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Federating Distributed Social Data to Build an Interlinked Online Information Society

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.

Among the activities that people participate in on the Social Web are argumentative discussions and decision making. This paper analyzes a series of use-cases (from the perspective of social media sites) that share the presence of such argumentative discussions and where the structure of online discussions can be represented in SIOC. Our goal is to externalize implicit argumentation structures hidden in the usergenerated content. For capturing it and making it explicit, we propose a SIOC Argumentation ontology module as a formal representation.

"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

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.

a fishnet is a dynamic and heterarchic structure, described with the metaphor of a fisher's net, in a real organization? How to find knowledge and abilities which are fundamental in constructing such a structure?

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

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.

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 talk is an essay on design. In the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne invented a new genre of writing he called an essai, which in modern French translates to attempt. Since then, the best essays have been explorations by an author of a topic or question, perhaps or probably without a definitive conclusion. Certainly in a good essay there can be no theme or conclusion stated at the outset, repeated several times, and supported throughout, because a true essay takes the reader on the journey of discovery that the author has or is experiencing. This essay-on design-is based on my reflections on work I've done over the past 3 years. Some of that work has been on looking at what constitutes an "ultra large scale software system" and some on researching how to keep a software system operating in the face of internal and external errors and unexpected conditions.

Multi-ontology sense making a new simplicity in decision making

THE NEED FOR A NEW, BIOPHYSICAL-BASED PARADIGM IN ECONOMICS FOR THE SECOND HALF OF THE AGE OF OIL

Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning* HORST W. J. RITTEL Professor of the Science of Design, University of California, Berkeley MELVIN M. WEBBER Professor of City Planning, University of California, Berkeley

In 1981, based on a decade of Club's [Club of Rome] research, Peccei wrote: "The future will either be the inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future" (Peccei, 1981).

Multi-ontology sense making a new simplicity in decision making

But invariably, simple models and a lot of data trump more elaborate models based on less data."

Search and get life science PDFs right away at pubget.com

Narrative techniques both provide a complementary form of what we will call pre-hypothesis research, but further that the use of narrative research techniques produces, through a single intervention, quantitative conclusions supported by narrative context, fragmented knowledge databases, and a mechanism for measuring impact and more complex issues such as mapping ideation cultures.

Snowden again... Looks like a fairly interesting book is on its way, as well...?

"This research is grounded in the anthropological understanding that each individual is a unique 'energy source' (Bateson 1972) responsible for acting upon their socially and culturally inflected interpretations in an equally particular way. These indexes capture the actual moments of interaction, of the coming together of individuals in conversational and behavioural exchange (Rapport and Overing 2000). The indexes in this research focus on the socio-cultural field (rather than physical, archaeological or linguistic sub-disciplines), which has been a key element of the discipline since its establishment in the 19th century. Above all, this report highlights how this Cultural Mapping project will offer unparalleled global access into anthropology's own minimal definition: that is, a means to see the Other as Self, and the Self as Other."

Interesting work, based in anthropology

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.