sensemaking

DIYbio is an organization for the ever expanding community of citizen scientists and DIY biological engineers that value openness & responsibility. DIYbio aims to be an "Institution for the Amateur" -- an umbrella organization that provides some of the same resources afforded by more traditional institutions like academia and industry, such as access to a community of experts, to technical literature and other resources, to responsible oversight for health and safety, and an interface between the community and the public at large.

Many RDF toolkits provide SPARQL/Update functionality and move from simple query operations to more powerful data manipulation. SPARQLScript goes another step further and enables or simplifies the implementation of * semantic Mashups, * custom, portable rule and inference scripts using a SPARQL-based syntax * Output templates for RDF data and SPARQL query results * RDF/SPARQL-driven Yahoo! Pipes-like systems

ARC is a flexible RDF system for semantic web and PHP practitioners. It's free, open-source, easy to use, and runs in most web server environments.

In order to keep data structures in Semantic CrunchBase close to the source API, I used a 1-to-1 mapping between CrunchBase JSON keys and RDF terms (with only a few exceptions). This was helpful for people knowing the JSON API, but it wasn't easy to interlink the converted information with existing SemWeb data such as FOAF, or the various LOD sources.

Semantic CrunchBase is an RDF/SPARQL interface to CrunchBase, the free directory of technology companies, people, and investors.

CrunchBase is the free database of technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit.

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.

With the economy in a slump and budgets being cut in traditional print and TV advertising campaigns many will be looking to the Web 2.0 world to reach their constituents. So what should be on your Web 2.0 radar for 2009? Web 2.0 gurus give you the low down.

Systems Biology Linker (Sybil) is a platform for the integration of BioPAX and SBML. It is part of the Virtual Cell but also a useful tool for any SBML and BioPAX integration, in other words for any one who wants to use BioPAX with an SBML-capable platform or vice versa. While Sybil can be used as an intelligent conversion tool between SBML and BioPAX, it is primarily intended for building a joint repository for SBML and BioPAX data, where links between SBML elements and BioPAX objects are maintained by SBPAX. Sybil uses SYBREAM for most of the intelligent work involved in building the SBML-SBPAX-BioPAX joint repository.

The Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) is a computer-readable format for representing models of biochemical reaction networks in software. It's applicable to models of metabolism, cell-signaling, and many others. SBML has been evolving since mid-2000 thanks to an international community of software developers and users. This website is the portal for the global SBML development effort; here you can find information about all aspects of SBML.

Rich countries acknowledge their historic role in pushing up global temperatures but they say that emerging giants like China and India must also step up to the plate and take quantifiable action. Developing and poorer nations hit back with the argument that the industrialised world should lead by example, and foot the bill for clean-energy technology and coping with global warming's inevitable impacts.

GMT is an open source collection of ~60 tools for manipulating geographic and Cartesian data sets (including filtering, trend fitting, gridding, projecting, etc.) and producing Encapsulated PostScript File (EPS) illustrations ranging from simple x-y plots via contour maps to artificially illuminated surfaces and 3-D perspective views. GMT supports ~30 map projections and transformations and comes with support data such as GSHHS coastlines, rivers, and political boundaries.

Auto-scaling is the ability (with certain cloud infrastructure management tools like enStratus-in a limited beta through the end of the year) to add and remove capacity into a cloud infrastructure based on actual usage. No human intervention is necessary. It sounds amazing-no more overloaded web sites. Just stick your site into the cloud and come what may! You just pay for what you use. But I don't like auto-scaling.

Researchers in the School of Computer Science at the University's Malaysia Campus are exploring 'granular computing' - a computer paradigm that looks at groups or sets of information, called information granules, rather than the high level of detail at which data is currently processed. By looking at data in this way, new patterns and relationships emerge - which could potentially give us access to new types of computer modelling in a range of fields, including process control and optimisation, resource scheduling and bioinformatics.

GUESS is an exploratory data analysis and visualization tool for graphs and networks. The system contains a domain-specific embedded language called Gython (an extension of Python, or more specifically Jython) which supports the operators and syntactic sugar necessary for working on graph structures in an intuitive manner. An interactive interpreter binds the text that you type in the interpreter to the objects being visualized for more useful integration. GUESS also offers a visualization front end that supports the export of static images and dynamic movies.

The Web is ephemeral. Pages change frequently, and it is nearly impossible to find data or follow a link after the underlying page evolves. We present Zoetrope, a system that enables interaction with the historical Web (pages, links, and embedded data) that would otherwise be lost to time. Using a number of novel interactions, the temporal Web can be manipulated, queried, and analyzed from the context of familar pages. Zoetrope is based on a set of operators for manipulating content streams. We describe these primitives and the associated indexing strategies for handling temporal Web data. They form the basis of Zoetrope and enable our construction of new temporal interactions and visualizations.

BrowseRDF.com allows you to navigate arbitrary RDF datasets using an exploration technique called "faceted browsing". This technique lets you easily navigate through unfamiliar datasets.

Longwell mixes the flexibility of the RDF data model with the effectiveness of the faceted browsing UI paradigm and enables you to visualize and browse any arbitrarely complex RDF dataset, allowing you to build a user-friendly web site out of your data within minutes and without requiring any code at all.

The Flamenco search interface framework has the primary design goal of allowing users to move through large information spaces in a flexible manner without feeling lost. A key property of the interface is the explicit exposure of category metadata, to guide the user toward possible choices, and to organize the results of keyword searches. The interface uses hierarchical faceted metadata in a manner that allows users to both refine and expand the current query, while maintaining a consistent representation of the collection's structure. This use of metadata is integrated with free-text search, allowing the user to follow links, then add search terms, then follow more links, without interrupting the interaction flow.

/facet is a generic browser for heterogeneous semantic web repositories. The browser works on any RDFS dataset without any additional configuration.