Group items tagged

Picturing to Learn (PtL) is founded on the following core premises: one From a student's perspective: undergraduate students can clarify their own understanding of scientific concepts and processes by creating drawings that explain these concepts to non-experts. two From a teacher's perspective: drawings can be useful as: * assessment tools, allowing instructors to identify students' scientific understanding and pinpoint their misconceptions * educational tools, to help inform instructors' lecture preparation

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.

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium of leading biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods allowing scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. Our visionis that all biomedical knowledge and data are disseminated on the Internet using principled ontologies, such that they are semantically interoperable and useful for improving biomedical science and clinical care. Our resources include the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library, the Open Biomedical Data (OBD) repositories, and tools for accessing and using this information in research. The Center collaborates with biomedical researchers conducting Driving Biological Projects to enable outside research and stimulate technology development in the Center. The Center undertakes outreach and educational activities (Biomedical Informatics Program) to train future researchers to use biomedical ontologies and related tools with the goal of enhancing scientific discovery.

Personal knowledge management is becoming one of the most critical skills that information workers like journalists, marketers and PR pros need to succeed today. Specifically, I am talking about the efficient collecting, processing and weeding of massive amounts of data. In this post I want to offer tips on how to take full advantage of tagging information in Gmail.

Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think," has been much celebrated as a central inspiration for the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Less attention, however, has been paid to Bush's motivation for imagining a new generation of information technologies; it was his hope that more powerful tools, by automating the routine aspects of information processing, would leave researchers and other professionals more time for creative thought. But now, more than sixty years later, it seems clear that the opposite has happened, that the use of the new technologies has contributed to an accelerated mode of working and living that leaves us less to think, not more. In this talk I will explore how this state of affairs has come about and what we can do about it.

So far, most investments in EI have been driven by a focus on an increase in efficiency and topdown change of business processes in relatively static value chains. Typical deployment of EI has been based on the idea of an enterprise-wide "big bang" transition to a new "best way of working", pre-conceived largely by a corporate elite of engineers and analysts. The resulting system and the related procedures were supposed to enforce this way of working and make sure that the enterprise would reap the benefits (of efficiency) for some time to come, by discouraging subsequent unofficial forms of smaller-scale and/or bottom-up change. This approach was very much enterprise centric and typically weak in accommodating subsequent change. It is however no longer adequate, because enterprises increasingly need to rely on bottom-up initiative, emergence and flexibility, in order to remain competitive. Due to fierce global competition, enterprises can no longer survive with a focus on efficiency and producing more of the same (for a lower price). Instead, enterprises need to concentrate on value innovation and producing more of not the same (with higher margins). To this end enterprises operate increasingly in dynamic value networks.Therefore EI should be geared towards leveraging creativity, collaboration and change in more dynamic networks to release its full potential as an instrument for value creation. A new objective for EI should be: To stimulate value creation based on innovation and co-creation in a context of networked enterprises that is very much defined bottom-up, by creative, committed workers.

The contention made in this article is that ontologies are pivotal to several seemingly disparate technical endeavours that are currently emergent and have had more or less publicity. These include Event Driven Architecture (EDA), Complex Event Processing (CEP), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Master Data Management (MDM), which are supported by specific ontological initiatives most notably the Semantic Web, which is further leveraged by Model Driven Architecture (MDA). Furthermore how these efforts are all dependent on the adherence to common standards. These endeavours, and their complementary interrelationships, and specifically their relationship to ontology, are explored in more detail below.

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.

Using the 1994, South Canyon fire in Colorado as a case study, this article suggests Taylor's (1993) concept of worldview functions as an important "frame" for organizational sensemaking (Weick, 1995a). Taylor argues that organizations use either an "activity" or "particle" orientation. An activity view focuses attention on organizational units while a particle view sees the organization from the point of view of the product or customer. Results from this study indicate that an organization's worldview functions as an overarching metaphor that influences sensemaking and decision-making processes, and that the worldview perspective in retrospective accounts may differ from that of the participants themselves.

The W3C OWL 2 Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a Semantic Web language designed to represent ontologies - information about how individuals are grouped and fit together in a particular domain. OWL can represent rich and complex information about classes of individuals and their properties. OWL is a logical language, where every construct has a well-defined meaning, meanings that fit together to support exact and useful representation of many different kinds of information. OWL groups information into ontologies in the form of documents that can be stored and transmitted across the World Wide Web in the same way that data and other kinds of information are and that can be completely and effectively processed by tools that extract the information implicit in an ontology.

In our work the traditional bipartite model of ontologies is extended with the social dimension, leading to a tripartite model of actors, concepts and instances.We demonstrate the application of this representation by showing how community-based semantics emerges from this model through a process of graph transformation. We illustrate ontology emergence by two case studies, an analysis of a large scale folksonomy system and a novel method for the extraction of community-based ontologies from Web pages.

Qwaq provides 3-D virtual collaboration solutions for enterprises. Qwaq Forums are virtual environments used to facilitate interactive online meetings, workflow, project and program management processes, real-time document editing, document sharing, and online training. Qwaq Forums are deployed as virtual workspaces for virtual offices, program management, virtual operations centers, facilitated meetings, and corporate training.

In a striking departure from traditional methods of teaching, a new way for students to gain course credits is emerging. The Eduzendium initiative was proposed by Dr. Sorin A. Matei (Purdue University). In collaboration with Dr. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and now Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium, and a group of Purdue graduate students, he has designed a set of template policies, rules and educational methods that allow incorporating wiki style collaboration in the educational process. The policies have been pretested at Purdue and will soon be released to the educational community through Eduzendium.

The crowdsourced feedback model provides a community setting for customers to share their ideas and expand on the ideas of other customers. The IdeaScale incentive and voting process is extremely important in harnessing this flow of customer ideas and making it an integral component of product innovation strategies.

The World Federation of UN Associations is an independent, non-governmental organization with Category One Consultative Status at the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and consultative or liaison links with many other UN organizations and agencies. The Millennium Project functions under the auspices of WFUNA. The Millennium Project of WFUNA is a global participatory futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities. The Millennium Project manages a coherent and cumulative process that collects and assesses judgements from its several hundred participants to produce the annual "State of the Future", "Futures Research Methodology" series, and special studies such as the State of the Future Index, Future Scenarios for Africa, Lessons of History, Environmental Security, Applications of Futures Research to Policy, and a 700+ annotated scenarios bibliography.

The semantic mapping of the English language is the key to making Natural Language Processing (NLP) effective. Cognition's unique Semantic Map, which it built over the past 24 years, is the most comprehensive and complete map of the English language available today. It can be used in support of the Semantic Web for semantic search, search tools, business analytics, machine translation, document search, context search, and much more.

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.

Unstructured Information Management applications are software systems that analyze large volumes of unstructured information in order to discover knowledge that is relevant to an end user. UIMA is a framework and SDK for developing such applications. An example UIM application might ingest plain text and identify entities, such as persons, places, organizations; or relations, such as works-for or located-at. UIMA enables such an application to be decomposed into components, for example "language identification" -> "language specific segmentation" -> "sentence boundary detection" -> "entity detection (person/place names etc.)". Each component must implement interfaces defined by the framework and must provide self-describing metadata via XML descriptor files. The framework manages these components and the data flow between them. Components are written in Java or C++; the data that flows between components is designed for efficient mapping between these languages. UIMA additionally provides capabilities to wrap components as network services, and can scale to very large volumes by replicating processing pipelines over a cluster of networked nodes.

"This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complimentary capabilities across social networks. The ASN has three main objectives: 1) To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries. 2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society. 3) To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance. In effect, the ASN proposes a form of "online citizenship" for the Information Age."

Way ahead of its time, and I believe Facebook's (and LinkedIn's, and Plaxo's, and...) successes largely substantiate the emphasis the authors place on the significance of rich support for social trust and identity mechanisms.

Action research is a reflective process of progressive problem solving led by individuals working with others in teams or as part of a "community of practice" to improve the way they address issues and solve problems. Action research can also be undertaken by larger organizations or institutions, assisted or guided by professional researchers, with the aim of improving their strategies, practices, and knowledge of the environments within which they practice.