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Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications.

"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.

We believe individuals from the general public have a vital role to play in making personal genomes useful. We are recruiting volunteers who are willing to share their genome sequence and many types of personal information with the research community and the general public, so that together we will be better able to advance our understanding of genetic and environmental contributions to human traits and to improve our ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent illness. Learn more about how to participate in the Personal Genome Project.

The Collaboration Project is an independent forum of leaders committed to leveraging the interactive web and the benefits of collaborative technology to solve government's complex problems. Powered by the National Academy of Public Administration, this "wikified" space is designed to share ideas, examples and insights on the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the field of public governance.

Publications authored and co-authored by Keith Andrews

The COMMUNIA Thematic Network aims at becoming a European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion of existing and emerging issues concerning the public domain in the digital environment - as well as related topics, including, but not limited to, alternative forms of licensing for creative material; open access to scientific publications and research results; management of works whose authors are unknown (i.e. orphan works).

(from slashdot) "PGP and GnuPG have been utilizing webs of trust to establish authenticity without a centralized certificate authority for a while. Now, a new tool seeks to extend the concept to include scientific publications. The idea is that researchers can review and sign each others' works with varying levels of endorsement, and display the signed reviews with their vitas. This creates a decentralized social network linking researchers, papers, and reviews that, in theory, represents the scientific community. It meshes seamlessly with traditional publication venues. One can publish a paper with an established journal, and still try to get more out of the paper by asking colleagues to review the work. The hope is that this will eventually provide an alternative method for researchers to establish credibility."

J-Lab helps journalists and citizens use digital technologies to develop new ways for people to participate in public life with projects on innovations in journalism, citizen media, interactive news stories, entrepreneurship, training and research and publications.

Making Government Information More Accessible

The World Public Forum begins its history in 2002 when representatives of civil society from Russia, India and Greece organized the International Program "Dialogue of Civilizations". Vladimir Yakunin, Jagdish Kapur and Nicolas Papanicolaou have become founders and co-chairmen of the Forum. The forum "Dialogue of civilizations" has become a practical realization of the UNGA resolution "Global Agenda for Dialogue among Civilizations" accepted on November 9th, 2001 at the initiative of the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Mohammad Khatami.

This proposes and calls for expressions of interest in developing an international, voluntary, public register of risks to sustainability and of their causal paths - including those which are indirect, remote or transnational in nature.

Built on top of Calais and scalably hosted on Amazon's EC2 service, the new site at SemanticProxy.com enters public beta today, and enables anyone to easily generate rich semantic metadata for pages on the open web, simply by passing the URL to SemanticProxy.

The Biomedical Grid Terminology (BiomedGT) is an open, collaboratively developed terminology for translational research. BiomedGT builds on the strengths of the NCI Thesaurus, including concept orientation, description logic, and public accessibility. While the current terminology has been seeded with NCI Thesaurus content, it is being restructured to facilitate open content development. The goal is to evolve BiomedGT into a set of federated sub-terminologies, with content maintained by experts in the relevant research communities.

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.

SWiM is a semantic wiki for collaboratively building, editing and browsing a mathematical knowledge base. Its pages, containing mathematical theories, are stored in OMDoc, a markup format for mathematical knowledge. Our long-term objective is to develop a software that facilitates the creation of a shared, public collection of mathematical knowledge (e.g. for education) and serves work groups of mathematicians as a tool for collaborative development of new theories.

See also: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008Apr/0005.html NaturalOWL is an open-source natural language generation engine written in Java. It produces descriptions of individuals (e.g., items for sale, museum exhibits) and classes (e.g., types of exhibits) in English and Greek from OWL DL ontologies. The ontologies must have been annotated in RDF with linguistic and user modeling resources. We demonstrate a plug-in for Protege that can be used to produce these resources and to generate texts by invoking NaturalOWL. We also demonstrate how NaturalOWL can be used by robotic avatars in Second Life to describe the exhibits of virtual museums. NaturalOWL demonstrates the benefits of Natural Language Generation (NLG) on the Semantic Web. Organizations that need to publish information about objects, such as exhibits or products, can publish OWL ontologies instead of texts. NLG engines, embedded in browsers or Web servers, can then render the ontologies in multiple natural languages, whereas computer programs may access the ontologies directly.

Eurovoc is a multilingual thesaurus covering the fields in which the European Communities are active; it provides a means of indexing the documents in the documentation systems of the European institutions and of their users. The European Parliament, the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, the national and regional parliaments in Europe, some national government departments and European organisations are currently using this controlled vocabulary.

Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)-the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references-and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and-on many major research and library sites-find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one's personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).

In order to meet the emerging needs of e-Researchers, the DART project proposes a comprehensive end-to end approach to developing a new system for managing research activity and publication.

Our goal is to make the best arguments on all sides of any public debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all.