sensemaking

Solving the "digital divide" in Africa will not put food in mouths, knowledge in heads, clean water in households, or make healthcare accessible to those who need it most. Leveraging knowledge, skills, and capacities holds out the possibility of doing all of these things. This is what extending knowledge infrastructure is about: building robust and sustainable networks and communities that mobilize a broad range of information practices, institutions, and technologies (old and new) - and put these in the service of locally-defined needs, aspirations, and broad developmental goals. This report summarizes current thinking and action around African knowledge infrastructures.

Comparative Interoperability Project

The Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Method (OOHDM) (and its successor, the Semantic Hypermedia Design Method, SHDM) allow the concise specification and implementation of hypermedia (web) applications. This is achieved based on various models describing information (conceptual), navigation and interface aspects of these applications, and the mapping of these models into running applications, in various environements.

This paper presents two design patterns for the hypermedia domain: `Navigational Contexts' and `Information on Demand'. They are applied in two different aspects of hypermedia applications design: the design of healthy navigational structures and the design of understandable and usable hypermedia interfaces, respectively. These two patterns are part of an effort for developing a Pattern Language for that domain.

ClioPatria is the award winning, SWI-Prolog-based platform for Semantic Web Applications. It joins the SWI-Prolog RDF and HTTP infrastructure with a SeRQL/SPARQL query engine, interfacing to the The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) and libraries that support semantic search.

Open Office Toolkig

Introducing Acre: Freebase's integrated app development and hosting environment

A Digital Village is a space where a community expresses their identity though ICT and Digital Media. This may be from an artistic, heritage, or economic perspective or a mixture of all three.This can be done through poetry, digital stories, community newspapers online, image collections (old and new), audio (Internet radio, oral history), animations, video, and text. To engage in the activities the participants need to learn new skills and so the Digital Village also becomes a learning community.

A new model of evolution's origins traces the possible outlines of a critical and mysterious stage in Earth's infancy, when a few odd chemicals developed into the molecular ancestors of life as we know it.

A course in information studies was partly held in the virtual world of Second Life. Second Life was used as a platform to deliver lectures and as a place for organizing group assignments and having discussions. Students' opinions about Second Life were studied and compared to their opinions about more traditional methods in education. The results show a lower threshold for participation in lectures. According to the students, Second Life should not replace face-to-face education, but it could serve as an excellent addition to other more traditional methods and platforms used in education. The students also considered that lectures held in Second Life were much more "fun" than those using other methods. This particular aspect, and its effect on learning outcomes, requires further research. This research demonstrates that Second Life has potential as a learning environment in distance education.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced the launch of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Toolkit Union, a new open-source software community project organized to make document software more innovative, versatile and useful for business.

uClassify is a free web service where you can easily create your own text classifiers.

The Forecasting Principles site summarizes all useful knowledge about forecasting so that it can be used by researchers, practitioners, and educators. (Those who might want to challenge this are invited to submit missing information.) This knowledge is provided as principles (guidelines, prescriptions, rules, conditions, action statements, or advice about what to do in given situations).

Welcome to DeepDebate! We are passionate about ideas and are exploring new ways to improve online conversations. In order to do this, we've built a framework which makes it easier for a very large number of people to create a structured conversation.

Faviki is a tool that brings together social bookmarking and Wikipedia. It lets you bookmark web pages using Wikipedia's terms. In Faviki, everybody uses the same names for tags from the world's largest collection of knowledge!

ESSENCE: E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change is an immersive internet experiment, culminating in a face-face conference. We want to build a collective intelligence resource on the climate change debate. This is analogous to Wikipedia, but decidely not enforcing a "neutral point of view". We are going to put through their paces tools tuned for mapping the key issues, options, arguments and evidence on the different dillemmas - and reflect on how effective the current tools are.

The talk you are about to hear is the result of a lengthy process on my part. My specialty is in thinking about and, unfortunately, predicting collapse. My method is based on comparison: I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and, since I am also familiar with the details of the situation in the United States, I can make comparisons between these two failed superpowers.

The global spread of the H5N1 avian influenza has already extensively damaged economies worldwide and food security in developing countries. The spread of infection to new ecosystems results in viral adaptation to new hosts, including humans, which inevitably amplifies the potential for pandemic flu. H5N1 represents an unprecedented model of how influenza infections may become widespread. It is recognized that avian influenza viruses may be the progenitors of the next human pandemic virus, and for this reason their genetic evolution should be monitored and investigated in a timely manner. The full support of the international scientific community is therefore urgently required to better understand the spread and evolution of the virus, and the determinants of its transmissibility and pathogenicity in humans. This in turn demands that scientists with different fields of expertise have full access to comprehensive genetic sequence, clinical, and epidemiological data from both animal and human virus isolates.