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A course in information studies was partly held in the virtual world of Second Life. Second Life was used as a platform to deliver lectures and as a place for organizing group assignments and having discussions. Students' opinions about Second Life were studied and compared to their opinions about more traditional methods in education. The results show a lower threshold for participation in lectures. According to the students, Second Life should not replace face-to-face education, but it could serve as an excellent addition to other more traditional methods and platforms used in education. The students also considered that lectures held in Second Life were much more "fun" than those using other methods. This particular aspect, and its effect on learning outcomes, requires further research. This research demonstrates that Second Life has potential as a learning environment in distance education.

Swirrl is a wiki-like application that was built using Semantic Web technologies and launched as a beta last week.

This exploratory study examines the relationships between article and Talk page contributions and their effect on article quality in Wikipedia. The sample consisted of three articles each from the hard sciences, soft sciences, and humanities, whose talk page and article edit histories were observed over a five-month period and coded for contribution types. Richness and neutrality criteria were then used to assess article quality and results were compared within and among subject disciplines. This study reveals variability in article quality across subject disciplines and a relationship between Talk page discussion and article editing activity. Overall, results indicate the initial article creator's critical role in providing a framework for future editing as well as a remarkable stability in article content over time.

Many RDF toolkits provide SPARQL/Update functionality and move from simple query operations to more powerful data manipulation. SPARQLScript goes another step further and enables or simplifies the implementation of * semantic Mashups, * custom, portable rule and inference scripts using a SPARQL-based syntax * Output templates for RDF data and SPARQL query results * RDF/SPARQL-driven Yahoo! Pipes-like systems

The FlyWeb Project is implementing a proof-of-concept data web to integrate research image data from the FlyTED Project with related data from the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project, FlyBase, FlyAtlas and other sources.

Mycologist Paul Stamets lists 6 ways the mycelium fungus can help save the universe: cleaning polluted soil, making insecticides, treating smallpox and even flu

As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.

The goal of WikiScience is to create a global community of researchers on wiki communities, with a special focus on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation projects.

an international team of researchers, headed by Timothy Wright, a professor at New Mexico State University and a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, collaborated to study the early evolution of the parrots.

Immersive realism may be the "Holy Grail" of game development, but should it be? In this opinion piece, author and designer Lewis Pulsipher argues that most players don't want "role-fulfillment," in support of the idea that strong mechanics -- and even player design awareness -- is a more suitable goal.

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.

To manage information quality (IQ) effectively, one needs to know how IQ changes over time, what causes it to change, and whether the changes can be predicted. In this paper we analyze the structure of IQ change in Wikipedia, an open, collaborative general encyclopedia. We found several patterns in Wikipedia's IQ process trajectories and linked them to article types. Drawing on the results of our analysis, we develop a general model of IQ change that can be used for reasoning about IQ dynamics in many different settings, including traditional databases and information repositories.

WebWise 2.0: The Power of Community: Selected papers from the Ninth Annual WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums

This article explores relationships between players and the owners of the massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) they inhabit. Much of the language around these large scale communities currently focuses on "management." Viewing these complex social systems as essentially mechanical in nature has led to a preoccupation with creating or retrofitting systems which can be constantly monitored, tuned, regulated, and controlled. Though the language often turns to things like "cheating," "griefing," and "disruption of the magic circle," the underlying anxiety about unruliness, transgressiveness, and the emergent nature of these spaces as sites of culture needs to be more fully addressed, as well as the early formulations of the "imagined player" that shape the design process. Players are central productive agents in game culture and more progressive models are needed for understanding and integrating their work in these spaces. Drawing on the long tradition of participatory design this piece explores some alternative frameworks for understanding the designer/player relationship are proposed.

The present research analyses the 'social visualization' tool Sense.us, a commercial interactive Web application in which U.S. Census data are visualized. Sense.us was developed as a tool for social data exploration and interaction, in which it would be worthwhile to pay attention to the socio-cultural values that have driven the collection and categorization of the underlying U.S. Census datasets. It is argued that closer attention to value driven U.S. Census statistics would greatly enhance the social appeal of Sense.us, and would be a logical next step in the development of online social visualization tools. In order to allow for explicit socio-cultural values of statistics in online visualizations, three strategies are offered: pro-active annotation; more attention to visual aesthetics; and, a tighter integration of user profiles and represented data.

This paper surveys information architecture in the context of digital libraries. Key concepts are defined as well as common attributes of information architectures in general. Communications standards - including hybrid TCP/IP-OSI, CORBA, and Web services - are explored, as well as the history of information architecture and related models. A number of digital library projects are analyzed with a focus on their distinct architectures. The key role of information architecture in the design and development of the twenty-first century digital library is detailed throughout.

Collaborative Protégé is an extension of the existing Protégé system that supports collaborative ontology editing as well as annotation of both ontology components and ontology changes.