Group items tagged

Create your own social network, quickly and easily. Elgg allows you to take full advantage of the power of social technology with elegant, flexible solutions for organisations, groups and individuals.

RPI's Tetherless World Constellation will address this emerging area of "Web Science," focusing on the World Wide Web and it's future use. Faculty in the constellation will explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, will enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and will develop new technologies and languages that expand the capabilities of the Web. We will use powerful scientific and mathematical techniques from many disciplines to explore the modeling of the Web from network- and information- centric views. Our goals will include making the next generation web natural to use while being responsive to the growing variety of policy and social needs, whether in the area of privacy, intellectual property, general compliance, or provenance. The Tetherless World Constellation will design new techniques to explore social, scientific, and legal impacts of the evolving technologies deployed on the Web.

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.

how tagging transforms the solitary browsing experience into a social one

Central to Web 2.0 is the requirement for interactive systems to enable the participation of users in production and social interaction. Consequently, in order to critically explore the Web 2.0 phenomenon it is important to explore the relationship of interactivity to social power. This study firstly characterises interactivity in these media using Barry's (2001) framework differentiating interactivity from disciplining technologies as defined by Foucault. Contrary to Barry's model though, the analysis goes on to explore how interactivity may indeed function as a disciplining technology within the framework of a neoliberal political economy.

People are changing the way that they consume online information, as well as their expectations about its delivery. The social nature of the Web brings with it an expectation of interaction with information and modern Web design is reflecting that. There are now alternate forms of navigation including the ability to browse by user, tag clouds, tabbed navigation etc. Advances in technology along with these shifts in user expectations are affecting the way that information is laid out on a webpage. Today's websites are aiming for intuitive and usable interfaces which are continuously evolving in response to user needs. Website designers are approaching information design differently and designing simple, interactive websites which incorporate advancements in Web interface design, current Web philosophies, and user needs. Information design for the New Web is simple, it is social, and it embraces alternate forms of navigation.

Cogenz is a hosted social bookmarking service for companies wishing to harness the collective intelligence of their employees using social software in a simple and effective way. Think del.icio.us for the enterprise and you won't go far wrong.

KHarvester (Informal Knowledge Harvester) is a SOA layer which collects RDF data from web pages. It provides REST based Web Services for managing data available on Social Semantic Information Sources (SSIS): semantic blogs, semantic wikis, and JeromeDL (the Social Semantic Digital Library). These Web Services allow saving harvested data in the informal knowledge repository, and providing them in a form of informal Learning Objects (LOs) that are described accroding to LOM (Learning Object Metadata) standard. Also, IKHarvester is an extension to Didaskon system. Didaskon (διδάσκω - gr. teach) delivers a framework for composing an on-demand curriculum from existing Learning Objects provided by e-Learning services (formal learning). Moreover, the system derives from SSIS which provide informal knowledge. Then, the selection and work-flow scheduling of Learning Objects is based on the semantically annotated specification of the user's current skills/knowledge (pre-conditions), anticipated resulting skills/knowledge (goal) and technical details of the clients platform.

Proceedings of the 2nd SIRTEL'08 Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning Maastricht, Netherlands, September 17, 2008

E-mail is no longer just e-mail, and it arguably hasn't been for some time. Webmail clients like Yahoo's have offered IM and calendar integration for a while, and now Gmail allows video chatting and embedded gadgets. Zenbe, a new startup, is bringing social features, collaboration, and a new perspective on our e-mail routine with things like a sharable wiki, discussions, and even a Twitter sidebar.

Tusavvy, a service of zSoup delivers a new social search engine to find community knowledge without navigating the entire web

Social Enterprise Innovation Network members help each other get to the next level of impact faster and more effectively thanks to accelerated knowledge discovery, rapid skill development, and new partnership opportunities.

Among the activities that people participate in on the Social Web are argumentative discussions and decision making. This paper analyzes a series of use-cases (from the perspective of social media sites) that share the presence of such argumentative discussions and where the structure of online discussions can be represented in SIOC. Our goal is to externalize implicit argumentation structures hidden in the usergenerated content. For capturing it and making it explicit, we propose a SIOC Argumentation ontology module as a formal representation.

Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations.

The Coffee Shop as Social Gathering-Place: Chris Corrigan picks up on an idea in Architect Magazine on how coffee shops might morph into the business and community gathering places of the future. I recently predicted the end of offices, and with their demise will come a need for such f2f gathering spots, equipped with videoconferencing and screensharing and other social tools to allow others who can't attend to be part of the conversation.

Connexions works to connect individuals and organizations working for social change with each other, with information and ideas, and with the wider community. Connexions Online features resources and organizations fostering democratization, economic justice, environmental responsibility, civil liberties, and the creation and preservation of community.

Academic Researcher Social Network

s Richard MacManus recently predicted, in 2008 we'll witness the rise of semantic web services. From the native support for Microformats in Firefox 3, to the New York Times' utilization of rich headers metadata, to this week's release of the Social Graph API by Google, semantics are starting to slip onto the web. The impact is being felt because large companies are really starting to focus on structured information. In the same vein, last week Reuters - an international business and financial news giant - launched an API called Open Calais. The API does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events. This technology is the next generation of the Clear Forest offering, which Reuters acquired last year. We have profiled Clear Forest on ReadWriteWeb and in this post we will look at what Reuters opened up and why.

But I've never seen a service that brings social bookmarking and semantic search together the way AntStorm does. The service works on two major fronts: first, AntStorm allows you to upload your bookmarks, tag them, share them, and access them from any computer you choose, and second, AntStorm uses your tagged bookmarks to power a semantic search engine that will help you find new sites and services that match your interests.

Human Centered Systems in the Perspective of Organizational and Social Informatics