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On the occasion of the celebration of the International Year of Planet Earth in (2008), the Department of Geography of the University of the Aegean in Lesvos, Greece, is organizing the international conference "Studying, Modeling and Sense Making of Planet Earth". The UNESCO Natural Sciences Sector has granted support to the conference.

Natural languages are easy to learn by infants, they can express any thought that any adult might ever conceive, and they accommodate the limitations of human breathing rates and short-term memory. The first property implies a finite vocabulary, the second implies infinite extensibility, and the third implies a small upper bound on the length of phrases. Together, they imply that most words in a natural language will have an open-ended number of senses - ambiguity is inevitable.To achieve a comparable level of flexibility with formal ontologies, this paper proposes an organization with a dynamically evolving collection of formal theories, systematic mappings to formal concept types and informal lexicons of natural language terms, and a modularity that allows independent distributed development and extension of all resources, formal and informal.

The aims of clinical and translational research are to achieve a better understanding of the pathogenesis of human disease in order to develop effective diagnostic, therapeutic and prevention strategies. Biomedical informatics can play an important role in supporting this research by facilitating the management, integration, analysis and exchange of data derived from and related to the research problems being studied. A key aspect of this support is to bring clarity, rigor and formalism to the representation of 1. disease initiation, progression, pathogenesis, signs, symptoms, assessments, clinical and laboratory findings, disease diagnosis, treatment, treatment response and outcome, and 2. the interrelations between these distinct entities both in patient management and in clinical research, thus allowing the data to be more readily retrievable and shareable, and more able to serve in the support of algorithmic reasoning.

This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web's topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.

This article describes the motivation for and development of a project I have called PepysMap. PepysMap was inspired by the excellent 'blog of the diary of Samuel Pepys run by Phil Gyford 1. Phil posts diary entries day by day (currently for the year 1662). Each blog post contains the text of the diary entry hyperlinked to pages containing detail of people, places and cultural artifacts referenced from the text. The goal of PepysMap is to shadow the development of the Pepys blog by creating a topic map for each diary entry, showing the relationships between people, places and cultural artifacts.

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.

SenseBot (www.sensebot.net) represents a new type of Search Engine that delivers a summary in response to your search query instead of a collection of links to Web pages. SenseBot parses top results returned by a major Web search engine (e.g., Google) and prepares a text summary of them. The summary serves as a digest on the topic of your query, blending together the most significant and relevant aspects of the search results. The summary itself becomes the main result of your search.

MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) provides a Semantic Web framework to publish semantically-annotated content from free-tagging. While tags are widely used in Web 2.0 services, their lack of machine-understandable meaning can be a problem for information retrieval, especially when people use tags that can have different meanings depending on the context. MOAT aims to solve this by providing a way for users to define meaning(s) of their tag(s) using URIs of Semantic Web resources (such as URIs from dbpedia, geonames … or any knowledge base), and then annotate content with those URIs rather than free-text tags, leveraging content into Semantic Web, by linking data together. Moreover, tag meanings can be shared between people, providing an architecture of participation to define and exchange potential meanings of tags within a community of users. To achieve this goal, MOAT relies on an architecture that can be deployed for any organisation or community and that involves a lightweight ontology, a MOAT server, and some third-party clients .

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.

Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically-but... let's not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).

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.

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.

IkeWiki is a new kind of Wiki (a Semantic Wiki ) developed by SalzburgResearch that allows users to annotate pages and links between pages with semantic annotations. Such annotations are useful because they give machines a certain amount of "understanding" of the content that goes beyond merely displaying the page. This information can then e.g. be used for context-specific presentation of pages, advanced querying, consistency verification or drawing conclusions. Currently, IkeWiki can make use of some of the knowledge represented in RDFS and OWL schemas to display enhanced navigation tools. Furthermore, we implemented a sample "biology ontology" that automatically displays a taxonomy box for biological objects. Although IkeWiki looks and behaves like Wikipedia/MediaWiki in many aspects, it is a complete rewrite, and the system design significantly differs from other Wikis. IkeWiki makes full use of Semantic Web technologies like RDF(S) and OWL using the Jena RDF store, and is implemented as an AJAX-based Rich Internet Application, based on the Dojo Toolkit

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.

I am pleased to announce the release of Issue II of Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development. Our current editorial board of 32 undergraduate and graduate students worked with this issue's 23 authors to present to you an inspiring collection of written experiences and novel ideas of individuals passionate for the advancement of sustainable development.

Semantic Cloud is the API that powers semantic search engine SenseBot and contextual linking tool for bloggers LinkSensor. The API supports SOAP and REST protocols (HTTP GET). The idea is to empower semantic startups or any ventures that are looking to utilize an affordable high-quality semantic solution to build their applications. Semantic API features include: * extraction of semantic concepts from a page or document; * creating a "semantic cloud" of concepts describing a group of documents; * generating a multi-document summary of a set of pages; * generating an essay on a topic based on a set of documents. Multiple parameters allow the client to control the type and format of results.

Despite significant growth in the number of research papers available through open access, principally through author self-archiving in institutional archives, it is estimated that only c. 20% of the number of papers published annually are open access. It is up to the authors of papers to change this. Why might open access be of benefit to authors? One universally important factor for all authors is impact, typically measured by the number of times a paper is cited (some older studies have estimated monetary returns to authors from article publication via the role citations play in determining salaries). Recent studies have begun to show that open access increases impact. More studies and more substantial investigations are needed to confirm the effect, although a simple example demonstrates the effect.

tagCare lets you to maintain all your tags jointly in one place, which is especially useful if you normally use several of these different platforms. Many users apply a variety of different tags within different platforms - and finally get lost among them. For example, it is hard to keep track of consistent spelling variants (e.g. not using "science_fiction" in one case and "scienceFiction" in the other) or of preferred terms (e.g. not using "bike" in one case and "bicycle" in the other). Some documents may be tagged with the general term "dog", others more specifically with "greyhound" or "border_collie". tagCare will help you to apply some structure to your tagging vocabulary so that you will more easily navigate through vocabulary choices and use tags more consistently. In tagCare, a user can assemble all tags which he has used within different systems and may then create his own vocabulary hierarchy, synonym collections and cross-references to related terms to establish some lightweight form of controlled vocabulary. This process is also called "tag gardening". Edited and structured tags will then be used to browse document collections in other platforms and to directly tag documents out of tagCare. tagCare is still under development, a first demo version will be available soon and more features will then be added step by step. tagCare will first support Flickr, Bibsonomy and del.icio.us.

In our work the traditional bipartite model of ontologies is extended with the social dimension, leading to a tripartite model of actors, concepts and instances.We demonstrate the application of this representation by showing how community-based semantics emerges from this model through a process of graph transformation. We illustrate ontology emergence by two case studies, an analysis of a large scale folksonomy system and a novel method for the extraction of community-based ontologies from Web pages.