There is a revolution happening on the Internet that is alive and building momentum with each passing tag. With the advent of social software and Web 2.0, we usher in a new era of Internet order. One in which the user has the power to effect their own online experience, and contribute to others'. Today, users are adding metadata and using tags to organize their own digital collections, categorize the content of others and build bottom-up classification systems. The wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence are doing what heretofore only expert catalogers, information architects and website authors have done. They are categorizing and organizing the Internet and determining the user experience, and it's working. No longer do the experts have the monopoly on this domain; in this new age users have been empowered to determine their own cataloging needs. Metadata is now in the realm of the Everyman.
WikiProteins enables community annotation in a Wiki-based system. Extracts of major data sources have been fused into an editable environment that links out to the original sources. Data from community edits create automatic copies of the original data. Semantic technology captures concepts co-occurring in one sentence and thus potential factual statements. In addition, indirect associations between concepts have been calculated. We call on a 'million minds' to annotate a 'million concepts' and to collect facts from the literature with the reward of collaborative knowledge discovery. The system is available for beta testing at http://www.wikiprofessional.org
Mutual respect, trust, and recognition that cultural differences exist, matter, and must be explicitly dealt with are requirements of successful international projects. In summary, I would suggest these principles for the success of international collaboration:
* Two (or more) teams share the same goal and seek the overall optimal result, not the local optimum.
* Each team should clearly recognize and value the other party's different culture and traditions.
* The single most important word in international projects is trust. Team members earn trust by being sincere, honest, and open-minded.
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.
SWOOP is a tool for creating, editing, and debugging OWL ontologies. It was produced by the MIND lab at University of Maryland, College Park, but is now an open source project with contributers from all over.
"The value of any individual piece of knowledge is about the value of any individual piece of lego," Wilbanks said in a keynote address to the Open Access and Research Conference held in Brisbane last week.
"It's not that much until you put it together with other legos."
He says the ability to connect knowledge brings scientific revolutions. For example Watson and Crick's breakthrough on the structure of DNA involved them reading all the scientific papers on nucleotide bonding and encoding it in the form of a physical model, says Wilbanks.
But this kind of "human scale" analysis is no longer feasible in an age when automated laboratory processes generate vast amounts of information faster than the human mind can process it.
"For example, we have 45,000 papers about one protein or one gene," says Wilbanks.
He says a scientist might once have analysed the impact of one drug on one gene, but now pipetting robots are capable of analysing 25,000 genes at a time.
"Most of the research says the smartest of us can handle five or six independent variables at once - not 25,000," he says
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.
You'd think being seriously wounded on the battlefield would be the most painful thing a soldier could go through, but the recovery from burns can take months of agonizing physical therapy that prolongs the suffering. In some cases, healing can be more painful than the original trauma. What if you could take patients away from their immediate surroundings when cleaning their burns or stretching the skin during physical therapy? A virtual reality game created to help patients deal with pain hopes to do just that.
What if you could contribute to a computational (Map-Reduce) job by simply pointing your browser to a URL? Surely your social network wouldn't mind opening a background tab to help you crunch a dataset or two!
Instead of focusing on high-throughput proprietary protocols and high-efficiency data planes to distribute and deliver the data, we could use battle tested solutions: HTTP and your favorite browser.
An unbook is more like software:
1. An unbook is never finished, but rather continually updated, based on feedback from users andtheir evolving needs.
2. An unbook is released in versions. As in open source software, version 1.0 of an unbook is a significant milestone, indicating that it is stable and reliable enough for use by the general public. The significance of a new release is indicated by the size of the gap: For example, the difference between 1.1 and 1.1.3 is minor, while the difference between 1.1 and 2.0 is major.
3. An unbook is supported by a community of users who share their experiences and best practices with each other, and help each other troubleshoot problems encountered in their practice areas. An unbook's community is a very real part of the unbook's development team.
An unbook is mindware: software for the mind.
10 Pillars of Knowledge is a systematic map of human knowledge. It presents, at a glance, the structure of knowledge and the meaningful relations among the main fields. Human knowledge is composed of 10 pillars: Foundations, Supernatural, Matter and Energy, Space and Earth, Non-Human Organisms, Body and Mind, Society, Thought and Art, Technology, History
While Montague isn't ready to share the results - he's still gathering data - what he's found so far is, he says, "stunning, shocking even…. For me the lesson has been that people act very badly in groups. And now we can see why."
people don't necessarily want to solve puzzles on their own. They often enjoy attacking them in online collaborative groups that include dozens, sometimes millions, of fans. These groups are collectively far smarter than their individual members, and regular puzzles don't stand a chance against that many brains.
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.
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