116,394 research outputs found
Net Gains: A Handbook for Network Builders Seeking Social Change
This handbook provides the growing number of people who are developing networks for social change with practical advice based on the experiences of network builders, case studies of networks small and large, local and international, and emerging scientific knowledge about "connectivity." It is intended to join, complement, and spur other efforts to capture and make widely available what is being learned in the business, government, and civil sectors about why and how to use networks, rather than solitary organizations, to generate large-scale impact
Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) in the Semantic Web: A Multi-Dimensional Review
Since the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) specification and its
SKOS eXtension for Labels (SKOS-XL) became formal W3C recommendations in 2009 a
significant number of conventional knowledge organization systems (KOS)
(including thesauri, classification schemes, name authorities, and lists of
codes and terms, produced before the arrival of the ontology-wave) have made
their journeys to join the Semantic Web mainstream. This paper uses "LOD KOS"
as an umbrella term to refer to all of the value vocabularies and lightweight
ontologies within the Semantic Web framework. The paper provides an overview of
what the LOD KOS movement has brought to various communities and users. These
are not limited to the colonies of the value vocabulary constructors and
providers, nor the catalogers and indexers who have a long history of applying
the vocabularies to their products. The LOD dataset producers and LOD service
providers, the information architects and interface designers, and researchers
in sciences and humanities, are also direct beneficiaries of LOD KOS. The paper
examines a set of the collected cases (experimental or in real applications)
and aims to find the usages of LOD KOS in order to share the practices and
ideas among communities and users. Through the viewpoints of a number of
different user groups, the functions of LOD KOS are examined from multiple
dimensions. This paper focuses on the LOD dataset producers, vocabulary
producers, and researchers (as end-users of KOS).Comment: 31 pages, 12 figures, accepted paper in International Journal on
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Towards evaluation design for smart city development
Smart city developments integrate digital, human, and physical systems in the built environment. With growing urbanization and widespread developments, identifying suitable evaluation methodologies is important. Case-study research across five UK cities - Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Peterborough - revealed that city evaluation approaches were principally project-focused with city-level evaluation plans at early stages. Key challenges centred on selecting suitable evaluation methodologies to evidence urban value and outcomes, addressing city authority requirements. Recommendations for evaluation design draw on urban studies and measurement frameworks, capitalizing on big data opportunities and developing appropriate, valid, credible integrative approaches across projects, programmes and city-level developments
Connectivism: a knowledge learning theory for the digital age?
<b>Background</b> The emergence of the internet, particularly Web 2.0 has provided access to the views and opinions of a wide range of individuals opening up opportunities for new forms of communication and knowledge formation. Previous ways of navigating and filtering available information are likely to prove ineffective in these new contexts. Connectivism is one of the most prominent of the network learning theories which have been developed for e-learning environments. It is beginning to be recognised by medical educators. This paper aims to examine connectivism and its potential application.<p></p>
<b>Content</b> The conceptual framework and application of connectivism are presented along with an outline of the main criticisms. Itsâ potential application in medical education is then considered.<p></p>
<b>Conclusions</b> While connectivism provides a useful lens through which teaching and learning using digital technologies can be better understood and managed, further development and testing is required. There is unlikely to be a single theory that will explain learning in technological enabled networks. Educators have an important role to play in online network learning
From Artifacts to Aggregations: Modeling Scientific Life Cycles on the Semantic Web
In the process of scientific research, many information objects are
generated, all of which may remain valuable indefinitely. However, artifacts
such as instrument data and associated calibration information may have little
value in isolation; their meaning is derived from their relationships to each
other. Individual artifacts are best represented as components of a life cycle
that is specific to a scientific research domain or project. Current cataloging
practices do not describe objects at a sufficient level of granularity nor do
they offer the globally persistent identifiers necessary to discover and manage
scholarly products with World Wide Web standards. The Open Archives
Initiative's Object Reuse and Exchange data model (OAI-ORE) meets these
requirements. We demonstrate a conceptual implementation of OAI-ORE to
represent the scientific life cycles of embedded networked sensor applications
in seismology and environmental sciences. By establishing relationships between
publications, data, and contextual research information, we illustrate how to
obtain a richer and more realistic view of scientific practices. That view can
facilitate new forms of scientific research and learning. Our analysis is
framed by studies of scientific practices in a large, multi-disciplinary,
multi-university science and engineering research center, the Center for
Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS).Comment: 28 pages. To appear in the Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology (JASIST
Mapping the open education landscape: citation network analysis of historical open and distance education research
The term open education has recently been used to refer to topics such as Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Historically its roots lie in civil approaches to education and open universities, but this research is rarely referenced or acknowledged in current interpretations. In this article the antecedents of the modern open educational movement are examined, as the basis for connecting the various strands of research. Using a citation analysis method the key references are extracted and their relationships mapped. This work reveals eight distinct sub-topics within the broad open education area, with relatively little overlap. The implications for this are discussed and methods of improving inter-topic research are proposed
Desire Lines: Open Educational Collections, Memory and the Social Machine
This paper delineates the initial ideas around the development of the Co-Curate North East project. The idea of computerised machines which have a social use and impact was central to the development of the project. The project was designed with and for schools and communities as a digital platform which would collect and aggregate âmemoryâ resources and collections around local area studies and social identity. It was a co-curation process supported by museums and curators which was about the âmeshworkâ between âofficialâ and âunofficialâ archives and collections and the ways in which materials generated from within the schools and community groups could themselves be re-narrated and exhibited online as part of self-organised learning experiences. This paper looks at initial ideas of social machines and the ways in machines can be used in identity and memory studies. It examines ideas of navigation and visualisation of data and concludes with some initial findings from the early stages of the project about the potential for machines and educational work
Astro-WISE: Chaining to the Universe
The recent explosion of recorded digital data and its processed derivatives
threatens to overwhelm researchers when analysing their experimental data or
when looking up data items in archives and file systems. While current hardware
developments allow to acquire, process and store 100s of terabytes of data at
the cost of a modern sports car, the software systems to handle these data are
lagging behind. This general problem is recognized and addressed by various
scientific communities, e.g., DATAGRID/EGEE federates compute and storage power
over the high-energy physical community, while the astronomical community is
building an Internet geared Virtual Observatory, connecting archival data.
These large projects either focus on a specific distribution aspect or aim to
connect many sub-communities and have a relatively long trajectory for setting
standards and a common layer. Here, we report "first light" of a very different
solution to the problem initiated by a smaller astronomical IT community. It
provides the abstract "scientific information layer" which integrates
distributed scientific analysis with distributed processing and federated
archiving and publishing. By designing new abstractions and mixing in old ones,
a Science Information System with fully scalable cornerstones has been
achieved, transforming data systems into knowledge systems. This break-through
is facilitated by the full end-to-end linking of all dependent data items,
which allows full backward chaining from the observer/researcher to the
experiment. Key is the notion that information is intrinsic in nature and thus
is the data acquired by a scientific experiment. The new abstraction is that
software systems guide the user to that intrinsic information by forcing full
backward and forward chaining in the data modelling.Comment: To be published in ADASS XVI ASP Conference Series, 2006, R. Shaw, F.
Hill and D. Bell, ed
Open semantic service networks
Online service marketplaces will soon be part of the economy to scale the provision of specialized multi-party services through automation and standardization. Current research, such as the *-USDL service description language family, is already deïŹning the basic building blocks to model the next generation of business services. Nonetheless, the developments being made do not target to interconnect services via service relationships. Without the concept of relationship, marketplaces will be seen as mere functional silos containing service descriptions. Yet, in real economies, all services are related and connected. Therefore, to address this gap we introduce the concept of open semantic service network (OSSN), concerned with the establishment of rich relationships between services. These networks will provide valuable knowledge on the global service economy, which can be exploited for many socio-economic and scientiïŹc purposes such as service network analysis, management, and control
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