Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Wiki for Professionals: VERY ambitious & exciting
While the name does not really inspire me ;-) this is an amazing initiative and the various quotes by researchers describing Barend Mons' project as visionary are completely justified. He (they) are trying to pull together the Semantic Web with a variety of biological databases and PubMed in a suped-up semantically-enhanced Wiki environment that is meant to be used by -- and be useful to -- biological researchers.
NIH and the Power of WIKIs (for science, medicine...)
A sign of the times, the NIH had a day long Wiki Fair where the NIH community were edumacated in the the capabilities of Wikis, including some case studies.
Quote Prospect
An earlier posting (Royal Society of Chemistry Semantic Publishing) of mine has been quoted by the RSC on their Project Prospect...

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

EU: 50M Euro for digital repositories for scientific data
The European Commissioner for Science and Research has announced (Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council and the European Economic and Social Committee on Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation) 50M euros to be put aside for a digital repository for scientific data. Wow! This is amazing news. I am hoping that this might spur Canada to wake up and do something similar, especially after having two reports discussing similar activities in Canada (National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data and National Data Archive Consultation Final Report: Building Infrastructure for Access to and Preservation of Research Data in Canada)


Friday, February 16, 2007

911.gov (or here in Canada, 911.gc.ca)
Following the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, much of the community relief effort was organized (by the community itself) though blogs and other collaborative web environments. Now in an article in Science (Public Health: 911.gov), Ben Shneiderman and Jennifer Preece are proposing that governments set up infrastructure to support the volunteer efforts and other community support of relief activities, using them to engage and communicate with volunteers.
-found at Nature News
Symposium: The Future of Electronic Literature
This looks like a very interesting meeting -- with significant international participation -- put on by the Electronic Literature Organization (the first time I've heard of the existance of this organization: my bad, but now I know about things like "Kinetic poetry [1,2] presented in Flash" and other things...) and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. This is a very different view of digital publishing than I am used to...
ACM Digital Library: > 1M entries !!
Just this month the ACM Digital Library exceeded one million entries. They have full-text for all of their publications going back 60 years (!! and add 50k items per year) & claim the space of being the definitive computing industry resource. I use their DL several times a week and have been a member for several years now...

It's kind of ironic that their one millionth article is titled "Spam and the Ongoing Battle for the Inbox"..

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Web 2.0 Video: A 0-60MPH tutorial
For those who are still trying to figure out what Web 2.0 is, or for those wanting a resource to explain it to their friends, or just wanting to see a very creative way of explaining an amorphous concept, Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us (YouTube video) is a wonderful, creative exploration of much that is Web 2.0. A creation of Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology & the Digital Ethnography Group. Kansas State University. Grab-you-engage-you-and-make-you-think communication at its best!
A must see: 2 thumbs up!




Monday, February 05, 2007

Open Source Meets Business Conference: The congress for CIOs, CTOs, and IT decision makers
This conference, held January 23 -26, in Nuernberg, Germany is the second annual. Its programme reveals how mature the Open Source ideal is and how extensively it is being embraced and understood by industry. It was structured into three parts (Investment Summit, Technology Summit, and Enterprise Summit - day 1, day 2), with titles such as:
  • Why do VCs invest in Open Source?
  • The Impact of Open Source Software on the Innovation and the Competitiveness of the ICT sector in Europe -- UNU-MERIT
  • Open Source and its role in the new IT ecosystem
  • Enterprise adoption of open source platforms and applications
  • Integrating Open Source into your business -- IBM
  • Avionics software engineering: Why Open Source? -- Airbus France
Royal Society of Chemistry Semantic Publishing
Project Prospect is an exciting effort by the RSC where "...journal papers will be enhanced so that their data can be read, indexed and intelligently searched by machine, a first step towards the "semantic web"." As someone working in the area of text retrieval and semantic web, this is a very exciting prospect. RSC's Project Prospect is reminiscent of Nature's Open Text Mining Interface (OTMI) effort -- in which I am also participating -- but in the case of Project Prospect, more semantic content will be exposed.
(YA) Copyright blog
A new blog (Collectanea!: Collected Perspectives On Copyright) focusing on the cultural, political and legal context of copyright has just been announced by the Center for Intellectual Property (CIP) at the University of Maryland University College...
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