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BioForge was created to encourage online collaborations between diverse research groups under BiOS-based licensing schemes. CAMBIA believes that enabling technologies in the life sciences need to remain available to anyone to improve or use in new innovations, both commercial and non-commercial.

The Semantic Web is necessary, but not sufficient to provide better technological support for online communities. Web services cannot be described independently of how they are used, because communities of practice use services in novel, unexpected ways. Although semantics are very important to create more 'intelligent' web services, what has been lacking so far is some formal notion of context of use. As Piers Young summarizes it, "that's where the problem of effectiveness starts getting addressed." Contextual elements like the community of use, its objectives and communicative interactions are thus important starting points for conceptualizing the pragmatic layer.

Free online toolkit that makes it easy to work in groups

Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, ASU. Interactive online civics curriculum, free to all users

Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)-the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references-and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and-on many major research and library sites-find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one's personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).

Web 2.0 has brought many wonderful innovations and ideas to the Internet. We can no longer imagine the web without a social dimension, and we can no longer imagine an online world that is read-only - it is now a read/write web full of user-generated content. But there is another fairly recent innovation, which might have just as profound implications. We're speaking of the contextual user interface.

Zenbe is free email that works with the email you already use. Zenbe offers many features, including email, online calendar, lists, mobile sync, file sharing, team collaboration. It even works with Facebook and Twitter.

Grockit is about questioning together. To this end, we are developing an online learning game where people can teach each other. Our organization is about the space where learning and technology meet. By combining our years of experience as teachers and developers, we are creating a place where learners can meet other learners. You can read more about our thoughts on learning and technology in our blog. You can also learn more about how we live and work at Grockit.

For the past few months I've been an active member of Twine.com; a beta semantic web app riddled with AI to help us organize, share and discover information. The beta is still under heavy construction, but at this point in time, I've migrated entirely from Del.icio.us, personal wikis and similar online services and over to Twine.

Ned.com is a global, all-volunteer, member-governed, online social network (in combination with real-world locations) that is made up of social entrepreneurs, activists, artists, social purpose enterprises, grassroots nonprofit, non-governmental, and community-based organizations, and is collaborating and taking action locally, nationally & globally, in order to make the world a better place.

The full text of The Future of Reputation is now available online for free. Click on the links below to download PDFs of each chapter. The front matter to the book is at the beginning of each chapter.

People are changing the way that they consume online information, as well as their expectations about its delivery. The social nature of the Web brings with it an expectation of interaction with information and modern Web design is reflecting that. There are now alternate forms of navigation including the ability to browse by user, tag clouds, tabbed navigation etc. Advances in technology along with these shifts in user expectations are affecting the way that information is laid out on a webpage. Today's websites are aiming for intuitive and usable interfaces which are continuously evolving in response to user needs. Website designers are approaching information design differently and designing simple, interactive websites which incorporate advancements in Web interface design, current Web philosophies, and user needs. Information design for the New Web is simple, it is social, and it embraces alternate forms of navigation.

Croquet is a powerful open source software technology that, in the form of the Croquet Software Developer's Kit (Croquet SDK), can be used by experienced software developers to create and deploy deeply collaborative multi-user online vitual world applications on and across multiple operating systems and devices. Derived from Squeak, the Croquet system features a peer-based messaging protocol that dramatically reduces the need for server infrastructures to support virtual world deployment and makes it easy for software developers to create deeply collaborative applications. Cobalt is a National Science Foundation-sponsored effort to develop an open source virtual world browser and authoring toolkit application based on the Croquet technology.

MindCanvas is a research service to help companies gather insights about customers' thoughts & feelings. We use Game-like Elicitation Methods (GEMs) to let online users participate in answering the complex questions that you face in designing a product or service.

Every hour, HealthMap, an infectious disease-tracking Web site, culls through news Web sites, public health list servs, the World Health Organization's online pages, and other Web sites in six different languages to pinpoint outbreaks of disease that real-world doctors can then act on.

Six weeks ago, the Gonzo Scientist challenged researchers around the world to interpret their Ph.D. research in dance form, film the dance, and share it with the world on YouTube (Science, 10 October, p. 186). By the 11 p.m. deadline this past Sunday, 36 dances--including solo ballet and circus spectacle--had been submitted online.

Recently the town of Heerlen in the Netherlands repurposed an old abandoned coal mine into a brilliant source of geothermal energy. The project takes advantage of flooded underground mine shafts, using their thermal energy to power a large-scale district heating system. Dubbed the Minewater Project, the new system recently went online and provides 350 homes and businesses in the town with hot water and heating in the winter and cool water in the summer.

Welcome to DeepDebate! We are passionate about ideas and are exploring new ways to improve online conversations. In order to do this, we've built a framework which makes it easier for a very large number of people to create a structured conversation.

A Digital Village is a space where a community expresses their identity though ICT and Digital Media. This may be from an artistic, heritage, or economic perspective or a mixture of all three.This can be done through poetry, digital stories, community newspapers online, image collections (old and new), audio (Internet radio, oral history), animations, video, and text. To engage in the activities the participants need to learn new skills and so the Digital Village also becomes a learning community.

Journal of Web Semantic Preprint Server: online papers