sensemaking

The Lemur Toolkit is a open-source toolkit designed to facilitate research in language modeling and information retrieval. Lemur supports a wide range of industrial and research language applications such as ad-hoc retrieval, site-search, and text mining. The toolkit supports indexing of large-scale text databases, the construction of simple language models for documents, queries, or subcollections, and the implementation of retrieval systems based on language models as well as a variety of other retrieval models. The system is written in the C and C++ languages, and is designed as a research system to run under Unix operating systems, although it can also run under Windows.

World Pulse is an interactive global media enterprise that covers global issues through the eyes of women. We publish a magazine and link it to our global community newswire, called PulseWire, where women from over 130 countries, including from rural villages, are speaking for themselves and connecting to solve global problems.

Despite significant growth in the number of research papers available through open access, principally through author self-archiving in institutional archives, it is estimated that only c. 20% of the number of papers published annually are open access. It is up to the authors of papers to change this. Why might open access be of benefit to authors? One universally important factor for all authors is impact, typically measured by the number of times a paper is cited (some older studies have estimated monetary returns to authors from article publication via the role citations play in determining salaries). Recent studies have begun to show that open access increases impact. More studies and more substantial investigations are needed to confirm the effect, although a simple example demonstrates the effect.

Entitled "Severe Space Weather Events - Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts," it describes the consequences of solar flares unleashing waves of energy that could disrupt Earth's magnetic field, overwhelming high-voltage transformers with vast electrical currents and short-circuiting energy grids. Such a catastrophe would cost the United States "$1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year," concluded the panel, and "full recovery could take four to 10 years." That would, of course, be just a fraction of global damages.

The project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a website. Distribution will also be possible via paper, CD, or DVD. Our goal initially is to focus on content development and Web distribution, and we will work with relevant authorities to facilitate dissemination by other means when bandwidth is unavailable or inadequate. The goal is to make textbooks available to the many who cannot afford them.

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your posts. Hashtags can be created by anyone simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #myhashtag.

The combination of classification, search enhancement, and contextual navigation delivers Findability.

Media Cloud is a project that tracks news content comprehensively - providing open, free, and flexible tools. This will allow unprecedented quantitative analysis of media trends. For instance, some of our driving questions are: 1. Do bloggers introduce storylines into mainstream media or the other way around? 2. What parts of the world are being covered or ignored by different media sources? 3. Where do stories begin? 4. How are competing terms for the same event used in different publications? 5. Can we characterize the overall mix of coverage for a given source? 6. How do patterns differ between local and national news coverage? 7. Can we track news cycles for specific issues? 8. Do online comments shape the news?

Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data.

So far little awareness exists about the commercial opportunities of linked data. Andreas Blumauer (SWC) talked to Chris Bizer, mastermind behind the DB-Pedia project and advocate of the linking open data philosophy, about the emerging market for deep web applications, its value for corporate purposes, and the need for information accountability and privacy awareness.

Natural languages are easy to learn by infants, they can express any thought that any adult might ever conceive, and they accommodate the limitations of human breathing rates and short-term memory. The first property implies a finite vocabulary, the second implies infinite extensibility, and the third implies a small upper bound on the length of phrases. Together, they imply that most words in a natural language will have an open-ended number of senses - ambiguity is inevitable.To achieve a comparable level of flexibility with formal ontologies, this paper proposes an organization with a dynamically evolving collection of formal theories, systematic mappings to formal concept types and informal lexicons of natural language terms, and a modularity that allows independent distributed development and extension of all resources, formal and informal.

What lies at the intersection of journalism and videogames? This research project seeks to understand the ways videogames can be used in the field of journalism, providing examples, theoretical approaches, speculative ideas, and practical advice about the past, present, and future of games and journalism.

Keotag lets users search for tags across 14 different sites, from Reddit to Ice Rocket.Keotag will also generate folksonomy tags for a blog post, or submit a bookmark to multiple sites.

In particular, I am thinking about intentional communities -- communities in which people live geographically near one another, and participate in community together, by choice. They may live together or not, dine together or not, work together or not, worship together or not -- but at least they need to live within some limit of proximity to one another and participate in community together. These are the minimum requirements. But is there a model that works? Or is it time to design a new model that fits the time and place in which we live better?

The Trade & Environment Database (TED) is a collection of categorical case studies that began with a focus on solely environmental issues, but did not include the economic consequences of other social policy choices, such as culture, rights, or other issues.

The True Knowledge answer engine is a technology capable of answering questions put to it on any topic. If you would like to take it for a spin you can login (or apply for a beta account if you haven't done so already) using the box to the right.

Swingly is a new type of semantic search engine designed to help you find answers to questions - wherever they can be found on the Internet.

COSMO is the proposed Common Semantic Model, viewed as consisting of a lattice of ontologies which will serve as a set of basic logically-specified concepts (classes, relations, functions, instances) with which the meanings of all terms and concepts in domain ontologies can be specified. The most important function of the COSMO is to serve as a Foundation Ontology that has a sufficient inverntory of fundamental concept representations so that it can support utilities to translate assertions of fundamentally different ontologies into the terminology and format of each other. The use of a common set of defining concepts will permit accurate interoperability of knowledge-based systems using the logical relations of their ontologies as the basis for reasoning in the system. The COSMO can also be used as the starting ontology for creation of more specialized domain ontologies.