Group items tagged

Virtual worlds are governed not only by the source code used to develop the world, but also by civil code documents that establish a governance structure that constrains the interactions of users of the virtual world and regulates relationships among stakeholders of the virtual world. While previous research has examined specific aspects of these documents, this paper analyzes these governing documents as a totality. By examining the totality of and the interplay among the governing documents of a number of established social worlds, this paper seeks to discover insights that can prove valuable both for scholarly understanding of social world governance and for the various stakeholders of social worlds. Following this analysis, the paper offers a set of policy recommendations and considerations to facilitate the development of governing documents that more democratically and equally serve the needs and rights of all stakeholders in virtual worlds. The paper concludes that virtual worlds and their governing documents are boundary objects with agency, in that they are the result of interactions among stakeholder groups and in turn reshape the relationships among those stakeholder groups.

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.

"The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for “popular” sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags."

The paper shows that the tags users choose are not chaotic, but rather quickly converge to a common descriptive set of tags that is almost unchanging over time. Perhaps once the tags have stabilized, coherent URI-based identification schemes could emerge?

Nice paper, thanks. Categories / tags / subjects / topics / issues ... that's what I'm working with right now. p.s. sure would be nice if the email notification included the source URL. I'm far more likely to download the PDF when I see something like www2007.org/paper635.pdf

(from slashdot) "PGP and GnuPG have been utilizing webs of trust to establish authenticity without a centralized certificate authority for a while. Now, a new tool seeks to extend the concept to include scientific publications. The idea is that researchers can review and sign each others' works with varying levels of endorsement, and display the signed reviews with their vitas. This creates a decentralized social network linking researchers, papers, and reviews that, in theory, represents the scientific community. It meshes seamlessly with traditional publication venues. One can publish a paper with an established journal, and still try to get more out of the paper by asking colleagues to review the work. The hope is that this will eventually provide an alternative method for researchers to establish credibility."

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.

In the process of knowledge discovery, workers examine available information in order to make sense of it. By sensemaking, we mean interacting with and operating on the information with a variety of information processing mechanisms [3,18]. Previously, we introduced a concept that uses the spreadsheet metaphor with cells containing visualizations of complex data. In this paper, we extend and apply a cognitive model called "visual sensemaking " to the Visualization Spreadsheet. We use the task of making sense of a large Web site as a concrete example through out the paper for demonstration. Using a variety of visualization techniques, such as the Disk Tree and Cone Tree, we show that the interactions of the Visualization Spreadsheet help users draw conclusions from the overall relationships of the entire information set.

This paper not only shares the designing and implementation challenges faced by the KnowGenesis team, but also presents the approach used to match the user requirements with the Library design. Based on the lessons learned during the process, the paper also presents specific set of guidelines and recommends methodologies that can provide critical assistance for developing and managing medium and large-scale repositories.

"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

VoCamp is a series (hopefully) of informal events where people can spend some dedicated time creating lightweight vocabularies/ontologies for the Semantic Web/Web of Data. The emphasis of the event(s) is not on creating the perfect ontology in a particular domain, but on creating vocabs that are good enough for people to start using for publishing data on the Web. The intention is to follow a "paper first, laptops second" format, where the modelling is done initially on paper and only later committed to code. The VoCamp idea is heavily influenced by BarCamp, although the VoCamp should only have presentations where strictly necessary.

Accepted Papers

Individual-intelligence research, from a neurological perspective, describes the cortex as a medium for performing conceptual abstraction and specification. This idea has been used to explain how motor-cortex regions responsible for different behavioral modalities such as writing and speaking can express the same general concept represented in the cortex. For example, the concept of a dog, abstractly represented in the higher-layers of the cortex, can either be written or spoken about depending on the context. Abstract models in the higher-layers propagate activation patterns down the cortical hierarchy to the desired region of the motor-cortex for worldly implementation. In this paper, the individual-intelligence framework is expanded to incorporate collective-intelligence within a hyper-cortical construct. This hyper-cortex is a multi-layered network used to represent abstract collective concepts. This collective-intelligence framework plays an important role in understanding how collective-intelligence systems can be engineered to handle collective problem-solving. To conclude the paper, five common problems in the scientific community are solved using an artificial hyper-cortex generated from digital-library metadata.

The scholarly literature forms a vast network of academic papers connected to one another by citations in bibliographies and footnotes [1]. The structure of this network reflects millions of decisions by individual scholars about which papers are important and relevant to their own work. Therefore within the structure of this network is a wealth of information about the relative influence of individual journals, and also about the patterns of relations among academic disciplines. Our aim at eigenfactor.org is develop ways of extracting this information.

This paper addresses the issue of text normalization, an important yet often overlooked problem in natural language processing. By text normalization, we mean converting 'informally inputted' text into the canonical form, by eliminating 'noises' in the text and detecting paragraph and sentence boundaries in the text.

This paper is based on a study of personal experience narratives told by witnesses of the September 11th attacks in calls to C-SPAN. Drawing on research on narratives of ordinary and extraordinary experiences and witnessing, the author offers a framework for analyzing the structure and function of eyewitness accounts. Analysis focuses on methods callers use to show and tell the audience where they were, what they were doing, and what they were thinking at the time of the attacks. Verbal, visual, and structural features of these narratives are highlighted, with particular attention given to orientation and ideation components of the narratives. The design of these components and their location within the callers' stories are shown to construct the narratives as eyewitness accounts, position the callers and audience members as witnesses, and engage all in a therapeutic sensemaking process.

Rapid advances in information technologies continue to drive a flood of data and analysis techniques in ecological and environmental sciences. Using these resources more effectively and taking advantage of associated cross-disciplinary research opportunities poses a major challenge to both scientists and information technologists. These challenges are now being addressed in projects that apply knowledge representation and Semantic Web technologies to problems in discovering and integrating ecological data and data analysis techniques. In this paper, we present an overview of the major ontological components of our project, SEEK ("Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge"). We describe the concepts and models that are represented in each, and present a discussion of potential applications of these ontologies on the Semantic Web

This paper presents two design patterns for the hypermedia domain: `Navigational Contexts' and `Information on Demand'. They are applied in two different aspects of hypermedia applications design: the design of healthy navigational structures and the design of understandable and usable hypermedia interfaces, respectively. These two patterns are part of an effort for developing a Pattern Language for that domain.

This paper introduces the concept of phatic technology and analyses its role in modern society. A phatic technology is a technology that serves to establish, develop, and maintain human relationships. The primary function of this type of technology is to create a social context: its users form a social community with a collection of interactional goals, which may be relevant to all human interchanges in that social context.

Tagging is a process that associates keywords with specific content. We did a rough analysis in our paper (reference below), and computed how often a keyword used by a user to tag an URL appears in the page content. We found that, on average, the chance that a tag comes from the content is 49%. This process produced a conservative estimate of tag occurrence in content, since we did not account for situations such as content changes for a given URL (e.g., dynamic content), typos (e.g., "Ajaz" instead of "Ajax"), abbreviations (e.g., "ad" instead of "advertisement"), compound tags (e.g., "SearchEngine"), and tags written in languages other than that of the content.

Businesses are moving beyond marketing in virtual worlds and are exploring other applications of virtual worlds (see a recent BusinessWeek article & slideshow). Enabling collaboration among remote workers is one such application (see our past posts and paper on this topic). A variety of virtual world options or platforms have been available for supporting remote work and these include Second Life, Qwaq, Forterra, and Tixeo. Last week I had the rare opportunity to see an emerging virtual world called Wonderland, the product of an open source project, Project Wonderland, sponsored by Sun Microsystems. During a conference call with our colleague Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems, Becky Jestice and I were lucky enough to get a tour of Wonderland. Nicole graciously spent over an hour to show us some of the impressive features of Wonderland. The tour was so impressive that I want to devote a post to some key aspects of Wonderland: * Virtual meeting participants can use voice to communicate with one another; * If necessary, participants can connect to a Wonderland meeting via telephone; * Private conversations between participants are possible in a virtual meeting; * Participants can share applications; and * Anyone can try out Wonderland (see instructions below).

Mahout's goal is to build scalable, Apache licensed machine learning libraries. Initially, we are interested in building out the ten machine learning libraries detailed in http://www.cs.stanford.edu/people/ang//papers/nips06-mapreducemulticore.pdf using Hadoop. While these algorithms are our initial focus, we welcome contributions of other machine learning approaches.