sensemaking

She suggested that we used the communication metaphor too much, assuming that all issues were either about listening or telling. Instead she argued we needed an interaction metaphor in which we communicate by action and more importantly interaction. Praxis makes perfect as we used to say. There is a fair amount of talk about story-listening and story-telling and much of it is useful. However, interaction is about collaborative story creation, something which I think has more inherent value.

myExperiment is a collaborative environment where scientists can safely publish their workflows, share them with groups and find the workflows of others. Workflows, other digital objects and collections - called Packs - can now be swapped, sorted and searched like photos and videos on the Web. And unlike Facebook or MySpace, myExperiment fully understands the needs of the researcher. myExperiment makes it really easy for the next generation of scientists to contribute to a pool of scientific workflows, build communities and form relationships. It enables scientists to share, reuse and repurpose workflows and reduce time-to-experiment, share expertise and avoid reinvention.

This talk is an essay on design. In the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne invented a new genre of writing he called an essai, which in modern French translates to attempt. Since then, the best essays have been explorations by an author of a topic or question, perhaps or probably without a definitive conclusion. Certainly in a good essay there can be no theme or conclusion stated at the outset, repeated several times, and supported throughout, because a true essay takes the reader on the journey of discovery that the author has or is experiencing. This essay-on design-is based on my reflections on work I've done over the past 3 years. Some of that work has been on looking at what constitutes an "ultra large scale software system" and some on researching how to keep a software system operating in the face of internal and external errors and unexpected conditions.

"We don't think we have the right kind of tools to help decision makers plan for the future," said Jack Fellows, the vice president for corporate affairs of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a consortium of 71 universities. Comment: this is an opportunity for improved sensemaking tools.

There is a growing community interest in applying Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies in health care and life sciences areas including the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG ; http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/) and Medicine 2.0 (http://www.medicine20congress.com/). This has motivated us to explore how to intersect these two sets of technologies in the context of the HCLS Knowledge Base (KB).

See also: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008Apr/0005.html NaturalOWL is an open-source natural language generation engine written in Java. It produces descriptions of individuals (e.g., items for sale, museum exhibits) and classes (e.g., types of exhibits) in English and Greek from OWL DL ontologies. The ontologies must have been annotated in RDF with linguistic and user modeling resources. We demonstrate a plug-in for Protege that can be used to produce these resources and to generate texts by invoking NaturalOWL. We also demonstrate how NaturalOWL can be used by robotic avatars in Second Life to describe the exhibits of virtual museums. NaturalOWL demonstrates the benefits of Natural Language Generation (NLG) on the Semantic Web. Organizations that need to publish information about objects, such as exhibits or products, can publish OWL ontologies instead of texts. NLG engines, embedded in browsers or Web servers, can then render the ontologies in multiple natural languages, whereas computer programs may access the ontologies directly.

Despite significant advancement in technology and tools, building ontologies, annotating data, and aligning multiple ontologies remain tasks that highly depend on human intelligence, both as a source of domain expertise and for making conceptual choices. This means that people need to contribute time, and sometimes other resources, to this endeavor. As a novel solution, we have proposed to masquerade core tasks of weaving the Semantic Web behind on-line, multi-player game scenarios, in order to create proper incentives for humans to contribute. Doing so, we adopt the findings from the already famous "games with a purpose" by von Ahn, who has shown that presenting a useful task, which requires human intelligence, in the form of an on-line game can motivate a large amount of people to work heavily on this task, and this for free.

Using segments of rich media makes it possible to aggregate context and meaning on these chunks by using a number of different mechanisms. Starting with a granular node -- be it a sound bite, visual clip or written fact -- it is possible to aggregate contextual metadata through a series of steps that emergently progress from: * Starting with thousands of defined Audio Sound Bites & visual clips * Rating sound bites and clustering them with folksonomy tags * Sequencing audio sound bites within playlists * Collaboratively building larger sequences with nested playlists * Independently controlling the video & audio tracks with 2-dimensional nested playlists * Evaluating Multiple Storylines and Hypotheses with a 2-dimensional playlist matrix * Visualizing complex networks by mapping out feedback loop relationships between nodes

Sensemaking systems don't only help people find stuff faster. That's just the information retrieval part. The bigger story is about augmenting and amplifying our abilities to make sense. Sensemaking adds things like skimming, power reading, organizing, spotting patterns, tracing social networks, taking notes, summarizing, drilling for details, and flagging biases. Reading an article is different from reading a book, and that's different from reading from a collection or stream. Radically new forms of human-information interaction are being enabled by these new technologies. Sensemaking systems not only have front ends (visualization), but also back ends (content analytics and reasoning).

understanding this content and making decisions based on it (especially in mission-critical situations) is not just a simple matter of consuming information. To effectively "make sense" of large, heterogeneous, and often unstructured content collections requires: - efficient, accurate, and context-based ways of extracting, filtering, and summarizing information; - better and more meaningful ways of organizing, visualizing, and interacting with the information; - faster, more objective methods for investigating hypotheses, detecting trends or patterns across multiple sources, and otherwise analyzing or interpreting information.

This present report summarizes the insights and recommendations of a symposium on sensemaking, sponsored by the Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence, and held in Vienna, Virginia, on 23-25 October 2001.

Instead of constructing theories like their researcher colleagues, researching clinicians must face their previous constructions (i.e., sensemaking from experience), create methods which allow for deconstruction (i.e., sensemaking challenged), and then work towards building reconstructions (i.e., sensemaking remade) (Dervin, 1992; Duffy, 1995; Shields & Dervin, 1993; Weick, 1995)

Sensemaking is a process designed to enable groups of people to see patterns that were once hidden to them and develop a common understanding of what is required to address an issue. While the sensemaking (and subsequent intervention design) process will result in the production of artefacts (reports, lists of action items, descriptions of the current situation etc) much of the value is derived through participation in the process. It is not a process where you say 'make sense of this and tell me the answer'. Much of the benefit comes from determining 'what it means' for yourself. Sensemaking is beneficial at an individual level as our values and assumptions are tested and either confirmed or found wanting.

Once students have gathered information on a topic, it is important that they reflect on whether the information they have gathered is sufficient to answer the research question. This requires students to make sense of the information they have gathered-to synthesize the information into new knowledge. In order to address the different leaning modalities that students possess, teachers should have students use a variety of forms of representation for this sensemaking stage (see Forms of Representation matrix).

Sensemaking is the way in which people understand the world at large scale: how they decide what kind of goals are reasonable to try for and what kinds of strategies are worth trying or using. Sensemaking is related to what the military call situational awareness.

Using the 1994, South Canyon fire in Colorado as a case study, this article suggests Taylor's (1993) concept of worldview functions as an important "frame" for organizational sensemaking (Weick, 1995a). Taylor argues that organizations use either an "activity" or "particle" orientation. An activity view focuses attention on organizational units while a particle view sees the organization from the point of view of the product or customer. Results from this study indicate that an organization's worldview functions as an overarching metaphor that influences sensemaking and decision-making processes, and that the worldview perspective in retrospective accounts may differ from that of the participants themselves.

In the process of knowledge discovery, workers examine available information in order to make sense of it. By sensemaking, we mean interacting with and operating on the information with a variety of information processing mechanisms [3,18]. Previously, we introduced a concept that uses the spreadsheet metaphor with cells containing visualizations of complex data. In this paper, we extend and apply a cognitive model called "visual sensemaking " to the Visualization Spreadsheet. We use the task of making sense of a large Web site as a concrete example through out the paper for demonstration. Using a variety of visualization techniques, such as the Disk Tree and Cone Tree, we show that the interactions of the Visualization Spreadsheet help users draw conclusions from the overall relationships of the entire information set.

Human Centered Systems in the Perspective of Organizational and Social Informatics