sensemaking

As a conversational process, the World Café is an innovative yet simple methodology for hosting conversations about questions that matter. These conversations link and build on each other as people move between groups, cross-pollinate ideas, and discover new insights into the questions or issues that are most important in their life, work, or community. As a process, the World Café can evoke and make visible the collective intelligence of any group, thus increasing people's capacity for effective action in pursuit of common aims.

Why Conversation Cafés? Promoting community, democracy and wisdom world-wide through generating millions of open, respectful public conversations.

X-Media addresses the issue of knowledge management in complex distributed environments. It will study, develop and implement large scale methodologies and techniques for knowledge management able to support sharing and reuse of knowledge that is distributed in different media (images, documents and data) and repositories (data bases, knowledge bases, document repositories, etc.). The project started in March 2006 and will last for 4 years. It has a budget topping Euro 13.6M, (9.9M from the EU). 15 partners are involved from UK, Germany, Italy, France, Slovenia, Greece and Norway.

Academic Researcher Social Network

The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) is one of the largest and most prestigious professional associations of its kind. Formed as the American Society of Zoologists through a 1902 merger of two societies, the Central Naturalists and the American Morphological Society, its focus has remained to integrate the many fields of specialization which occur in the broad field of biology. Throughout most of its history the society was known as the American Society of Zoologists and changed its name to the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in 1996 to reflect the scientific breadth, integrative approaches, and interests of its membership across all disciplines of biology. The SICB is organized around disciplinary divisions, each relevant to a major segment of biology.

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium of leading biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods allowing scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. Our visionis that all biomedical knowledge and data are disseminated on the Internet using principled ontologies, such that they are semantically interoperable and useful for improving biomedical science and clinical care. Our resources include the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library, the Open Biomedical Data (OBD) repositories, and tools for accessing and using this information in research. The Center collaborates with biomedical researchers conducting Driving Biological Projects to enable outside research and stimulate technology development in the Center. The Center undertakes outreach and educational activities (Biomedical Informatics Program) to train future researchers to use biomedical ontologies and related tools with the goal of enhancing scientific discovery.

Welcome to the biology portal. Biology, from the Greek words bios (life) and the suffix -ology, meaning study of, is a branch of science. It is concerned with the characteristics and behaviors of organisms, how species and individuals come into existence, and the interactions they have with each other and with their environment. Biology encompasses a broad spectrum of academic fields that are often viewed as independent disciplines. Together, they study life over a wide range of scales.

The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) defines a communication protocol used to exchange biological annotations. It is motivated by the idea that such annotations should not be provided by single centralized databases, but should instead be spread over multiple sites. Data distribution, performed by DAS servers, is separated from visualization, which is done by DAS clients. DAS is a client-server system in which a single client integrates information from multiple servers. It allows a single machine to gather up sequence annotation information from multiple distant web sites, collate the information, and display it to the user in a single view. Little coordination is needed among the various information providers. DAS is heavily used in the genome bioinformatics community. Over the last years we have also seen growing acceptance in the protein sequence and structure communities.

BioJava is an open-source project dedicated to providing a Java framework for processing biological data. It includes objects for manipulating biological sequences, file parsers, DAS client and server support, access to BioSQL and Ensembl databases, tools for making sequence analysis GUIs and powerful analysis and statistical routines including a dynamic programming toolkit.

BioForge was created to encourage online collaborations between diverse research groups under BiOS-based licensing schemes. CAMBIA believes that enabling technologies in the life sciences need to remain available to anyone to improve or use in new innovations, both commercial and non-commercial.

BiOS is a response to inequities in food security, nutrition, health, natural resource management and energy. Our goal is to democratise problem solving to enable diverse solutions through decentralised innovation. Open Source We promote an innovation paradigm that focuses on a distinction between the tools of innovation and the products. We promote licenses that couple rights with responsibilities to foster efficient development, improvement, sharing and use of technology. Open Science We create and share new biological enabling technologies and platforms that can be used to deliver innovations. We develop new licensing and distributive collaboration mechanisms that have resonance with the open source software movement, but are tailored for biological innovation. Open Society We enhance the transparency, accessibility and capability to use all the tools of science, whether patented, open access or public domain.

The ISCB is a scholarly society dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of living systems through computation

PLoS Computational Biology is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal featuring works of exceptional significance that further our understanding of living systems at all scales through the application of computational methods. It is the official journal of the International Society for Computational Biology.

Free online toolkit that makes it easy to work in groups

What. WatchBlog is a multiple-editor weblog broken up into three major political affiliations, each with its own blog: the Democrats, the Republicans and the Third Party (covering everything outside the two major parties). Why. Let's face it, politics is confusing. Sometimes it's difficult to know who to believe, who to listen to and who to support. We're here to help. Posting on a regular basis are editors representing each major party. Stay informed.

To begin using SemantiFind, you must go to www.google.com - the service won't work from iGoogle or your Google search box in your browser. After you enter your search term in the box as usual, you then are prompted to indicate the precise meaning of your term before starting your query. This is done through the use of a drop-down box where specific terms and their definitions display. For example, if you were searching for "Georgia," you would be presented with the option to select either the U.S. state or the former soviet republic.

Semantic Exchange is a collaborative industry news, research, and education initiative about all things web 3.0 and semantic web, and sponsored by industry leading semantic technology providers.

RPI's Tetherless World Constellation will address this emerging area of "Web Science," focusing on the World Wide Web and it's future use. Faculty in the constellation will explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, will enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and will develop new technologies and languages that expand the capabilities of the Web. We will use powerful scientific and mathematical techniques from many disciplines to explore the modeling of the Web from network- and information- centric views. Our goals will include making the next generation web natural to use while being responsive to the growing variety of policy and social needs, whether in the area of privacy, intellectual property, general compliance, or provenance. The Tetherless World Constellation will design new techniques to explore social, scientific, and legal impacts of the evolving technologies deployed on the Web.

The Biomedical Grid Terminology (BiomedGT) is an open, collaboratively developed terminology for translational research. BiomedGT builds on the strengths of the NCI Thesaurus, including concept orientation, description logic, and public accessibility. While the current terminology has been seeded with NCI Thesaurus content, it is being restructured to facilitate open content development. The goal is to evolve BiomedGT into a set of federated sub-terminologies, with content maintained by experts in the relevant research communities.