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CollabRx applies collaborative science to slash the time, cost and risk of therapy development. CollabRx builds and operates Virtual Biotechs for foundations and patients who urgently seek cures for their diseases. Working with these foundations and research institutions, CollabRx * builds teams of top researchers * facilitates planning of a strategic road map * brings best practices to therapy development * manages the execution of the plan The CollabRx research platform connects researchers to one another and to a network of scientific services, providing unprecedented opportunities for knowledge sharing and economies of scale.

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

OntoMat-Annotizer is a user-friendly interactive webpage annotation tool. It supports the user with the task of creating and maintaining ontology-based OWL-markups i.e. creating of OWL-instances, attributes and relationships. It include an ontology browser for the exploration of the ontology and instances and a HTML browser that will display the annotated parts of the text. It is Java-based and provide a plugin interface for extensions. The intended user is the individual annotator i.e., people that want to enrich their web pages with OWL-meta data. Instead of manually annotating the page with a text editor, say, emacs, OntoMat allows the annotator to highlight relevant parts of the web page and create new instances via drag?n?drop interactions. It supports the meta-data creation phase of the lifecycle. It is planned that a future version will contain an information extraction plugin, that offers a wizard which suggest which parts of the text are relevant for annotation. That aspect will help to ease the time-consuming annotation task.

Scratch is a simple, easy-to-learn programming language designed at MIT's Media Lab that lets anyone create and share video games and animated stories. Introduced just over a year ago, it has already attracted a wide following--particularly among kids aged 8 to 15--and a variety of uses that its creators never imagined. Now, Scratch users from around the world are gathering for the first of what is planned as an annual conference to discuss the software and its uses and to share ideas.

"We don't think we have the right kind of tools to help decision makers plan for the future," said Jack Fellows, the vice president for corporate affairs of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a consortium of 71 universities. Comment: this is an opportunity for improved sensemaking tools.

Making sense of the world is a ubiquitous activity, taking place around the margins of what we know. At work, your boss says, "Can you give a presentation next week on how wireless will affect our business?" Or perhaps, you join a new committee, and wonder "Who are these people? Who is in charge? What is our mission? What are we really going to do?" Maybe you move to a new neighborhood, and you try to make sense of the streets, schools, parks, shopping, and neighbors. Or you say to yourself, "I really need to get an updated cellphone-what has been happening with the current set of features, costs, plans and new gadgets?" Sensemaking can be a core professional task in itself, as for researchers, designers, or intelligence analysts. It arises when we change our place in the world or when the world changes around us. It arises when new problems, opportunities, or tasks present themselves, or when old ones resurface. It involves finding the important structure in a seemingly unstructured situation. It is an activity with cognitive and social dimensions, and has informational, communicational, and computational aspects.

PowerMeeting is a Web-based synchronous groupware framework. It also refers to a research prototype that demonstrates the kind of groupware built with the framework. Such groupware allow participants to plan, perform, and coordinate their synchronous collaboration.

Welcome to the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory. It's all free, as in both "freedom of speech" and "almost totally free beer." We invite you to build on what we've started to create more free value. The Social Media Classroom (we'll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes-integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. The Collaboratory (or Colab), is what we call just the web service part of it. Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMB materials freely, and we host your Colab communities if you don't want to install your own.

Database systems are notorious for being hard to use. It is even more difficult to integrate data from multiple sources and collaborate on large data sets with people outside your organization. Without an easy way to offer all the collaborators access to the same server, data sets get copied, emailed and ftp'd--resulting in multiple versions that get out of sync very quickly. Today we're introducing Google Fusion Tables on Labs, an experimental system for data management in the cloud. It draws on the expertise of folks within Google Research who have been studying collaboration, data integration, and user requirements from a variety of domains. Fusion Tables is not a traditional database system focusing on complicated SQL queries and transaction processing. Instead, the focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing. We plan to iteratively add new features to the systems as we get feedback from users.

A system and method for organizing knowledge in such a way that humans can find knowledge, learn from it, and add to it as needed is disclosed. The exemplary system has four components: a knowledge base, a learning model and an associated tutor, a set of user tools, and a backend system. The invention also preferably comprises a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow these components to work together, so that other people can create their own versions of each of the components. In the knowledge web a community of people with knowledge to share put knowledge in the database using the user tools. The knowledge may be in the form of documents or other media, or it may be a descriptor of a book or other physical source. Each piece of knowledge is associated with various types of meta-knowledge about what the knowledge is for, what form it is in, and so on. The information in the knowledge base can be created specifically for the knowledge base, but it can also consist of information converted from other sources, such as scientific documents, books, journals, Web pages, film, video, audio files, and course notes. The initial content of the knowledge web comprises existing curriculum materials, books and journals, and those explanatory pages that are already on the World Wide Web. These existing materials already contain most of the information, examples, problems, illustrations, even lesson plans, that the knowledge web needs. The knowledge base thus represents the core content (online documents or references to online or offline documents); the meta-knowledge that was created at the time of entry; and a number of user annotations and document metadata that accumulate over time about the usefulness of the knowledge, additional user opinions, certifications of its veracity and usefulness, commentary, and connections between various units of knowledge.

, the government should be a rule-setting referee to encourage the development of an open software platform on which innovators could write electronic health record applications.