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TechCrunch50 is broadcasting the conference live with their partner UStream which means our fans and supporters can watch our presentation live this morning during the 10:30 Pacific time session on gaming. We've included the live broadcast of the event here. Wish us luck and we look forward to welcoming you into the Akoha community of players soon. Updated 14:39. Our presentation went really well. If you missed it, you can watch the recorded version below.

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 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.

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.

Cloudera presents the MapReduce bull case

The exponential growth of diverse types of biological data presents the research community with an unprecedented challenge and opportunity. The challenge is to stay afloat in the flood of biological data, keeping it as accessible, up-to-date, and integrated as possible. The opportunity is to cultivate new models of data curation and exchange that take advantage of direct participation by a greater portion of the community.

Here, we present a computational model that learns structures of many different forms and that discovers which form is best for a given dataset. The model makes probabilistic inferences over a space of graph grammars representing trees, linear orders, multidimensional spaces, rings, dominance hierarchies, cliques, and other forms and successfully discovers the underlying structure of a variety of physical, biological, and social domains. Our approach brings structure learning methods closer to human abilities and may lead to a deeper computational understanding of cognitive development.

OpenSocial's API reference describes a number of classes ('Person', 'Name', 'Email', 'Phone', 'Url', 'Organization', 'Address', 'Message', 'Activity', 'MediaItem', 'Activity', …), each of which has various properties whose values are either strings, references to instances of other classes, or enumerations. I'd like to make them usable beyond the confines of OpenSocial, so I'm making an RDF/OWL version. OpenSocial's schema is an attempt to provide an overarching model for much of present-day mainstream 'social networking' functionality, including dating, jobs etc. Such a broad effort is inevitably somewhat open-ended, and so may benefit from being linked to data from other complementary sources.

To begin using SemantiFind, you must go to www.google.com - the service won't work from iGoogle or your Google search box in your browser. After you enter your search term in the box as usual, you then are prompted to indicate the precise meaning of your term before starting your query. This is done through the use of a drop-down box where specific terms and their definitions display. For example, if you were searching for "Georgia," you would be presented with the option to select either the U.S. state or the former soviet republic.

Over the past two decades, more people have been lifted out of poverty in Asia than in any other region at any other time in history. In the next decade, there is the chance to fulfil the potential of this success story - the world is presented with an historic opportunity to end poverty in Asia .

This present report summarizes the insights and recommendations of a symposium on sensemaking, sponsored by the Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence, and held in Vienna, Virginia, on 23-25 October 2001.

Despite significant advancement in technology and tools, building ontologies, annotating data, and aligning multiple ontologies remain tasks that highly depend on human intelligence, both as a source of domain expertise and for making conceptual choices. This means that people need to contribute time, and sometimes other resources, to this endeavor. As a novel solution, we have proposed to masquerade core tasks of weaving the Semantic Web behind on-line, multi-player game scenarios, in order to create proper incentives for humans to contribute. Doing so, we adopt the findings from the already famous "games with a purpose" by von Ahn, who has shown that presenting a useful task, which requires human intelligence, in the form of an on-line game can motivate a large amount of people to work heavily on this task, and this for free.

The mistake is that semantic search engines present us with Google-like search box and allow us to enter free form queries. So we type the things that we are used to asking - primitive queries. It never occurs to us to type in What actor starred in both Pulp Fiction and Saturday Night Fever? or What two US Senators received donations from a foreign entity? We type simple questions, but this is not where the power of semantic search lies. Lets look at the spectrum of semantic technologies from Google, to SearchMonkey, to Powerset, and Freebase to understand what is going on.

This poster presents ongoing efforts to enrich the RDF-based semantic Web with the tools of the Historical Event Markup and Linking Project (Heml). An experimental RDF vocabulary for Heml data is illustrated, as well as its use in storing and querying encoded historical events. Finally, the practical use of Heml-RDF is illustrated with a toolkit for the Piggy Bank semantic browser plugin.

As my thesis work, I created and evaluated a programming system for middle school girls called Storytelling Alice that presents programming as a means to the end of storytelling. Storytelling Alice includes high-level animations that enable users to program social interactions, a gallery of characters and scenery designed to spark story ideas, and a story-based tutorial.

This ethnographic study investigates how a project group deals with the contradiction between distributed knowledge in boundary-spanning collaborative processes and the expectation that software systems will provide unified, codified knowledge. Group and individual activities were observed over a period of 18 months, to examine the ways knowledge was presented, recognized, shared, or otherwise managed during joint design of business process and IT systems change. The study explores how knowledge and expertise were translated across organizational boundaries, and identifies four stages in the development of group understanding of how to manage sensemaking and expertise across knowledge boundaries: focus on defining shared goals; acknowledging and sharing tacit knowledge about organizational practice; identifying external influences; and explicit knowledge generation.

OntoWiki facilitates the visual presentation of a knowledge base as an information map, with different views on instance data. It enables intuitive authoring of semantic content, with an inline editing mode for editing RDF content, similar to WYSIWIG for text documents.

All conferences and research events have much informal related content spread around the Internet, including abstracts, papers, presentations and audio/visual material. Locating this content can be difficult and time-consuming. Using semantic web tools, IUGO is investigating how to organise and provide access to this valuable information.

E15 is an experimental architecture that places the power of presentation of web content into the hands of those that use it. Based on a dynamic, interactive OpenGL-based scripting engine, E15 exposes an entirely new face to web content, freely modifiable by each individual user.