry system to explore the personal information space, that supports the user with the help of the searching paradigm orienteering. The document-based, personal information space of the user constitutes by all documents on his computer. Included are documents of several file formats (e.g. *.pdf), but also the users emails. Also included are all available meta informations and existing semantic informations according to the documents. Users that are not aware of the scientific context of the project can just think of DynaQ as an desktop search engine.

Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) makes meteorological data, forecast models, and analysis and visualization tools available to anyone who wants to interactively explore the weather as it evolves. The LEAD Portal brings together all the necessary resources at one convenient access point

Displays a status bar icon to indicate presence of Semantic Web (RDF) data in the web page. Click the icon to explore this information in more detail...

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.

The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data. Like the web of hypertext, the web of data is constructed with documents on the web. However, unlike the web of hypertext, where links are relationships anchors in hypertext documents written in HTML, for data they links between arbitrary things described by RDF,. The URIs identify any kind of object or concept. But for HTML or RDF, the same expectations apply to make the web grow: 1. Use URIs as names for things 2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names. 3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information. 4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

OntoMat-Annotizer is a user-friendly interactive webpage annotation tool. It supports the user with the task of creating and maintaining ontology-based OWL-markups i.e. creating of OWL-instances, attributes and relationships. It include an ontology browser for the exploration of the ontology and instances and a HTML browser that will display the annotated parts of the text. It is Java-based and provide a plugin interface for extensions. The intended user is the individual annotator i.e., people that want to enrich their web pages with OWL-meta data. Instead of manually annotating the page with a text editor, say, emacs, OntoMat allows the annotator to highlight relevant parts of the web page and create new instances via drag?n?drop interactions. It supports the meta-data creation phase of the lifecycle. It is planned that a future version will contain an information extraction plugin, that offers a wizard which suggest which parts of the text are relevant for annotation. That aspect will help to ease the time-consuming annotation task.