sensemaking

The Budapest Open Access Initiative arises from a small but lively meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute (OSI) on December 1-2, 2001. The purpose of the meeting was to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet. The participants represented many points of view, many academic disciplines, and many nations, and had experience with many of the ongoing initiatives that make up the open access movement. In Budapest they explored how the separate initiatives could work together to achieve broader, deeper, and faster success. They explored the most effective and affordable strategies for serving the interests of research, researchers, and the institutions and societies that support research. Finally, they explored how OSI and other foundations could use their resources most productively to aid the transition to open access and to make open-access publishing economically self-sustaining. The result is the Budapest Open Access Initiative. It is at once a statement of principle, a statement of strategy, and a statement of commitment.

CKAN is the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, a registry of open knowledge packages and projects (and a few closed ones). CKAN is the place to search for open knowledge resources as well as register your own.

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2004 with the simple aim of promoting (and protecting) open knowledge. It is our belief that open approaches to the production and distribution of knowledge can deliver far-reaching social and commercial benefits in a variety of areas.

Businesses are moving beyond marketing in virtual worlds and are exploring other applications of virtual worlds (see a recent BusinessWeek article & slideshow). Enabling collaboration among remote workers is one such application (see our past posts and paper on this topic). A variety of virtual world options or platforms have been available for supporting remote work and these include Second Life, Qwaq, Forterra, and Tixeo. Last week I had the rare opportunity to see an emerging virtual world called Wonderland, the product of an open source project, Project Wonderland, sponsored by Sun Microsystems. During a conference call with our colleague Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems, Becky Jestice and I were lucky enough to get a tour of Wonderland. Nicole graciously spent over an hour to show us some of the impressive features of Wonderland. The tour was so impressive that I want to devote a post to some key aspects of Wonderland: * Virtual meeting participants can use voice to communicate with one another; * If necessary, participants can connect to a Wonderland meeting via telephone; * Private conversations between participants are possible in a virtual meeting; * Participants can share applications; and * Anyone can try out Wonderland (see instructions below).

Reminds me of HyperCard and Tinderbox

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources and learning projects for all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. We invite teachers, students, and researchers to join us in creating open educational resources and collaborative learning communities.

Rapid advances in information technologies continue to drive a flood of data and analysis techniques in ecological and environmental sciences. Using these resources more effectively and taking advantage of associated cross-disciplinary research opportunities poses a major challenge to both scientists and information technologists. These challenges are now being addressed in projects that apply knowledge representation and Semantic Web technologies to problems in discovering and integrating ecological data and data analysis techniques. In this paper, we present an overview of the major ontological components of our project, SEEK ("Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge"). We describe the concepts and models that are represented in each, and present a discussion of potential applications of these ontologies on the Semantic Web

In our work the traditional bipartite model of ontologies is extended with the social dimension, leading to a tripartite model of actors, concepts and instances.We demonstrate the application of this representation by showing how community-based semantics emerges from this model through a process of graph transformation. We illustrate ontology emergence by two case studies, an analysis of a large scale folksonomy system and a novel method for the extraction of community-based ontologies from Web pages.

This article describes the motivation for and development of a project I have called PepysMap. PepysMap was inspired by the excellent 'blog of the diary of Samuel Pepys run by Phil Gyford 1. Phil posts diary entries day by day (currently for the year 1662). Each blog post contains the text of the diary entry hyperlinked to pages containing detail of people, places and cultural artifacts referenced from the text. The goal of PepysMap is to shadow the development of the Pepys blog by creating a topic map for each diary entry, showing the relationships between people, places and cultural artifacts.

This poster presents ongoing efforts to enrich the RDF-based semantic Web with the tools of the Historical Event Markup and Linking Project (Heml). An experimental RDF vocabulary for Heml data is illustrated, as well as its use in storing and querying encoded historical events. Finally, the practical use of Heml-RDF is illustrated with a toolkit for the Piggy Bank semantic browser plugin.

The Historical Event Markup and Linking project provides a means of coordinating and navigating disparate historical materials on the internet. It includes 1. an XML schema for historical events which describes the events' participants, dates, location and keywords; the schema associates these with source materials in print or on the web. 2. XSLT stylesheets that combine conforming documents and generate lists, maps and graphical timelines out of them. Heml integrates these resources using the Cocoon2 web publishing engine.

Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)-the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references-and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and-on many major research and library sites-find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one's personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).

Dialogue, Argument and Deliberation on Earth Issues

Our focus is on what we are finding to be a powerful and intruiging intersection: the meeting of Hypermedia and Discourse - both theory and technology. Our interests are conceptual, and intensely practical: understanding and practicing the co-evolution of new digital media and practices for discussing and arguing about problems.

Science Commons designs strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. We identify unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develop technology to make research data and materials easier to find and use.

CK-12, a non-profit organization launched in 2006, aims to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide. Using an open-source, collaborative, and web-based compilation model that can be manifested as an adaptive textbook - termed the "FlexBook", CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational web texts.

Annotea Ubimarks is part of Annotea social bookmarks and topics work in Mozilla. It lets any user familiar with the common bookmark user interface metaphora to create metadata for Semantic Web while the complexities of the Semantic Web are hidden from the users. It also offers users better means to share and combine bookmark data and bookmark categories, or topics from several locations or with other metadata. Topics in Annotea can be very simple tags or they can form hierarchies.

HarvANA uses a standardized but extensible RDF model for representing the annotations/tags and OAI-PMH to harvest the annotations/tags from distributed community servers. The harvested annotations are aggregated with the authoritative metadata in a centralized metadata store.