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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.

Open, distributed, social. * About The DiSo Project * Blog * Links * Chat About The DiSo Project Silo free living. Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides/legs/arms/spokes - pick your connection: Information, Identity, and Interaction. DiSo (dee * zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: "to build a social network with its skin inside out".

The project KiWi is concerned with knowledge management in Semantic Wikis and funded by the European Commission under the Project Number 211932 in the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). KiWi's objective is to investigate how knowledge management in highly dynamic environments can be supported using Semantic Wiki technologies, and how Semantic Wikis can be improved to satisfy the requirements of knowledge management. For this purpose, KiWi will * implement an advanced knowledge management system based on the Semantic Wiki IkeWiki and extend it by improved, rule-based reasoning support, information extraction, personalisation, and advanced visualisations and editors * verify the system on two use cases in the areas of project knowledge management and software knowledge management, with flexible workflow models and specific support for the respective application areas.

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.

The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists and nature enthusiasts from around the world. On more than 10,000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history (phylogeny). Each page contains information about a particular group, e.g., salamanders, segmented worms, phlox flowers, tyrannosaurs, euglenids, Heliconius butterflies, club fungi, or the vampire squid. ToL pages are linked one to another hierarchically, in the form of the evolutionary tree of life. Starting with the root of all Life on Earth and moving out along diverging branches to individual species, the structure of the ToL project thus illustrates the genetic connections between all living things.

Businesses are moving beyond marketing in virtual worlds and are exploring other applications of virtual worlds (see a recent BusinessWeek article & slideshow). Enabling collaboration among remote workers is one such application (see our past posts and paper on this topic). A variety of virtual world options or platforms have been available for supporting remote work and these include Second Life, Qwaq, Forterra, and Tixeo. Last week I had the rare opportunity to see an emerging virtual world called Wonderland, the product of an open source project, Project Wonderland, sponsored by Sun Microsystems. During a conference call with our colleague Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems, Becky Jestice and I were lucky enough to get a tour of Wonderland. Nicole graciously spent over an hour to show us some of the impressive features of Wonderland. The tour was so impressive that I want to devote a post to some key aspects of Wonderland: * Virtual meeting participants can use voice to communicate with one another; * If necessary, participants can connect to a Wonderland meeting via telephone; * Private conversations between participants are possible in a virtual meeting; * Participants can share applications; and * Anyone can try out Wonderland (see instructions below).

TAPIR started up as a research project in June 2001. In 2002 the project is sponsored by NORDINFO and the Research Council of The Danish Ministry of Culture. TAPIR aims at investigating the potentials of applying the diversity of cognitive representations pointing to scientific full-text documents following the principle of poly-representation. Poly-representation (or multi evidence) implies to utilize the cognitively different overlapping interpretations, also over time, made by different actors participating in interactive IR. Such cognitive overlaps derive, for instance, from the authors own perceptions of their work (titles, full-text terms), from human indexing (e.g. descriptors), or from citations given to the work by other authors. The assumption is that the more cognitively different the representations simultaneously pointing to a document are, the higher is the probability that the document is relevant to a given set of criteria.

The EU IST integrated project Semantic Knowledge Technologies (SEKT) developed and exploited semantic knowledge technologies. Core to the SEKT project has been the creation of synergies by combining the three core research areas ontology management, machine learning and natural language processing.

This is the homepage for an ongoing research and development project named PATIKA - Pathway Analysis Tools for Integration and Knowledge Acquisition. Within this project so far, among others, an ontology has been defined; a pathway database (which integrates and interfaces with several public pathway databases) has been constructed; and some software tools have been developed for effective integration, querying, analysis, and manipulation of pathway data.

This is the official website of the TAGora project, a STREP project funded by the European Commission in the framework of the FET proactive initiative "Simulating Emergent Properties in Complex Systems".

Through ANLoc, the African Network for Localization, the Kamusi Project is proud to be involved with a project to create Locales for 100 African languages. The following presentation provides an introduction to the initiative:

How do chess players make decisions? How do they avoid the combinatorial explosion? How do we go from rooks and knights to abstract thought? What is abstract thought like? These are some of the questions involving the Capyblanca project. The name, of course, is a blend between José Raoul Capablanca, and Hofstadter's original Copycat Project implemented by Melanie Mitchell, which brought us so many ideas. Well, after almost 5 years, we have a proof-of-concept in the form of a running program, and we are GPL'ing the code, so interested readers might take it to new directions which we cannot foresee.

Recently the town of Heerlen in the Netherlands repurposed an old abandoned coal mine into a brilliant source of geothermal energy. The project takes advantage of flooded underground mine shafts, using their thermal energy to power a large-scale district heating system. Dubbed the Minewater Project, the new system recently went online and provides 350 homes and businesses in the town with hot water and heating in the winter and cool water in the summer.

The Wonderland Modules Incubator project is a sandbox where developers can develop extensions to Wonderland in the form of modules. Incubator projects are not part of the core Wonderland code, but are experimental extensions.

SWAN (Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine) is a project to develop knowledge bases for the neurodegenerative disease research communities, using the energy and self-organization of that community enabled by Semantic Web technology. Created in collaboration with the Alzforum and other partners. Read more about the SWAN project here.

An international research consortium has been formed to create the most detailed and medically useful picture to date of human genetic variation. The 1000 Genomes Project will involve sequencing the genomes of at least a thousand people from around the world. The project will receive major support from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England, the Beijing Genomics Institute Shenzhen in China and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Mutual respect, trust, and recognition that cultural differences exist, matter, and must be explicitly dealt with are requirements of successful international projects. In summary, I would suggest these principles for the success of international collaboration: * Two (or more) teams share the same goal and seek the overall optimal result, not the local optimum. * Each team should clearly recognize and value the other party's different culture and traditions. * The single most important word in international projects is trust. Team members earn trust by being sincere, honest, and open-minded.

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

DynaQ stands for 'Dynamic Queries for document based, personal information spaces'. The goal of the project is to conceptualise and to develop a prototypical inquiry system to explore the personal information space, that supports the user with the help of the searching paradigm orienteering. The document-based, personal information space of the user constitutes by all documents on his computer. Included are documents of several file formats (e.g. *.pdf), but also the users emails. Also included are all available meta informations and existing semantic informations according to the documents. Users that are not aware of the scientific context of the project can just think of DynaQ as an desktop search engine.

This project will 1. Provide useful findings about * why and how people use electronic information * how system design features affect how well systems meet the needs of users * how system design features affect the actual use of systems. 2. Apply diverse user-research interpretations to the inquiry, in order to * focus on both commonalities and diversities in findings and interpretations * develop boundary-bridging concepts that enable more effective application and collaboration in both system design and user research.