Group items tagged

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data - think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.

This poster presents ongoing efforts to enrich the RDF-based semantic Web with the tools of the Historical Event Markup and Linking Project (Heml). An experimental RDF vocabulary for Heml data is illustrated, as well as its use in storing and querying encoded historical events. Finally, the practical use of Heml-RDF is illustrated with a toolkit for the Piggy Bank semantic browser plugin.

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

More than 40 years ago the fragmentation of scientific knowledge was a problem actively discussed but without much visible progress toward a solution; perhaps people then had the consummate wisdom to know that no problem is so big that you can't run away from it.

Using stories to trigger conversations and intepretations of behaviours is powerful.

Social capital is the invisible stock of connections between people that makes collaboration possible. It basically measures trust and how people really care for one another. When members of a group know each other very well and share the same values, social capital is high. When they don't and have no shared awareness of the situation facing the group, the same words can mean very different things to them, and the trust level is low. Social capital and culture go hand in hand.

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.

People in organizations actively construct the environment that they attend

Global (e.g. organization-wide) patterns emerge from everyday 'local' (i.e. one-to-one or small-group) conversations. The more that people (in interaction) make sense of events and take action in particular ways, the more likely they are to make similar sense and take similar actions in the future. That is, from an informal coalitions perspective, these patterns are not formed by managerial dictat or design but by the nature of the everyday sensemaking that has gone before.

"This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complimentary capabilities across social networks. The ASN has three main objectives: 1) To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries. 2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society. 3) To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance. In effect, the ASN proposes a form of "online citizenship" for the Information Age."

Way ahead of its time, and I believe Facebook's (and LinkedIn's, and Plaxo's, and...) successes largely substantiate the emphasis the authors place on the significance of rich support for social trust and identity mechanisms.

If companies cannot develop a culture of knowledge sharing and innovation, it's primarily because they are having a hard time measuring the benefits. All metrics of intangibles -and KM in particular- are shaky, and the most promising ones, based on network analysis (VNA) still have a long way to go before they become generally accepted practices. In the meantime, organizing a knowledge market might be the best way to go. Let's imagine what it would look like… First, a separate organization for shared knowledge services would have to be set up, if it doesn't exist already. For lack of a better phrase, let's cal it the corporate university. The problem is that corporate universities, when they exist, are focused on executive programs, which is a very small part of the problem.

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.

How storytelling communicates complex ideas In this group of pages, some of the underlying mechanisms of storytelling and its relationships to knowledge and knowledge management are revealed: Narrative vs abstract thinking : Jerome Bruner Communications as media : the conventional view of Roman Jakobsen Communications the interactive view : Walter Ong Communications as social flow : David Bohm Stories and archetypes : Carl Jung Engineering vs ecological viewpoints : John Seely Brown Storytelling and the literature of persuasion : Homo vendens Storytelling and genuine persuasion : Storytelling and seduction : Jean Baudrillard Storytelling and openness : de Bono Why isn't storytelling taken seriously? Who's to blame? Why does science despise storytelling? Storytelling and zen: Eastern concepts of knowledge Storytelling and post-modernism: Jean-François Lyotard

Highlight & save the best parts of the internet, with a virtual highlighter. Use it, share it and since i-lighter is web based, never lose it!

In this paper, we challenge the universality of three basic assumptions prevalent in organizational decision support and strategy: assumptions of order, of rational choice, and of intent. We describe the Cynefin framework, a sense-making device we have developed to help people make sense of the complexities made visible by the relaxation of these assumptions. The Cynefin framework is derived from several years of action research into the use of narrative and complexity theory in organizational knowledge exchange, decision-making, strategy, and policy-making. The framework is explained, its conceptual underpinnings are outlined, and its use in group sense-making and discourse is described. Finally, the consequences of relaxing the three basic assumptions, using the Cynefin framework as a mechanism, are considered.

One of the most surprising discoveries of modern physics is that objects aren't as separate as they may seem. When you drill down into the core of even the most solid-looking material, separateness dissolves. All that remains, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, are relationships extending curiously throughout space and time.

I've been running Simpy for almost 4 years now. Every once in a while I get the "Why should I use Simpy?", "Why is Simpy better than, say, del.icio.us?" This post answers those questions in the form of "Why I use Simpy" answer. This are my personal reasons for using Simpy, but you can also read other people's opinions. I also encourage you to add your reasons in the comments, so I can add your reasons to this list.

Felix is a community effort to implement the OSGi R4 Service Platform, which includes the OSGi framework and standard services, as well as providing and supporting other interesting OSGi-related technologies. The ultimate goal is to provide a completely compliant implementation of the OSGi framework and standard services and to support a community around this technology. Felix currently implements a large portion of the OSGi release 4 specification, but additional work is necessary for full compliance. Despite this fact, the OSGi framework functionality provided by Felix is very stable.

Yesterday, together with my colleague Ricardo Sueiras of PwC UK, we had a demo of Connectbeam the entreprise social bookmarking appliance. Connectbeam is an enterprise social networking tool using shared bookmarks and tags as a way to connect people. Basically it connects people who use the same content, on the grounds that it is likely that they have similar activities or interests, and will benefit from knowing each other.

KML is a file format used to display geographic data in an Earth browser such as Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Maps for mobile. KML uses a tag-based structure with nested elements and attributes and is based on the XML standard. All tags are case-sensitive and must be appear exactly as they are listed in the KML Reference. The Reference indicates which tags are optional. Within a given element, tags must appear in the order shown in the Reference.