sensemaking

Welcome to ITIS, the Integrated Taxonomic Information System! Here you will find authoritative taxonomic information on plants, animals, fungi, and microbes of North America and the world

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary - Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

I'm fascinated with the way that a bunch of old ideas floating around from the dot com era are back, and now succeeding. Many of these apps are explicitly social, and are benefitting from the larger user population and increased comfort - it took quite a while for Match.com to catch on, and sixdegrees had much of the Friendster model down by 1996 and flamed out anyway. One really interesting category of these v 2.0 apps is shared bookmarking, a la the service Backflip from Back in the Day. So, with a minimum of editorializing, here is a list of places doing some form of shared link management, which are providing some of Tom Coates' "user-friendly throw-aroundable clumps of groupness."

Welcome to the home page of Stephen Downes. I work for the National Research Council, Institute for Information Technology, in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. I specialize in online learning, content syndication, and new media.

Croquet is a powerful open source software technology that, in the form of the Croquet Software Developer's Kit (Croquet SDK), can be used by experienced software developers to create and deploy deeply collaborative multi-user online vitual world applications on and across multiple operating systems and devices. Derived from Squeak, the Croquet system features a peer-based messaging protocol that dramatically reduces the need for server infrastructures to support virtual world deployment and makes it easy for software developers to create deeply collaborative applications. Cobalt is a National Science Foundation-sponsored effort to develop an open source virtual world browser and authoring toolkit application based on the Croquet technology.

Appropedia is the site for collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development. Appropedia helps us sustain our world.

ECOSPACE pursues the vision that by 2012 every Professional in Europe is empowered for seamless, dynamic and creative collaboration across teams, organisations and communities through a personalised collaborative working environment. ECOSPACE contributes to this vision through 4 main objectives: * The definition of innovative work paradigms through the analysis of eProfessionals and their related organisation. * The design and development of an open standards, service-oriented architecture for complementary and alike systems. * A collaboration middleware and services to enable seamless and instant collaboration among knowledge workers in group forming networks, beyond organisational boundaries. * The creation of new tools that simplify the complexity of collaboration in dynamic work environments and which enable users for creative and knowledge intensive tasks.

OpenCongress brings together official government data with news coverage, blog posts, comments, and more to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress. Small groups of political insiders and lobbyists already know what's really going on in Congress. We think everyone should be an insider.

Humanities, arts, science, and technology advanced collaboratory

Corrib.org is a cluster project, has been started on the base of cooperation between DERI International and Gdansk University of Technology. So far, it gathers together both open source projects being developed based on that cooperations and people affiliated to different sites.

SMORE is a tool that allows users to markup their documents in RDF using web ontologies in association with user-specific terms and elements. The aim of this software is as follows: To provide the user with a flexible environment in which he can create his web page without too many hindrances involving markup To allow the user to markup his document with minimal knowledge of RDF terms and syntax. However, the user should be able to semantically classify his data set for annotation i.e. breakup sentences into the basic subject-predicate-object model To provide a reference to existing ontologies on the Internet in order to use more precise references in his own web page/text. The user can also create his own ontology from scratch and borrow terms from existing ontologies To ensure accurate and complete RDF markup with scope to make modifications easily

OntoMat-Annotizer is a user-friendly interactive webpage annotation tool. It supports the user with the task of creating and maintaining ontology-based OWL-markups i.e. creating of OWL-instances, attributes and relationships. It include an ontology browser for the exploration of the ontology and instances and a HTML browser that will display the annotated parts of the text. It is Java-based and provide a plugin interface for extensions. The intended user is the individual annotator i.e., people that want to enrich their web pages with OWL-meta data. Instead of manually annotating the page with a text editor, say, emacs, OntoMat allows the annotator to highlight relevant parts of the web page and create new instances via drag?n?drop interactions. It supports the meta-data creation phase of the lifecycle. It is planned that a future version will contain an information extraction plugin, that offers a wizard which suggest which parts of the text are relevant for annotation. That aspect will help to ease the time-consuming annotation task.

This ontology supports the development of Protégé ontologies using the OntoClean methodology (PDF). This methodology for ontological analysis was developed by N. Guarino and C. Welty. The OntoClean methodology applies the notions used for ontological analysis in philosophy to analyzing conceptual modeling in information systems. If you include this Protégé ontology in your ontology, you can annotate your classes with meta-properties of identity, unity, essence, and dependence. The OntoClean ontology in Protégé also contains constraints in the Protégé Axiom Language (PAL) enabling you to verify whether the ontology is "clean"---does not violate any of the constraints based on these properties.

Our aim is to advance the state of the art in using ontologies for large-scale semantic applications in the distributed organizations. Particularly, we aim at improving the capability to handle multiple networked ontologies that exist in a particular context, are created collaboratively, and might be highly dynamic and constantly evolving.

The Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) sets out principles to define the 'open' in open knowledge. The term knowledge is used broadly and it includes all forms of data, content such as music, films or books as well any other type of information. In the simplest form the definition can be summed up in the statement that "A piece of knowledge is open if you are free to use, reuse, and redistribute it". For details read the latest version of the full definition (with explanatory annotations). The history page includes a changelog and links to all previous versions.

Advocating open content in non formal education

YAGO is a huge semantic knowledge base. Currently, YAGO knows more than 2 million entities (like persons, organizations, cities, etc.). It knows 20 million facts about these entities. Unlike many other automatically assembled knowledge bases, YAGO has a manually confirmed accuracy of 95%

Last week, I participated in a WWW2007 panel called "Multimedia Metadata Standards in a Semantic Web 3.0", where I took the opportunity to declare the Semantic Web dead. As you can imagine, such a declaration in front of a crowd of semantic web researchers provoked many responses. While I believe panels should be provocative and entertaining, I also have specific reasons for why I went as far as calling the Semantic Web "dead". Let me explain what I mean.

The concept of representation format, or type, permeates all technical areas of digital repositories. Policy and processing decisions regarding object ingest, storage, access, and preservation are frequently conditioned on a per-format basis. In order to achieve necessary operational efficiencies, repositories need to be able to automate these procedures to the fullest extent possible. JSTOR and the Harvard University Library are collaborating on a project to develop an extensible framework for format validation: JHOVE (pronounced "jove"), the JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment.