Collaborating communities : the RDA experience and its implications for common information environments

This paper is presented as a case study which describes the interactions between several communities with a common interest in developing standards related to bibliographic information retrieval. Such interactions have mainly taken the form of a meeting followed by a programme of substantive work mutually agreed and carried out as a collaborative venture between technical representatives of those communities. The case study is therefore presented in the chronological order of those meetings

Integrating musicology's heterogeneous data sources for better exploration

Musicologists have to consult an extraordinarily heterogeneous body of primary and secondary sources during all stages of their research. Many of these sources are now available online, but the historical dispersal of material across libraries and archives has now been replaced by segregation of data and metadata into a plethora of online repositories. This segregation hinders the intelligent manipulation of metadata, and means that extracting large tranches of basic factual information or running multi-part search queries is still enormously and needlessly time consuming. To counter this barrier to research, the “musicSpace” project is experimenting with integrating access to many of musicology’s leading data sources via a modern faceted browsing interface that utilises Semantic Web and Web2.0 technologies such as RDF and AJAX. This will make previously intractable search queries tractable, enable musicologists to use their time more efficiently, and aid the discovery of potentially significant information that users did not think to look for. This paper outlines our work to date

Enriching ontological user profiles with tagging history for multi-domain recommendations

Many advanced recommendation frameworks employ ontologies of various complexities to model individuals and items, providing a mechanism for the expression of user interests and the representation of item attributes. As a result, complex matching techniques can be applied to support individuals in the discovery of items according to explicit and implicit user preferences. Recently, the rapid adoption of Web2.0, and the proliferation of social networking sites, has resulted in more and more users providing an increasing amount of information about themselves that could be exploited for recommendation purposes. However, the unification of personal information with ontologies using the contemporary knowledge representation methods often associated with Web2.0 applications, such as community tagging, is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we propose a method for the unification of tags with ontologies by grounding tags to a shared representation in the form of Wordnet and Wikipedia. We incorporate individuals' tagging history into their ontological profiles by matching tags with ontology concepts. This approach is preliminary evaluated by extending an existing news recommendation system with user tagging histories harvested from popular social networking sites

A Web2.0 Strategy for the Collaborative Analysis of Complex Bioimages

Loyek C, Kölling J, Langenkämper D, Niehaus K, Nattkemper TW. A Web2.0 Strategy for the Collaborative Analysis of Complex Bioimages. In: Gama J, Bradley E, Hollmén J, eds. Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis X: 10th International Symposium, IDA 2011, Porto, Portugal, October 29-31, 2011. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol 7014. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2011: 258-269

Geospatial data integration with Semantic Web services: the eMerges approach

Geographic space still lacks the semantics allowing a unified view of spatial data. Indeed, as a unique but all encompassing domain, it presents specificities that geospatial applications are still unable to handle. Moreover, to be useful, new spatial applications need to match human cognitive abilities of spatial representation and reasoning. In this context, eMerges, an approach to geospatial data integration based on Semantic Web Services (SWS), allows the unified representation and manipulation of heterogeneous spatial data sources. eMerges provides this integration by mediating legacy spatial data sources to high-level spatial ontologies through SWS and by presenting for each object context dependent affordances. This generic approach is applied here in the context of an emergency management use case developed in collaboration with emergency planners of public agencies

A Service based Development Environment on Web 2.0 Platforms

Governments are investing on the IT adoption and promoting the socalled e-economies as a way to improve competitive advantages. One of the main government’s actions is to provide internet access to the most part of the population, people and organisations. Internet provides the required support for connecting organizations, people and geographically distributed developments teams. Software developments are tightly related to the availability of tools and platforms needed for products developments. Internet is becoming the most widely used platform. Software forges such as SourceForge provide an integrated tools environment gathering a set of tools that are suited for each development with a low cost. In this paper we propose an innovating approach based on Web2.0, services and a method engineering approach for software developments. This approach represents one of the possible usages of the internet of the future

How to Create an Innovation Accelerator

Too many policy failures are fundamentally failures of knowledge. This has become particularly apparent during the recent financial and economic crisis, which is questioning the validity of mainstream scholarly paradigms. We propose to pursue a multi-disciplinary approach and to establish new institutional settings which remove or reduce obstacles impeding efficient knowledge creation. We provided suggestions on (i) how to modernize and improve the academic publication system, and (ii) how to support scientific coordination, communication, and co-creation in large-scale multi-disciplinary projects. Both constitute important elements of what we envision to be a novel ICT infrastructure called "Innovation Accelerator" or "Knowledge Accelerator".Comment: 32 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

The memory space: Exploring future uses of Web 2.0 and mobile internet through design interventions.

The QuVis Quantum Mechanics Visualization project aims to address challenges of quantum mechanics instruction through the development of interactive simulations for the learning and teaching of quantum mechanics. In this article, we describe evaluation of simulations focusing on two-level systems developed as part of the Institute of Physics Quantum Physics resources. Simulations are research-based and have been iteratively refined using student feedback in individual observation sessions and in-class trials. We give evidence that these simulations are helping students learn quantum mechanics concepts at both the introductory and advanced undergraduate level, and that students perceive simulations to be beneficial to their learning.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, 1 table; accepted for publication in the American Journal of Physic