sensemaking

"Cobalt" is an open source virtual world browser and construction toolkit application being developed at Duke University. Cobalt will make it possible for people to easily create, publish, access, and participate in a network of linked virtual worlds. Currently in pre-alpha and built using the Croquet open source software platform, Cobalt uses peer-based messaging to eliminate the need for virtual world servers and makes it very simple to create and share secure virtual worlds that run on all major software operating systems.

The World Public Forum begins its history in 2002 when representatives of civil society from Russia, India and Greece organized the International Program "Dialogue of Civilizations". Vladimir Yakunin, Jagdish Kapur and Nicolas Papanicolaou have become founders and co-chairmen of the Forum. The forum "Dialogue of civilizations" has become a practical realization of the UNGA resolution "Global Agenda for Dialogue among Civilizations" accepted on November 9th, 2001 at the initiative of the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Mohammad Khatami.

ESSENCE is an immersive internet experiment, and a face-face conference. It invites human-centred technologists, climate scientists, policymakers, and any other stakeholder with a view on some part of the climate change debate, to experience and reflect on a new generation of software tools. Build, structure, summarise and navigate the science and policy arguments underpinning climate challenge. Think of it as a visual Wikipedia, a collective intelligence, to organise the key issues, options and arguments.

Monthly Digests: Interesting snippets of information from the semantic web frontiers.

The Bibliographic Ontology has just been published.

Computers and common sense

Graphical ontology editor, plugin for protege

The Yahoo! BOSS API allows you to access the Yahoo! search index with new levels of freedom. You can rearrange the results, change their look, have unlimited requests, mash the results with other resources, and you don't even have to let people know that Yahoo! is powering the page. Many people are busy mashing the BOSS results with internal data sets, proprietary logic, and new visual interfaces.

The focus of this month's issue moves from the individual to the community. Sustainable development requires communities in which people consciously and continuously attempt to balance individual self-interest with the common good. Surely, this is not the kind of ethos that induced the current financial crisis that, starting in New York, has already spread to all regions of the world. It is a financial pandemic, fueled by a greed virus that makes governments willing to sink trillions of dollars into failed financial institutions at the expense of millions of human beings that lack the resources to meet the most basic human needs.

The Earth System Grid (ESG) integrates supercomputers with large-scale data and analysis servers located at numerous national labs and research centers to create a powerful environment for next generation climate research. This portal is the primary point of entry into the ESG.

Science Museum Learning Collaboratories: Helping to Bridge the Gap Between Museums' Informal Learning Resources and Science Education in K-12 Schools

SMILA is an extensible framework for building search solutions to access unstructured information in the enterprise. Besides providing essential infrastructure components and services, SMILA also delivers ready-to-use add-on components, like connectors to most relevant data sources. Using the framework as their basis will enable developers to concentrate on the creation of higher value solutions, like semantic driven applications etc.

Accepted Papers

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.

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.

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