people don't necessarily want to solve puzzles on their own. They often enjoy attacking them in online collaborative groups that include dozens, sometimes millions, of fans. These groups are collectively far smarter than their individual members, and regular puzzles don't stand a chance against that many brains.

SCRIBO - Semi-automatic and Collaborative Retrieval of Information Based on Ontologies - aims at algorithms and collaborative free software for the automatic extraction of knowledge from texts and images, and for the semi-automatic annotation of digital documents.

The Drizzle project is building a database optimized for Cloud and Net applications. It is being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-cpu/core architecture. The code is originally derived from MySQL.

I hope that "Smarter" is going to be a key tag for the Web 3.0, and yet I think "More Open, More Ubiquitous, with even More Information (Overload) and a little Smarter" is what it's really going to be. We'll have to wait till "Web 4.0" for a web that really is stepwise more intelligent, one that could really be called semantic and hold the hidden promises of a "Semantic Web". And the reason I believe this is that the community is focused on linking more stuff together in new ways and breaking down data siloes, much more than it is focused on creating new, smarter filters for all the data that's going to be made accessible that way.

The nLab is a collaborative wiki which has grown out of the desire (I, II) of an on-line community communicating via the weblog The n-Category Café of people interested in discussion of expository and research nature about mathematics, physics and philosophy in the light of category theory and higher category theory (the "n" in "nLab") to have a place for development (the "Lab" in "nLab") and indexed archivation of the ideas and concepts that were, are and will be subject of or that developed out of the discussion at the weblog.

The scholarly literature forms a vast network of academic papers connected to one another by citations in bibliographies and footnotes [1]. The structure of this network reflects millions of decisions by individual scholars about which papers are important and relevant to their own work. Therefore within the structure of this network is a wealth of information about the relative influence of individual journals, and also about the patterns of relations among academic disciplines. Our aim at eigenfactor.org is develop ways of extracting this information.

Real-time web search - which scours only the latest updates to services like Twitter - is currently generating quite a buzz because it can provide a glimpse of what people around the world are thinking or doing at any given moment. Interest in this kind of search is so great that, according to recent leaks, Google is considering buying Twitter.

Cloudera presents the MapReduce bull case

Stuff in, triples out

Welcome to Phrase Detectives Lovers of literature, grammar and language, this is the place where you can work together to improve future generations of technology. By indicating relationships between words and phrases you will help to create a resource that is rich in linguistic information.

The ability to make progress in Computational Linguistics depends on the availability of large annotated corpora, but creating such corpora by hand annotation is very expensive and time consuming; in practice, it is unfeasible to think of annotating more than one million words. However, the success of Wikipedia and other projects shows that another approach might be possible: take advantage of the willingness of Web users to contribute to collaborative resource creation. AnaWiki is a recently started project that will develop tools to allow and encourage large numbers of volunteers over the Web to collaborate in the creation of semantically annotated corpora (in the first instance, of a corpus annotated with information about anaphora).

Web Science 2009 Journal

EPrints is the most flexible platform for building high quality, high value repositories, recognised as the easiest and fastest way to set up repositories of research literature, scientific data, student theses, project reports, multimedia artefacts, teaching materials, scholarly collections, digitised records, exhibitions and performances.

This paper introduces the concept of phatic technology and analyses its role in modern society. A phatic technology is a technology that serves to establish, develop, and maintain human relationships. The primary function of this type of technology is to create a social context: its users form a social community with a collection of interactional goals, which may be relevant to all human interchanges in that social context.

This summary was born out of a question on Twitter and percolated to FriendFeed, which was "Who is using RDF and integrating other resources at the minute and what are those resources? From this question, several resources were highlighted

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.

Pre-Proceedings of the Workshop on Controlled Natural Language (CNL 2009)

eritrix is the Internet Archive's open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler project.

NutchWAX ("Nutch + Web Archive eXtensions" ) searches web archive collections. The Web Archive eXtensions (WAX) include adaptation of the Nutch fetcher step to go against web archives rather than crawl the open net -- adaptation currently does Internet Archive ARC files only -- and plugins to add extra fields to the index that return an Archive Records' location in the repository, its collection name, etc.

The purpose of the GRASS project is to develop an arena for credible societal discourse. Its aim is to produce concise group reports that give their readers an up to date and credible overview of the positions of various stakeholders on a particular issue. As such, these reports may play an important role in catalyzing societal conflict resolution.