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17 November 2008 - The international open standards consortium, OASIS, has formed a new group to standardize a Web services interface specification that will enable greater interoperability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. The new OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Technical Committee will advance an open standard that uses Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable information to be shared across Internet protocols in vendor-neutral formats, among document systems, publishers and repositories, within and between companies.

OYSTER stands for Open sYSTem Entity Resolution, a project to build a configurable, open-source entity resolution engine.

The "Open Stack" refers to a set of technologies that work together to make it easier for web developers and users to manage access to user data across the Web.

This document is intended to initiate a conversation that will bring together the emerging cloud computing community (both cloud users and cloud providers) around a core set of principles. We believe that these core principles are rooted in the belief that cloud computing should be as open as all other IT technologies.

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium of leading biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods allowing scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. Our visionis that all biomedical knowledge and data are disseminated on the Internet using principled ontologies, such that they are semantically interoperable and useful for improving biomedical science and clinical care. Our resources include the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library, the Open Biomedical Data (OBD) repositories, and tools for accessing and using this information in research. The Center collaborates with biomedical researchers conducting Driving Biological Projects to enable outside research and stimulate technology development in the Center. The Center undertakes outreach and educational activities (Biomedical Informatics Program) to train future researchers to use biomedical ontologies and related tools with the goal of enhancing scientific discovery.

s Richard MacManus recently predicted, in 2008 we'll witness the rise of semantic web services. From the native support for Microformats in Firefox 3, to the New York Times' utilization of rich headers metadata, to this week's release of the Social Graph API by Google, semantics are starting to slip onto the web. The impact is being felt because large companies are really starting to focus on structured information. In the same vein, last week Reuters - an international business and financial news giant - launched an API called Open Calais. The API does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events. This technology is the next generation of the Clear Forest offering, which Reuters acquired last year. We have profiled Clear Forest on ReadWriteWeb and in this post we will look at what Reuters opened up and why.

A small, digital book startup thinks it has a solution to the age-old student lament: overpriced textbooks that have little value when the course is over. The answer? Make them open source -- and give them away.

The Biomedical Grid Terminology (BiomedGT) is an open, collaboratively developed terminology for translational research. BiomedGT builds on the strengths of the NCI Thesaurus, including concept orientation, description logic, and public accessibility. While the current terminology has been seeded with NCI Thesaurus content, it is being restructured to facilitate open content development. The goal is to evolve BiomedGT into a set of federated sub-terminologies, with content maintained by experts in the relevant research communities.

Panda, an open source project, will let any site owner willing to do a little coding and integration work to allow user video uploads and playback. Think YouTube in a box. The software itself is free and will run on Amazon Web Services EC2, S3 and SimpleDB. You'll have to pay for the Amazon services, but this is a nice step forward from a variety of existing paid services out there like Zencoder, SesameVault and Hey!Watch. Panda handles all aspects of uploading, transcoding and streaming, handing things off to a Flash player like JW FLV Player by default.

CKAN is the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, a registry of open knowledge packages and projects (and a few closed ones). CKAN is the place to search for open knowledge resources as well as register your own.

Open Knowledge Foundation Blog

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.

"Cobalt" is an open source virtual world browser and construction toolkit application being developed at Duke University. Cobalt will make it possible for people to easily create, publish, access, and participate in a network of linked virtual worlds. Currently in pre-alpha and built using the Croquet open source software platform, Cobalt uses peer-based messaging to eliminate the need for virtual world servers and makes it very simple to create and share secure virtual worlds that run on all major software operating systems.

The Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive. Its goal is to create an online catalog that contains one web page for every book ever published. To do this, it accepts data from a variety of sources: libraries, publishers, book-sellers, and individuals.

"Social media affect the way organizations do business and communicate externally and internally. There are no longer clear boundaries of inside and outside organization life, and we need to explore how new social media can bring value for businesses in new ways. 'Value' in a strong economic sense is challenged by social media as a door opener for influence that the organizations should take seriously. Can social media increase 'value', as in strengthened brand and reputation based on the market's influence and trust, and in the end bring economic benefit for the business and organization? The virtual market isn't a huge collection of passive consumers; it is represented by networks of people having meaningful dialogues and interaction with both each other and the businesses as such, and represents new ways of market power. Social media tools open up for rethinking value in new innovative ways - and it is interesting to examine whether different organizational cultures will make different valuable outcomes, values in social, reputational, knowledgeable and networked capital senses."

Social media in a business context, as viewed through the eyes of an anthropologist. Lots of great references, but some in Norwegian, unfortunately.

I have the pleasure to announce that the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) has been born. (1YGF) Formally established in Trento, Italy in April 2009, after an open meeting at the FOIS 2008 conference, IAOA is a non-profit, open association with the purpose of promoting interdisciplinary research and international collaboration at the intersection of philosophical ontology, linguistics, logic, cognitive science, and computer science, as well as in the applications of ontological analysis to conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering, knowledge management, information systems development, library and information science, scientific research and semantic technologies in general.

Yahoo! GeoPlanet helps bridge the gap between the real and virtual worlds by providing an open, permanent, and intelligent infrastructure for geo-referencing data on the Internet. This page provides open access to the underlying data under a Creative Commons Attribution license so that you can incorporate WOEIDs and the GeoPlanet hierarchy into your own applications.

This {DATA(BASE)-NAME} is made available under the Open Database License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/

OpenMark is a computer-assisted assessment (CAA) system that has its foundations in computer-assisted learning. It was developed by The Open University, where it has been used by thousands of students, and is now released as open source software under the GNU General Public License

OpenEphyra is an open framework for question answering (QA). It retrieves answers to natural language questions from the Web and other sources. Visit http://www.ephyra.info/ for more details and information on joining this open research initiative.