sensemaking

The Cognitive Edge weblog contains an interesting exchange on the nature and role of storytelling in organizations. It was prompted by blog author Dave Snowden's reading of an article by Gabrielle Dolan of One Thousand and One, an Australian consultancy specialising in storytelling as a tool for organisational development. Dave Snowden is well known for his work on the role of narrative and complexity theory in organizational sensemaking.

The content of Informal Coalitions is summarized below. Preface * Highlights the high failure rate of organizational change programs. * Sets out the background to, and origins of, the informal coalitions perspective. * Identifies some of the key features that distinguish Informal Coalitions from other books that repackage the more conventional approaches to organizational change. * Outlines the broad structure of the book and how readers can get the best out of it.

Welcome to PDBWiki - A community annotated knowledge base of biological molecular structures

The collaborative, 3D encyclopedia of proteins and other molecules.

Bio-Pedia is an openfree bioinfomation encyclopedia. You can freely add words and modify them anytime. We are making a biology specific openfree encyclopedia for the world.

The Open Protein Structure Annotation Network (TOPSAN) is a wiki designed to collect, share and distribute information about protein three-dimensional structures, and to advance it towards knowledge about functions and roles of these proteins in their respective organisms. TOPSAN will serve as a portal for the scientific community to learn about protein structures and also to contribute their expertise in annotating protein function.

XFML lets you exchange hierarchical faceted metadata. It also lets you indicate topics in different published XFML documents are equal, thus allowing you to reuse indexing efforts. XFML borrows many ideas from Topicmaps, a format you should check out if you like the ideas behind XFML but are frustrated with its limitations (see http://topicmaps.org).

KHarvester (Informal Knowledge Harvester) is a SOA layer which collects RDF data from web pages. It provides REST based Web Services for managing data available on Social Semantic Information Sources (SSIS): semantic blogs, semantic wikis, and JeromeDL (the Social Semantic Digital Library). These Web Services allow saving harvested data in the informal knowledge repository, and providing them in a form of informal Learning Objects (LOs) that are described accroding to LOM (Learning Object Metadata) standard. Also, IKHarvester is an extension to Didaskon system. Didaskon (διδάσκω - gr. teach) delivers a framework for composing an on-demand curriculum from existing Learning Objects provided by e-Learning services (formal learning). Moreover, the system derives from SSIS which provide informal knowledge. Then, the selection and work-flow scheduling of Learning Objects is based on the semantically annotated specification of the user's current skills/knowledge (pre-conditions), anticipated resulting skills/knowledge (goal) and technical details of the clients platform.

The Collaboration Project is an independent forum of leaders committed to leveraging the interactive web and the benefits of collaborative technology to solve government's complex problems. Powered by the National Academy of Public Administration, this "wikified" space is designed to share ideas, examples and insights on the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the field of public governance.

A Resource for Comparative Grass Genomics

CENDI's vision is to provide its member federal STI agencies a cooperative enterprise where capabilities are shared and challenges are faced together so that the sum of accomplishments is greater than each individual agency can achieve on its own. CENDI's mission is to help improve the productivity of federal science- and technology-based programs through effective scientific, technical, and related information-support systems. In fulfilling its mission, CENDI agencies play an important role in addressing science- and technology-based national priorities and strengthening U.S. competitiveness. CENDI is an interagency working group of senior scientific and technical information (STI) managers from 13 U.S. federal agencies

The past six months have brought scenes from a hungry apocalypse, as at least 14 countries have been wracked by food-related violence. By mid-April UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon acknowledged that "the steeply rising price of food has developed into a real global crisis." It's the product, economists say, of multiple factors: high oil prices, prolonged drought, biofuel production, and burgeoning meat consumption. In the short term, food aid will help. In the medium term, market-distorting trade tariffs and farm subsidies must end. But the long-term task is monumentally harder: transcending the limits of today's global food production.

Welcome to the National Center for Biomedical Ontology's BioPortal. BioPortal is a Web-based application for accessing and sharing biomedical ontologies. New features in BioPortal 2.0 include: * Full ontology navigation using Flash visualization * Web-service access to BioPortal content and capabilities, which enables developers to use our BioPortal services in their tools. * Ability to add Marginal Notes to classes in BioPortal ontologies, a feature that enables the community to comment on ontologies and to discuss their contents * Ability to create Point to Point Mappings between concepts in different BioPortal ontologies * Bulk export of ontology-to-ontology mappings in RDF format * Navigation of multiple ontologies, which enables users to have several ontologies opened simultaneously in different tabs in the user interface * URIs for all ontology content, which enable developers to access and share BioPortal content from their applications * Improved support through Protégé for ontologies in OWL format

VoCamp is a series (hopefully) of informal events where people can spend some dedicated time creating lightweight vocabularies/ontologies for the Semantic Web/Web of Data. The emphasis of the event(s) is not on creating the perfect ontology in a particular domain, but on creating vocabs that are good enough for people to start using for publishing data on the Web. The intention is to follow a "paper first, laptops second" format, where the modelling is done initially on paper and only later committed to code. The VoCamp idea is heavily influenced by BarCamp, although the VoCamp should only have presentations where strictly necessary.

This is a guide to effective compliance with the GNU General Public License (GPL) and related licenses. In accordance with the Software Freedom Law Center's (SFLC's) philosophy of assisting the community with GPL compliance cooperatively, this guide focuses on avoiding compliance actions and minimizing the negative impact when enforcement actions occur. It introduces and explains basic legal concepts related to the GPL and its enforcement by copyright holders. It also outlines business practices and methods that lead to better GPL compliance. Finally, it recommends proper post-violation responses to the concerns of copyright holders.

On the occasion of the celebration of the International Year of Planet Earth in (2008), the Department of Geography of the University of the Aegean in Lesvos, Greece, is organizing the international conference "Studying, Modeling and Sense Making of Planet Earth". The UNESCO Natural Sciences Sector has granted support to the conference.

Sensemaking is the process through which humans put together understanding of related information. Sensemaking has been said to involve changes in cognitive representations during a human information processing task. Collection sensemaking involves understanding a collection of media entities, as a whole. One example of a sensemaking task is to compare the damage from Hurricane Katrina to homes, personal effects, and community buildings in different areas of New Orleans. Connected visual and semantic representations provide perspective to support users involved in collection sensemaking tasks. A zoomable map organizes images based on location at varying scales. Multiscale clusters based on zoom level organize images associated with events. The clusters afford contextualized thumbnail browsing and also maintain uniform information density on the map. Metadata enhances context and memory in the process of collection sensemaking.

Recent Sensemaking Research

Multi-ontology sense making a new simplicity in decision making