sensemaking

Topaz is a nonprofit organization of focused on developing open source software around collaborative creation, management and sharing of information.

The U.S. intelligence agencies' internal wiki Intellipedia has gotten glowing press reports and accolades, as well as input from thousands of analysts. However, the wiki still struggles to make a permanent home in the spy agencies, according to one of its evangelists.

An unbook is more like software: 1. An unbook is never finished, but rather continually updated, based on feedback from users andtheir evolving needs. 2. An unbook is released in versions. As in open source software, version 1.0 of an unbook is a significant milestone, indicating that it is stable and reliable enough for use by the general public. The significance of a new release is indicated by the size of the gap: For example, the difference between 1.1 and 1.1.3 is minor, while the difference between 1.1 and 2.0 is major. 3. An unbook is supported by a community of users who share their experiences and best practices with each other, and help each other troubleshoot problems encountered in their practice areas. An unbook's community is a very real part of the unbook's development team. An unbook is mindware: software for the mind.

While online spreadsheets like Google Docs make it very easy for anyone to embed tabular data in websites, let's explore some new alternatives that you may find more useful depending on the requirement.

On January 07, 2009, OASIS announced the submission of a draft charter for a new OASIS Technical Committee to define an integrated collaboration object model supporting a complete range of enterprise collaboration activities. The proposed data model is based upon the Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM), to be contributed by Oracle to the ICOM TC. The new standard model, interface, and protocol would support contextual collaboration within business processes for an integrated collaboration environment which includes communication artifacts (e.g., email, instant message, telephony, RSS), teamwork artifacts (such as project and meeting workspaces, discussion forums, real-time conferences, presence, activities, subscriptions, wikis, and blogs), content artifacts (e.g., text and multi-media contents, contextual connections, taxonomies, folksonomies, tags, recommendations, social bookmarking, saved searches), and coordination artifacts (such as address books, calendars, tasks) etc.

I'm going to have more to say about data, databases, and intellectual property rights in the coming months. This longish post provides a basic primer on how U.S. copyright law applies to databases.

ASMALLWORLD is the world's leading private online community that captures an existing international network of people who are connected by three degrees of separation. Members share similar backgrounds, interests and perspectives. ASMALLWORLD's unique platform offers powerful tools and user generated content to help members manage their private, social and business lives. Membership to ASMALLWORLD is by invitation only, which is part of what makes this network unique, and the connections, authentic. Trusted and loyal ASW members who meet certain criteria have the privilege of inviting a limited number of their friends to the network.

DeepPeep is a search engine specialized in Web forms. The current beta version tracks 13,000 forms across 7 domains. DeepPeep helps you discover the entry points to content in Deep Web (aka Hidden Web) sites, including online databases and Web services.

Social Enterprise Innovation Network members help each other get to the next level of impact faster and more effectively thanks to accelerated knowledge discovery, rapid skill development, and new partnership opportunities.

ZooKeeper is a high-performance coordination service for distributed applications. It exposes common services - such as naming, configuration management, synchronization, and group services - in a simple interface so you don't have to write them from scratch. You can use it off-the-shelf to implement consensus, group management, leader election, and presence protocols. And you can build on it for your own, specific needs.

Individual-intelligence research, from a neurological perspective, describes the cortex as a medium for performing conceptual abstraction and specification. This idea has been used to explain how motor-cortex regions responsible for different behavioral modalities such as writing and speaking can express the same general concept represented in the cortex. For example, the concept of a dog, abstractly represented in the higher-layers of the cortex, can either be written or spoken about depending on the context. Abstract models in the higher-layers propagate activation patterns down the cortical hierarchy to the desired region of the motor-cortex for worldly implementation. In this paper, the individual-intelligence framework is expanded to incorporate collective-intelligence within a hyper-cortical construct. This hyper-cortex is a multi-layered network used to represent abstract collective concepts. This collective-intelligence framework plays an important role in understanding how collective-intelligence systems can be engineered to handle collective problem-solving. To conclude the paper, five common problems in the scientific community are solved using an artificial hyper-cortex generated from digital-library metadata.

Many institutions, from neolithic villages to the maniples of the Roman army, seem to be organised around the Dunbar number.

Ontology Repository

NCBO Seminar Series talks occur via the Web and teleconference at 10:00AM, Pacific time, the 1st and 3rd Wednesday of every month. This series aims to showcase new projects, technologies and ideas in biomedical ontology by featuring the work of a different collaborator each session. It is open to anyone interested, regardless of location or affiliation.

The three most important aspects of an Open Science model are: 1) Open Access to scientific journals; 2) access to the raw material as Open Data; and 3) access to the transparent Open Process of the research methodologies itself.

What if you could contribute to a computational (Map-Reduce) job by simply pointing your browser to a URL? Surely your social network wouldn't mind opening a background tab to help you crunch a dataset or two! Instead of focusing on high-throughput proprietary protocols and high-efficiency data planes to distribute and deliver the data, we could use battle tested solutions: HTTP and your favorite browser.

SemanticWiki -- a virtual mini-series jointly organized by FZI Karlsruhe, Mayo Clinic, Ontolog, RPI Tetherless World Constellation and Salzburg Research, Austria

We are often told that the best things in life are free, but few have ever tried to build it into a business model. Yet it is curious that while financial capitalism is in global meltdown, a completely different kind of entrepreneurial activity - call it commune-ism - is rising, from an admittedly low base.

Computing all human knowledge from the web