sensemaking

For the past few months I've been an active member of Twine.com; a beta semantic web app riddled with AI to help us organize, share and discover information. The beta is still under heavy construction, but at this point in time, I've migrated entirely from Del.icio.us, personal wikis and similar online services and over to Twine.

MarkMail is a free service for searching mailing list archives, with huge advantages over traditional search engines. It is powered by MarkLogic Server: Each email is stored internally as an XML document, and accessed using XQuery. All searches, faceted navigation, analytic calculations, and HTML page renderings are performed by a small MarkLogic Server cluster running against millions of messages.

Everyone has something to learn. Everyone has something to teach. School of Everything connects people who want to learn with passionate teachers in their local area.

Unstructured Information Management applications are software systems that analyze large volumes of unstructured information in order to discover knowledge that is relevant to an end user. UIMA is a framework and SDK for developing such applications. An example UIM application might ingest plain text and identify entities, such as persons, places, organizations; or relations, such as works-for or located-at. UIMA enables such an application to be decomposed into components, for example "language identification" -> "language specific segmentation" -> "sentence boundary detection" -> "entity detection (person/place names etc.)". Each component must implement interfaces defined by the framework and must provide self-describing metadata via XML descriptor files. The framework manages these components and the data flow between them. Components are written in Java or C++; the data that flows between components is designed for efficient mapping between these languages. UIMA additionally provides capabilities to wrap components as network services, and can scale to very large volumes by replicating processing pipelines over a cluster of networked nodes.

The crowdsourced feedback model provides a community setting for customers to share their ideas and expand on the ideas of other customers. The IdeaScale incentive and voting process is extremely important in harnessing this flow of customer ideas and making it an integral component of product innovation strategies.

Triplify is based on the definition of relational database queries for a specific Web application in order to retrieve valuable information and to convert the results of these queries into RDF, JSON and Linked Data. Experiences showed that for most web-applications a relatively small number of queries (mostly between 3-7) is sufficient to extract the important information. After generating such database views the Triplify software can be used to convert the view into an RDF, JSON or Linked Data representation, which can be shared and accessed on the (Semantic) Web.

The research team Edelweiss aims at offering models, methods and techniques for supporting knowledge management and collaboration in virtual communities interacting with information resources through the Web. This research will result in an ergonomic graph-based and ontology-based platform.

In a striking departure from traditional methods of teaching, a new way for students to gain course credits is emerging. The Eduzendium initiative was proposed by Dr. Sorin A. Matei (Purdue University). In collaboration with Dr. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and now Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium, and a group of Purdue graduate students, he has designed a set of template policies, rules and educational methods that allow incorporating wiki style collaboration in the educational process. The policies have been pretested at Purdue and will soon be released to the educational community through Eduzendium.

Qwaq provides 3-D virtual collaboration solutions for enterprises. Qwaq Forums are virtual environments used to facilitate interactive online meetings, workflow, project and program management processes, real-time document editing, document sharing, and online training. Qwaq Forums are deployed as virtual workspaces for virtual offices, program management, virtual operations centers, facilitated meetings, and corporate training.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping the scholarly community discover, use, and build upon a wide range of intellectual content in a trusted digital archive. Our overarching aims are to preserve a record of scholarship for posterity and to advance research and teaching in cost-effective ways. We operate a research platform that deploys information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. We collaborate with organizations that can help us achieve our objectives and maximize the benefits for the scholarly community

Global (e.g. organization-wide) patterns emerge from everyday 'local' (i.e. one-to-one or small-group) conversations. The more that people (in interaction) make sense of events and take action in particular ways, the more likely they are to make similar sense and take similar actions in the future. That is, from an informal coalitions perspective, these patterns are not formed by managerial dictat or design but by the nature of the everyday sensemaking that has gone before.

People in organizations actively construct the environment that they attend

Mustru is a desktop search engine written in Java using Lucene, Lingpipe, and the Berkeley DB . Create an index from a set of directories on your local filesystem and use the Web based interface to query the index. Submit questions in natural language or boolean queries using keywords.

ARC is a flexible RDF system for semantic web and PHP practitioners. It's free, open-source, easy to use, and runs in most web server environments. RDF and SPARQL for LAMP systems

Displays a status bar icon to indicate presence of Semantic Web (RDF) data in the web page. Click the icon to explore this information in more detail...

Zenbe is free email that works with the email you already use. Zenbe offers many features, including email, online calendar, lists, mobile sync, file sharing, team collaboration. It even works with Facebook and Twitter.

Social capital is the invisible stock of connections between people that makes collaboration possible. It basically measures trust and how people really care for one another. When members of a group know each other very well and share the same values, social capital is high. When they don't and have no shared awareness of the situation facing the group, the same words can mean very different things to them, and the trust level is low. Social capital and culture go hand in hand.

Using stories to trigger conversations and intepretations of behaviours is powerful.

Web 2.0 has brought many wonderful innovations and ideas to the Internet. We can no longer imagine the web without a social dimension, and we can no longer imagine an online world that is read-only - it is now a read/write web full of user-generated content. But there is another fairly recent innovation, which might have just as profound implications. We're speaking of the contextual user interface.

Apache Synapse is designed to be a simple, lightweight and high performance Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) from Apache. Based on a small asynchronous core, Apache Synapse has excellent support for XML and Web services - as well as binary and text formats. The Synapse engine is configured with a simple XML format and comes with a set of ready-to-use transports and mediators. We recommend you start by reading the QuickStart and then trying out the samples.