Welcome to the home page of Stephen Downes. I work for the National Research Council, Institute for Information Technology, in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. I specialize in online learning, content syndication, and new media.

To download the 34-page version of "The Bioteaming Manifesto - A new paradigm for virtual, networked business teams" published on ChangeThis click here

The Forecasting Principles site summarizes all useful knowledge about forecasting so that it can be used by researchers, practitioners, and educators. (Those who might want to challenge this are invited to submit missing information.) This knowledge is provided as principles (guidelines, prescriptions, rules, conditions, action statements, or advice about what to do in given situations).

The Delphi Method: Techniques and Applications

Delphi has been around since the 1950's with a large body of support material, case studies and tools on the web and should be part of any virtual team, community or network leader's toolset.

A Digital Village is a space where a community expresses their identity though ICT and Digital Media. This may be from an artistic, heritage, or economic perspective or a mixture of all three.This can be done through poetry, digital stories, community newspapers online, image collections (old and new), audio (Internet radio, oral history), animations, video, and text. To engage in the activities the participants need to learn new skills and so the Digital Village also becomes a learning community.

Introducing Acre: Freebase's integrated app development and hosting environment

Open Office Toolkig

This paper presents two design patterns for the hypermedia domain: `Navigational Contexts' and `Information on Demand'. They are applied in two different aspects of hypermedia applications design: the design of healthy navigational structures and the design of understandable and usable hypermedia interfaces, respectively. These two patterns are part of an effort for developing a Pattern Language for that domain.

The Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Method (OOHDM) (and its successor, the Semantic Hypermedia Design Method, SHDM) allow the concise specification and implementation of hypermedia (web) applications. This is achieved based on various models describing information (conceptual), navigation and interface aspects of these applications, and the mapping of these models into running applications, in various environements.

Comparative Interoperability Project

Solving the "digital divide" in Africa will not put food in mouths, knowledge in heads, clean water in households, or make healthcare accessible to those who need it most. Leveraging knowledge, skills, and capacities holds out the possibility of doing all of these things. This is what extending knowledge infrastructure is about: building robust and sustainable networks and communities that mobilize a broad range of information practices, institutions, and technologies (old and new) - and put these in the service of locally-defined needs, aspirations, and broad developmental goals. This report summarizes current thinking and action around African knowledge infrastructures.

So here's the real trick: cloud computing is real. Everything is moving into the cloud, in whole or in part. The utility layer of cloud computing will be just that, a utility, without outsized profits. But the cloud platform, like the software platform before it, has new rules for competitive advantage. And chief among those advantages are those that we've identified as "Web 2.0", the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

Dedicated to the publication and use of multilingual RDF descriptions of human languages, to be used as Linked Data.

Mahout's goal is to build scalable, Apache licensed machine learning libraries. Initially, we are interested in building out the ten machine learning libraries detailed in http://www.cs.stanford.edu/people/ang//papers/nips06-mapreducemulticore.pdf using Hadoop. While these algorithms are our initial focus, we welcome contributions of other machine learning approaches.

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.

FlyTED, the Drosophila Testis Gene Expression Database, is a public database currently containing 1,947 mRNA in situ images and ancillary data revealing the extent of expression of 623 individual genes involved in spermatogenesis in the testis of the fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster, both in normal wild type flies and in seven meiotic arrest mutant strains.

Accepted Papers