sensemaking

A tag cloud is a list of words in different sizes and colors, with or without a sense of depth (3D), meant to represent the statistical importance of keywords mentioned in a particular document base (a blog, a website, twitter,…). It serves as an indicator of the relative importance of the use of certain ideas in the document base at hand. It is a bottom-up, very fuzzy method for the synthesis of knowledge from an arbitrarily big aggregate of (text) data. Because it rests entirely on statistics, very often there is absolutely no relationships between the keywords of a tag cloud. Worse even, if they existed (by pure chance), there is absolutely no way of finding out about the meaning of those relationships.

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

KenYersel is a community organisation which promotes informed and high quality discussions of critical issues. We combine argument visualisation and web-based technology with established participatory discussion techniques. These are used to facilitate discussions, providing a rich understanding as the basis for rational and accountable decision making. Central to the effectiveness of this process is the building of community. Our unique methodology comes from many years experience working with a wide variety of community groups, businesses and universities. The results have considerable authority as they come from the concerted effort of real critical thinking by large number of people.

This document defines a concise bounded description of a resource in terms of an RDF graph [5], as a general and broadly optimal unit of specific knowledge about that resource to be utilized by, and/or interchanged between, semantic web agents. Given a particular node in a particular RDF graph, a concise bounded description is a subgraph consisting of those statements which together constitute a focused body of knowledge about the resource denoted by that particular node. The precise nature of that subgraph will hopefully become clear given the definition, discussion and example provided below. Optimality is, of course, application dependent and it is not presumed that a concise bounded description is an optimal form of description for every application; however, it is presented herein as a reasonably general and broadly optimal form of description for many applications, and unless otherwise warranted, constitutes a reasonable default response to the request "tell me about this resource".

I've set up this site to provide space for me to share ideas with a "Board of Directors", so I can get feedback on refining the ideas, and advice on how and when to share these ideas. Bootstrapping Collective Intelligence: This represents my response to Christina Engelbart's challenge during her presentation, and the Program For The Future challenge. GTD.brain. This is my entry to the contest for how people are using the PersonalBrain to implement David Allen's Getting Things Done methods: RESOLVING: This is a 3-D framework I've been developing, most influenced by Bill's Appreciation-Influence-Control philosophy. Combinatorial Modeling: applying combinatorial theory to assigning values based on models of N-node systems

Seth Grimes is a business intelligence expert with a special interest in text analytics. In this conversation with host Jon Udell, he discusses how a new breed of tools is enabling companies to build "voice of the customer" applications that extract useful signals from the noisy chatter that's erupting everywhere online.

Recently twitterdata.org introduced a format for sending semantic triplets through Twitter. An alternative format is, of course, our RoboCrunch Action Protocol.

myExperiment makes it really easy to find, use and share scientific workflows and other files, and to build communities

There's a long-time debate between those who advocate for semantic markup, and those who believe that machine learning will eventually get us to the holy grail of a Semantic Web, one in which computer programs actually understand the meaning of what they see and read.

Sensing importance across a sea of dynamic systems with constantly changing data requires the accumulation and persistence of context. (I am using the term persistence here to mean storing/saving what one has observed and learned - in a database for example.)

Twitter Data is a simple, open, semi-structured data representation format for embedding machine-readable, yet human-friendly, data in Twitter messages. This data can then be transmitted, received, and interpreted in real time to enable powerful new kinds of applications to be built on the Twitter platform.

I am pleased to announce the release of Issue II of Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development. Our current editorial board of 32 undergraduate and graduate students worked with this issue's 23 authors to present to you an inspiring collection of written experiences and novel ideas of individuals passionate for the advancement of sustainable development.

Consilience, or the unity of knowledge (literally a "jumping together" of knowledge), has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos, inherently comprehensible by logical process, a vision at odds with mystical views in many cultures that surrounded the Hellenes. The rational view was recovered during the high Middle Ages, separated from theology during the Renaissance and found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment. Then, with the rise of the modern sciences, the sense of unity gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries. The converse of consilience in this way is Reductionism.

Text that redefines - or - How to redefine the text.

people don't necessarily want to solve puzzles on their own. They often enjoy attacking them in online collaborative groups that include dozens, sometimes millions, of fans. These groups are collectively far smarter than their individual members, and regular puzzles don't stand a chance against that many brains.

SCRIBO - Semi-automatic and Collaborative Retrieval of Information Based on Ontologies - aims at algorithms and collaborative free software for the automatic extraction of knowledge from texts and images, and for the semi-automatic annotation of digital documents.

The Drizzle project is building a database optimized for Cloud and Net applications. It is being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-cpu/core architecture. The code is originally derived from MySQL.