sensemaking

"The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for “popular” sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags."

The paper shows that the tags users choose are not chaotic, but rather quickly converge to a common descriptive set of tags that is almost unchanging over time. Perhaps once the tags have stabilized, coherent URI-based identification schemes could emerge?

Nice paper, thanks. Categories / tags / subjects / topics / issues ... that's what I'm working with right now. p.s. sure would be nice if the email notification included the source URL. I'm far more likely to download the PDF when I see something like www2007.org/paper635.pdf

"The semantic web proposes to inject machine meaningful data into the existing human language oriented web. As part of this effort, on the semantic web, URIs are used to identify entities. But there is currently no standard way to specify what it is that any given URI is to identify, or to whom, or when. Recent work in linguistics offers ideas for a solution to this lack. It focuses on the pragmatics of actual language use among ensembles of people. Also, the World Wide Web provides a set of technologies, in the form of socially constructed web sites, that could be employed to provide a solution. In this paper, I suggest how such socially constructed web sites could be used to address the problem of establishing common ground among a community of machines of the referent of a URI used on the semantic web. The result is a proposal to automate social meaning by creating societies of machines that share knowledge representations identified by URIs."

What tagging does point to convincingly is the social aspect of naming. In a given natural language, many sorts of identifiers, such as common words, are socially centralized. Other sorts of identifiers, such as proper names, are socially decentralized, varying from local context to local context. Black has noticed a correspondence between this socially grounded identification process and the use of socially constructed Web sites.

"URIs, a universal identification scheme, are different from human names insofar as they can provide the ability to reliably access the thing identified. URIs also can function to reference a non-accessible thing in a similar manner to how names function in natural language. There are two distinctly different relationships between names and things: access and reference. To confuse the two relations leads to underlying problems with Web architecture. Reference is by nature ambiguous in any language. So any attempts by Web architecture to make reference completely unambiguous will fail on the Web. Despite popular belief otherwise, making further ontological distinctions often leads to more ambiguity, not less. Contrary to appeals to Kripke for some sort of eternal and unique identification, reference on the Web uses descriptions and therefore there is no unambiguous resolution of reference. On the Web, what is needed is not just a simple redirection, but a uniform and logically consistent manner of associating descriptions with URIs that can be done in a number of practical ways that should be made consistent. "

A great review of the challenges that follow from using URIs for both access and reference

'"A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole" In this paper, I am trying to lay out a new form of computation, which focuses on the harmony reached in a system. This type of computation in some way resembles certain recent results in chaos theory and complexity theory. However, the orientation of harmony-seeking computation is toward a kind of computation which finds harmonious configurations, and so helps to create things, above all, in real world situations: buildings, towns, agriculture, and ecology. I try to show that this way of thinking about computation is closer to intuition and personal feeling than the processes we typically describe as "computations." It is also more useful, potentially, in a great variety of tasks we face in building and taking care of the surface of the Earth, and quite different in character since it is value-oriented, not value-free. Examples are taken from art, architecture, biology, physics, astrophysics, drawing, crystallography, meteorology, dynamics of living systems, and ecology'

A sixty-six page think piece

"Snowden and Boone have formed a new perspective on leadership and decision making that's based on complexity science. The result is the Cynefin framework, which helps executives sort issues into five contexts."

Still my favorite Snowden article. Unfortunately not free, but try to Google the title...

Social architecture is the conscious design of an environment that encourages certain social behavior leading towards some goal or set of goals

Insightful discussion around the coining of the term "Social Architecture"

"Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive."

Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.

Identifying aliases is an important component of the criminal justice system. Accurately identifying a person of interest or someone who has been arrested can significantly reduce the costs within the entire criminal justice system. This paper examines the problem domain of matching and relating identities, examines traditional approaches to the problem, and applies the identity resolution approach described by Jeff Jonas and relationship awareness to the specific case of client identification for the indigent defense office. The combination of identify resolution and relationship awareness offered improved accuracy in matching identities

Further work building on Jeff Jonas' "data finds data", and his his article in IEEE Security and Privacy entitled "Threat and Fraud Intelligence, Las Vegas Style"

"[...] Mazzagatti calls this new data structure the Triadic Continuum, in honor of the theories and writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the least well-known scientific geniuses of the late 19th century. Peirce, who is recognized as the father of pragmatism, is also known for his work in semiotics, the study of thought signs. Using Peirce's theoretical writings on how thought signs are organized into the structure of the human brain, Mazzagatti extrapolated a computer data structure that is self organizing - in other words, a data structure that naturally organizes new data by either building on the existing data sequences or adding to the structure as new data are introduced"

I quote: "Mazzagatti continued research into how Peirce's sign theory could be adapted to create a logical structure composed of signs that could be used in computers. Using Peirce's theoretical writings on how thought signs are organized into the structure of the human brain, Mazzagatti extrapolated a computer data structure that is self organizing - in other words, a data structure that naturally organizes new data by either building on the existing data sequences or adding to the structure as new data are introduced. "

Matching and relating identities is of the utmost importance for Las Vegas casinos. The author describes a specific matching technique known as identity resolution. This approach provides superior results over traditional identity matching systems.

High flair, non academic case for semantic reconciliation and indexing. No tech detail, but clear and useful principles.

"Social media affect the way organizations do business and communicate externally and internally. There are no longer clear boundaries of inside and outside organization life, and we need to explore how new social media can bring value for businesses in new ways. 'Value' in a strong economic sense is challenged by social media as a door opener for influence that the organizations should take seriously. Can social media increase 'value', as in strengthened brand and reputation based on the market's influence and trust, and in the end bring economic benefit for the business and organization? The virtual market isn't a huge collection of passive consumers; it is represented by networks of people having meaningful dialogues and interaction with both each other and the businesses as such, and represents new ways of market power. Social media tools open up for rethinking value in new innovative ways - and it is interesting to examine whether different organizational cultures will make different valuable outcomes, values in social, reputational, knowledgeable and networked capital senses."

Social media in a business context, as viewed through the eyes of an anthropologist. Lots of great references, but some in Norwegian, unfortunately.

"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.

A user can start a Web crawl through 80legs's Web-based interface. The form on the company's site lets them set parameters for the project and upload custom code needed to control how the crawler does its job. For example, a user might want the crawler to find images and check them against a database of copyrighted ones. Deysarkar says his company's crawlers are capable of processing up to two billion pages a day. The company charges $2 for every million pages crawled, plus a fee of three cents per hour of processing used.

A user can start a Web crawl through 80legs's Web-based interface. The form on the company's site lets them set parameters for the project and upload custom code needed to control how the crawler does its job. For example, a user might want the crawler to find images and check them against a database of copyrighted ones. Deysarkar says his company's crawlers are capable of processing up to two billion pages a day. The company charges $2 for every million pages crawled, plus a fee of three cents per hour of processing used.

Collective Intelligence is a global group of entrepreneurs dedicated to improving the efficiency of social ecosystems and accelerating the flow of capital to good.

The main goal of the Ibis project is to create an efficient Java-based platform for grid computing. The Ibis project currently consists of the IPL (a communication library), a variety of programming models, the Java Grid Application Toolkit, and the Zorilla peer-to-peer grid middleware. All components can be deployed on any grid platform, due to the use of Java.

Annotating is a pervasive element of scholarly practice for both the humanist and the scientist. It is a method by which scholars organize existing knowledge and facilitate the creation and sharing of new knowledge. It is used by individual scholars when reading as an aid to memory, to add commentary, and to classify. It can facilitate shared editing, scholarly collaboration, and pedagogy. Over time annotations can have scholarly value in their own right. Yet scholars remain dissatisfied with the options available for annotating digital resources. Scholars wanting to annotate have to learn different annotation clients for different content repositories, have no easy way to integrate annotations made on different systems or created by colleagues using other tools, and are often limited to simplistic and constrained models of annotation. The importance of annotating as a scholarly practice coupled with the real-world limitations of existing practices and tools supporting annotation of digital content has had a retarding effect on the growth of digital scholarship and the level of digital resource use by scholars.