sensemaking

While online spreadsheets like Google Docs make it very easy for anyone to embed tabular data in websites, let's explore some new alternatives that you may find more useful depending on the requirement.

Individual-intelligence research, from a neurological perspective, describes the cortex as a medium for performing conceptual abstraction and specification. This idea has been used to explain how motor-cortex regions responsible for different behavioral modalities such as writing and speaking can express the same general concept represented in the cortex. For example, the concept of a dog, abstractly represented in the higher-layers of the cortex, can either be written or spoken about depending on the context. Abstract models in the higher-layers propagate activation patterns down the cortical hierarchy to the desired region of the motor-cortex for worldly implementation. In this paper, the individual-intelligence framework is expanded to incorporate collective-intelligence within a hyper-cortical construct. This hyper-cortex is a multi-layered network used to represent abstract collective concepts. This collective-intelligence framework plays an important role in understanding how collective-intelligence systems can be engineered to handle collective problem-solving. To conclude the paper, five common problems in the scientific community are solved using an artificial hyper-cortex generated from digital-library metadata.

ZooKeeper is a high-performance coordination service for distributed applications. It exposes common services - such as naming, configuration management, synchronization, and group services - in a simple interface so you don't have to write them from scratch. You can use it off-the-shelf to implement consensus, group management, leader election, and presence protocols. And you can build on it for your own, specific needs.

Ashoka is the global association of the world's leading social entrepreneurs-men and women with system changing solutions for the world's most urgent social problems. Since 1981, we have elected over 2,000 leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows, providing them with living stipends, professional support, and access to a global network of peers in more than 60 countries.

Social Enterprise Innovation Network members help each other get to the next level of impact faster and more effectively thanks to accelerated knowledge discovery, rapid skill development, and new partnership opportunities.

DeepPeep is a search engine specialized in Web forms. The current beta version tracks 13,000 forms across 7 domains. DeepPeep helps you discover the entry points to content in Deep Web (aka Hidden Web) sites, including online databases and Web services.

This website has been created to help make visible an emerging field of collective wisdom, its study and practice. It came into being in 2002 with support of the Fetzer Institute and has evolved to the form you see today by the support and contributions of hundreds of people and organizations who have, for decades, been actively engaged in this field.

ASMALLWORLD is the world's leading private online community that captures an existing international network of people who are connected by three degrees of separation. Members share similar backgrounds, interests and perspectives. ASMALLWORLD's unique platform offers powerful tools and user generated content to help members manage their private, social and business lives. Membership to ASMALLWORLD is by invitation only, which is part of what makes this network unique, and the connections, authentic. Trusted and loyal ASW members who meet certain criteria have the privilege of inviting a limited number of their friends to the network.

I'm going to have more to say about data, databases, and intellectual property rights in the coming months. This longish post provides a basic primer on how U.S. copyright law applies to databases.

On January 07, 2009, OASIS announced the submission of a draft charter for a new OASIS Technical Committee to define an integrated collaboration object model supporting a complete range of enterprise collaboration activities. The proposed data model is based upon the Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM), to be contributed by Oracle to the ICOM TC. The new standard model, interface, and protocol would support contextual collaboration within business processes for an integrated collaboration environment which includes communication artifacts (e.g., email, instant message, telephony, RSS), teamwork artifacts (such as project and meeting workspaces, discussion forums, real-time conferences, presence, activities, subscriptions, wikis, and blogs), content artifacts (e.g., text and multi-media contents, contextual connections, taxonomies, folksonomies, tags, recommendations, social bookmarking, saved searches), and coordination artifacts (such as address books, calendars, tasks) etc.

An unbook is more like software: 1. An unbook is never finished, but rather continually updated, based on feedback from users andtheir evolving needs. 2. An unbook is released in versions. As in open source software, version 1.0 of an unbook is a significant milestone, indicating that it is stable and reliable enough for use by the general public. The significance of a new release is indicated by the size of the gap: For example, the difference between 1.1 and 1.1.3 is minor, while the difference between 1.1 and 2.0 is major. 3. An unbook is supported by a community of users who share their experiences and best practices with each other, and help each other troubleshoot problems encountered in their practice areas. An unbook's community is a very real part of the unbook's development team. An unbook is mindware: software for the mind.

DynaQ stands for 'Dynamic Queries for document based, personal information spaces'. The goal of the project is to conceptualise and to develop a prototypical inquiry system to explore the personal information space, that supports the user with the help of the searching paradigm orienteering. The document-based, personal information space of the user constitutes by all documents on his computer. Included are documents of several file formats (e.g. *.pdf), but also the users emails. Also included are all available meta informations and existing semantic informations according to the documents. Users that are not aware of the scientific context of the project can just think of DynaQ as an desktop search engine.

The U.S. intelligence agencies' internal wiki Intellipedia has gotten glowing press reports and accolades, as well as input from thousands of analysts. However, the wiki still struggles to make a permanent home in the spy agencies, according to one of its evangelists.

Community and Networks Connection is a content hub started by Nancy White that collects and organizes information around communities and networks. We welcome comments and suggestions.

Topaz is a nonprofit organization of focused on developing open source software around collaborative creation, management and sharing of information.

This project seeks to develop and employ top level Internet/WWW support for academic and other courses. Our publications on one hand describe the experiences made with using Internet/WWW technologies for our courses, further concepts and systems we are developing, and specific issues like adaptive hyperbooks, configuration management etc. needed for these applications. (1999)

Essays and research supporting the idea that global warming poses a clear threat to humanity, that it is largely caused by human activity, and that solutions to the problems of climate change lie within human reach.

Tusavvy, a service of zSoup delivers a new social search engine to find community knowledge without navigating the entire web

Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues. Be recognized for your contributions to quality education.

Open Knowledge Foundation Blog