Group items tagged

understanding this content and making decisions based on it (especially in mission-critical situations) is not just a simple matter of consuming information. To effectively "make sense" of large, heterogeneous, and often unstructured content collections requires: - efficient, accurate, and context-based ways of extracting, filtering, and summarizing information; - better and more meaningful ways of organizing, visualizing, and interacting with the information; - faster, more objective methods for investigating hypotheses, detecting trends or patterns across multiple sources, and otherwise analyzing or interpreting information.

See also: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008Apr/0005.html NaturalOWL is an open-source natural language generation engine written in Java. It produces descriptions of individuals (e.g., items for sale, museum exhibits) and classes (e.g., types of exhibits) in English and Greek from OWL DL ontologies. The ontologies must have been annotated in RDF with linguistic and user modeling resources. We demonstrate a plug-in for Protege that can be used to produce these resources and to generate texts by invoking NaturalOWL. We also demonstrate how NaturalOWL can be used by robotic avatars in Second Life to describe the exhibits of virtual museums. NaturalOWL demonstrates the benefits of Natural Language Generation (NLG) on the Semantic Web. Organizations that need to publish information about objects, such as exhibits or products, can publish OWL ontologies instead of texts. NLG engines, embedded in browsers or Web servers, can then render the ontologies in multiple natural languages, whereas computer programs may access the ontologies directly.

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.

The purpose of this study was to improve the quality of students' online discussion of assigned readings in an online course. To improve the focus, depth, and connectedness of online discussion, the first author designed a text-focused Wiki that simultaneously displayed the assigned reading and students' comments side by side in adjacent columns. In the text-focused Wiki, students were able to read the assigned text in the left column and type their comments or questions in the right column adjacent to the sentence or passage that sparked their interest. In post-participation surveys, data were gathered about students' experiences in the text-focused Wiki and prior experiences in threaded discussion forums. Students reported more focus, depth, flow, idea generation, and enjoyment in the text-focused Wiki.

An individual may create or reinforce a relationship between two resources by applying a common tag or organizing them in a common folder. This has led to the exploration of techniques for building networks of resources, categories, and people using the social annotations. In order for these techniques to move from the lab to the real world, efficient building and maintenance of these potentially large networks remains a major obstacle. Methods for assembling and indexing these large networks will allow researchers to run more rigorous assessments of their proposed techniques. Toward this goal we explore an approach from the sparse matrix literature and apply it to our system, GiveALink.org. We also investigate distributing the assembly, allowing us to grow the network with the body of resources, annotations, and users.

Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. In this paper we take the position that the concept of sensemaking fills important gaps in organizational theory. The seemingly transient nature of sensemaking belies its central role in the determination of human behavior, whether people are acting in formal organizations or elsewhere. Sensemaking is central because it is the primary site where meanings materialize that inform and constrain identity and action. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the concept of sensemaking. We do so by pinpointing central features of sensemaking, some of which have been explicated but neglected, some of which have been assumed but not made explicit, some of which have changed in significance over time, and some of which have been missing all along or have gone awry. We sense joint enthusiasm to restate sensemaking in ways that make it more future oriented, more action oriented, more macro, more closely tied to organizing, meshed more boldly with identity, more visible, more behaviorally defined, less sedentary and backward looking, more infused with emotion and with issues of sensegiving and persuasion. These key enhancements provide a foundation upon which to build future studies that can strengthen the sensemaking perspective.

We want to make all the world's content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais. Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application.

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 .

"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

Sphinx is a full-text search engine, distributed under GPL version 2. Commercial license is also available for embedded use. Generally, it's a standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant fulltext search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages. Currently built-in data sources support fetching data either via direct connection to MySQL or PostgreSQL, or using XML pipe mechanism (a pipe to indexer in special XML-based format which Sphinx recognizes).

From the start of the 21st century, a new form of employment has emerged in developing countries. It employs hundreds of thousands of people and earns hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Yet it has been almost invisible to both the academic and development communities. It is the phenomenon of "gold farming": the production of virtual goods and services for players of online games. China is the employment epicentre but the sub-sector has spread to other Asian nations and will spread further as online games-playing grows. It is the first example of a likely future development trend in online employment. It is also one of a few emerging examples in developing countries of "liminal ICT work"; jobs associated with digital technologies that are around or just below the threshold of what is deemed socially-acceptable and/or formally-legal.

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.

Group sensemaking strikes me as more like science, if it isn't 'meta-science'. In other words, we want to make sense we all agree on that isn't just another kind of ideology or dogma, but based on objective reality. Where science, or at least the reductive approach, aggregates facts and data, sensemaking, like integrative methods, puts the facts into context with a larger environment. Sensemaking, in my view, is about understanding reality sufficiently well that one feels comfortable making statements about the future. That is, not necessarily making predictions, but anticipating future possibilities based on understanding how the world works.

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.

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.

As a conversational process, the World Café is an innovative yet simple methodology for hosting conversations about questions that matter. These conversations link and build on each other as people move between groups, cross-pollinate ideas, and discover new insights into the questions or issues that are most important in their life, work, or community. As a process, the World Café can evoke and make visible the collective intelligence of any group, thus increasing people's capacity for effective action in pursuit of common aims.

MyWebDesktop is a collaboration and communication tool, designed to be as "generic" and easy to use as a telephone and email. Connect your desktop to any other desktop (call) and collaborate with a person or a group of people by sharing files, bookmarks and notes and communicate via messaging and messageboard. Disconnect (hang up) when you have finished collaborating with that person or group of people. Of course this works two-way i.e. you call and you receive incoming calls.

"The semantic web proposes to inject machine meaningful data into the existing human language oriented web. As part of this effort, on the semantic web, URIs are used to identify entities. But there is currently no standard way to specify what it is that any given URI is to identify, or to whom, or when. Recent work in linguistics offers ideas for a solution to this lack. It focuses on the pragmatics of actual language use among ensembles of people. Also, the World Wide Web provides a set of technologies, in the form of socially constructed web sites, that could be employed to provide a solution. In this paper, I suggest how such socially constructed web sites could be used to address the problem of establishing common ground among a community of machines of the referent of a URI used on the semantic web. The result is a proposal to automate social meaning by creating societies of machines that share knowledge representations identified by URIs."

What tagging does point to convincingly is the social aspect of naming. In a given natural language, many sorts of identifiers, such as common words, are socially centralized. Other sorts of identifiers, such as proper names, are socially decentralized, varying from local context to local context. Black has noticed a correspondence between this socially grounded identification process and the use of socially constructed Web sites.

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you're looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool's features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.