sensemaking

Monthly Digests: Interesting snippets of information from the semantic web frontiers.

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan institution established and funded by Congress. Its goals are to help prevent and resolve violent international conflicts, promote post-conflict stability and development, and increase conflict management capacity, tools, and intellectual capital worldwide.

I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It's a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It's also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It's an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It's a discussion that doesn't just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It's collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

When your readers search for information in real life, their first step is to typically seek out a friend for the answer. If their friend doesn't have the answer they need, someone in that friend's social network may. Eventually, they get an answer they trust, because it came from a source they trust. Your readers can now have that same experience on the web and it all starts with the source they trust. That source is you, the blog publisher.

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.

We are creating the world's most trusted encyclopedia and knowledge base.

ESSENCE is an immersive internet experiment, and a face-face conference. It invites human-centred technologists, climate scientists, policymakers, and any other stakeholder with a view on some part of the climate change debate, to experience and reflect on a new generation of software tools. Build, structure, summarise and navigate the science and policy arguments underpinning climate challenge. Think of it as a visual Wikipedia, a collective intelligence, to organise the key issues, options and arguments.

The World Public Forum begins its history in 2002 when representatives of civil society from Russia, India and Greece organized the International Program "Dialogue of Civilizations". Vladimir Yakunin, Jagdish Kapur and Nicolas Papanicolaou have become founders and co-chairmen of the Forum. The forum "Dialogue of civilizations" has become a practical realization of the UNGA resolution "Global Agenda for Dialogue among Civilizations" accepted on November 9th, 2001 at the initiative of the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Mohammad Khatami.

J-Lab helps journalists and citizens use digital technologies to develop new ways for people to participate in public life with projects on innovations in journalism, citizen media, interactive news stories, entrepreneurship, training and research and publications.

The GridSphere portal framework provides an open-source portlet based Web portal. GridSphere enables developers to quickly develop and package third-party portlet web applications that can be run and administered within the GridSphere portlet container. Here you will find the GridSphere portal framework available for download and documentation related to the installation and development of portlets using GridSphere.

GRIA is a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) designed to support B2B collaborations through service provision across organisational boundaries in a secure, interoperable and flexible manner.

We believe individuals from the general public have a vital role to play in making personal genomes useful. We are recruiting volunteers who are willing to share their genome sequence and many types of personal information with the research community and the general public, so that together we will be better able to advance our understanding of genetic and environmental contributions to human traits and to improve our ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent illness. Learn more about how to participate in the Personal Genome Project.

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.

"Cobalt" is an open source virtual world browser and construction toolkit application being developed at Duke University. Cobalt will make it possible for people to easily create, publish, access, and participate in a network of linked virtual worlds. Currently in pre-alpha and built using the Croquet open source software platform, Cobalt uses peer-based messaging to eliminate the need for virtual world servers and makes it very simple to create and share secure virtual worlds that run on all major software operating systems.

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.

I am not the first, nor the only one, to believe a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet. No one can dispute the scale or reality of this vast connectivity. What's uncertain is, what is it? Is this global web of computers, servers and trunk lines a mere mechanical circuit, a very large tool, o

The full content of the book can now be downloaded for free.

Science cafés are live events that involve a face-to-face conversation with a scientist about current science topics. They are open to everyone, and take place in casual settings like pubs and coffeehouses.