Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web

What’s cool about tags is that you can easily tag the same information with multiple tags. Does the information fall in #techcomm, #contentstrategy, and #findability disciplines? You don’t have to choose one folder to assign the content to. With tags, resources can live in multiple places at once.

Tagging is emerging as one of the most common ways to organize resources on the web. Smith notes that Delicious, a social bookmarking site that first appeared in 2003, was one of the first instances of tagging to emerge online. However, he also notes that classification and metadata strategies have been ongoing for centuries, with the Dewey Decimal system as one of the prime examples.

You can read the whole blog entry at http://idratherbewriting.com/2011/12/26/using-tags-to-increase-findability/

Have more fun doing everyday things! GreenGoose is a place where you can download and play real-world apps.

Feel closer to those important to you. Examples: has your dog been walked or fed? Are the kids home from school? Has your grandma taken her medicine?

Make playtime more about playing together. Sensors on toys make it fun to share and make new friends.

With more than 100 sensors in development, we have a lot more fun on its way. Keep an eye out for new sensors to add to your base-station. For developers, we have a developer’s page so you dig into our API and get information about upcoming sensors!

More info at http://www.greengoose.com

You can read the complete Badgeville’s announcement at http://www.badgeville.com/?q=news/announcements/badgeville-launches-enterprise-cloud-connector-program

IBM “Master Inventor” Michael Paolini believes being rewarded in real time for improving one’s habits is exactly what will affect human behavior and help people become healthier. One of the inventors of a new IBM patent “Providing consumers with incentives for healthy eating habits”, Paolini says the “method, system, and program” was created so that it can be implemented in a variety of ways to accommodate groups with very different needs – be it your health insurance company, your gluten-free diet group, or your employer. But in order for the program to work, use of the system must be voluntary and trust has to first be established.

You can read the whole article at http://www.foodandtechconnect.com/site/2012/01/23/new-ibm-patent-allows-licensees-to-incentivize-good-eating-habits/

You can find all the information at http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/01/18/visual-studio-achievements-program-brings-gamification-to-development.aspx

Achivy provides you to see your and your friends’:

• Achievement “badges”
• Achievement levels and scores
• Top and recent users for all applications
• Progress bars and analytics to see how close you are to complete your tasks that encourages you to earn new badges
• Challenge with your friends
• You can even have some gifts and join loyalty programmes.

They will be releasing their API (http://achivy.com/c/api) soon

The e-programme technology provider is Microtask, whose automated platform splits dull repetitive tasks into tiny microtasks and distributes them over the internet. Once carried out by interested microworkers around Finland or around the world, Microtask puts the results back together into a completed assignment.

You can find all the information at http://www.nationallibrary.fi/infoe/uutiset/1297236955390.html

You can find all the information about the company at http://keas.com/

Beyond Badges: 3 Smart Ways to Gamify Your Startup

About the author:

Rajat Paharia is the founder and chief product officer atBunchball. You can follow him on Twitter @Bunchball and read his blog

According to the article the main questions for gamification are:

1. What Is Your Core Experience?
2. Know Your Business!
3. Know Your User

“Zynga has launched RewardVille, a platform for rewarding the players of its Facebook titles. By signing in to this portal via Facebook Connect, users can earn a virtual currency (zPoints) as they play supported games, earning them rewards (some game-exclusive or time-limited) to enhance their experience across the company’s portfolio of titles. As with myriad social network games, RewardVille also allows gifts to be sent to friends, to encourage their recruitment.” (via screendigest by Steve Bailey)

Source:

• screendigest

See also:

• RewardVille

With OpenFeint’s SDK you can let your players:

• Earn Rewards – Unlock achievements by playing games.
• Play with Friends – Invite friends from Facebook, Twitter, and your address book.
• Challenge the Leader – Beat the highest scorers at their own game.
• Build your Profile – Define your gamer identity

OpenFeint supports the iOS and Android mobile platforms.

You can fin all the information at http://openfeint.com

How it works

Fix a bug. Get a prize.

• Daily prizes ($50-400 each) to the developer that closes the most bugs each day, Mon-Fri
• Weekly prizes ($750-1250 each) to the developer that closes the most bugs each week, Mon-Sat
• Monthly grand prize ($2000-3000) to the developer that closes the most bugs in the 4-week campaign.

You can find all the information at http://rewardjs.com/

Combining real-life mobile social gaming, interest recognition, and location based services Vufind brings a new immersive mobile entertainment experience to its user-players based on their interests, likes and locations.

Vufind on your phone is the coolest and smartest way to share your life visually with friends and others with a tagged photo or video. The automated tagging is fun, impresses friends, and ensures your photos are searchable, discoverable, and can be efficently organized in smart albums for quick sharing. Your photos are smarter with Vufind! Sweet! Download the Vufind app to join thousands of Vufinders who enjoy smart visual sharing.

You can find all the information at http://www.vufind.com/

How it works:

1. Find your friends, local businesses and brands.
2. Achieve their pegs by following them on Twitter, uploading a photo to Facebook, checking in on Foursquare and more…
3. Earn various rewards by achieving pegs.
4. Create your own pegs and share them with friends.

You can find all the information at http://www.pegmo.com/

You can find all the information at http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=121936851206938&sk=info

All the information at http://www.projectsparadise.com/reward-recognition-strategies/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+projectsparadise+%28Projectsparadise.com+-+Projects%2C+Dissertation%2C+Thesis%2C+Working+Papers%29#

You can find all the information at http://www.springwise.com/gaming/chromaroma/

The Internet is a vast landscape and your audience spends their time in many different places. CrowdTwist’s activity engine intelligently tracks consumer interactions with your brand both on and off your website (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, iTunes, Ticketmaster, Amazon, etc.) like consuming, creating & sharing content, commenting, playing games, purchasing, etc. This system encourages increased engagement while driving rich data into their Control Center.

Proprietary CrowdTwist software and algorithms manage activity priority and point values to keep users coming back again and again to earn points. User levels and badges are awarded based on their number of points and evolving engagement activities. These points can then be used for real world rewards and discounts, not just a virtual good.

You can find all the information at http://www.crowdtwist.com/

A Google a Day is a new daily puzzle that can be solved using your creativity and clever search skills on Google. Questions will be posted every day on agoogleaday.com and printed on weekdays above the New York Times crossword puzzle. We’ll reveal each puzzle’s answer the next day in the Times and on agoogleaday.com, along with the search tips and features used to find it.

You can read the whole blog entry at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/trivia-game-where-using-google-is.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FMKuf+%28Official+Google+Blog%29

You can watch the video at http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_meslin_the_antidote_to_apathy.html

Most important messages in my opinion:

• “Fun first, purpose second. Not purpose first, fun second. Anytime you do that you get mediocrity”.
• “You can add game mechanics to a shallow experience and they can create a tremendous lift, but they cannot keep people there (…) Your core content and experience have to be good.”
• “One of the biggest commitments you have to make is that you are designing experiences over time, you have a long term commitment to your user to build the system more fun and engagement levering gamification, and that maybe for the rest of their lifes”.

You can watch this short episode at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DBI1GrICho

Earn badges and earn bragging rights for the tasks you’ve completed in the Spark game. For instance, you can earn a badge for sharing your unique URL with someone over 500 miles away. More importantly, earn badges and you might earn some sweet stuff from Mozilla (hint, hint). Just like the surprise Spark easter egg badges that you can earn along the way, the rewards are a surprise too, so keep your Spark glowing big and bright and we may contact YOU!

You can find all the info at https://spark.mozilla.org/en-US/home

That’s why Gameful have created a “secret HQ” for people who are making games that are making us:

• happier
• smarter
• stronger
• healthier
• more collaborative
• more creative
• better connected to our friends and family
• and better at WHATEVER we love to do when we’re not playing games

Here are some games that are already doing just that: EVOKE, Fold It!, The Epic Win App, Flower, Code of Everand, SuperBetter, The MP Expenses Game, Budgetball, the Pokéwalker, Quest to Learn, Little Big Planet: Gamechangers, World Without Oil, Seek ‘n Spell, Goal Mafia,and Conspiracy for Good.

What all of these projects have in common: they’re dedicated to making some kind of a real positive impact on gamers’ lives and the world around them.

Gameful is an online “Secret HQ” where you can connect with other people who believe in the power of games to make us better and change the world.

You can find all the information at http://gameful.org

Read more: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/engage-calibreapps-com-set-goals-for-your-team

Clicking on the vocabulary’s namespaces (including the balloons), the user can navigate the vocabularies and get further information about them.

You can find all the information at http://labs.mondeca.com/dataset/lov/index.html

You can find all the information at http://www.getupp.com/

You can find all the information at http://lcav.epfl.ch/research/automatic_image_annotation

Yes, beginning today when the integration goes fully live, you’ll be able to earn reward points at venues around the world simply by taking a picture and sharing it on Instagram. This may mean hotel points, air miles, or other benefits at the over 10,000 places Topguest currently works with. All you have to do is link up Topguest to your Instagram account (via their new API) and make sure your picture is geotagged at the venue.

You can read the whole blog entry at http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/27/topguest-instagram/

In Pingar’s case, its API will allow a company’s existing software programs to work with Pingar’s advanced data analysis and search technology to manage the company’s unstructured electronic data. Unstructured data can include: documents, webpages, emails, news or any kind of text. Companies will be able to review massive amounts of data with the touch of a button, rather than having the staff do these tasks by hand – saving valuable time.

From March 8. Pingar’s API will be available free to software developers for a limited development period to enable developers to work with Pingar’s tools to build specific solutions for their clients.

With Pingar’s API companies can utilise:

• Rapid Discovery – a tool that can be added to existing search engines for rapid query refinement and results assessment.
• Entity Extraction – a suite of cutting-edge tools that turn documents into useful lists of entities including people’s names, telephone numbers, credit card numbers and organisations.
• Content Analysis – provides precision key-word extraction and on-click document summarization and sanitation.

Pingar API tools will help companies make better sense of the data they own and deliver smarter, time-saving search and data analysis.

You can find all the information at http://www.pingar.com

Knowledge in Probase is harnessed from digitized footprints of human behavior and communications.

But Probase is much more than a traditional ontology/taxonomy, which can be seen in three dimensions: the concept dimension, the data dimension, and the relationship dimension.

Compared with other knowledgebases, Probase is unique in two aspects. First, Probase has an extremely large concept/category space (2.7 million categories). As these concepts are automatically acquired from Web pages authored by millions of users, it is probably true that they cover most concepts in our mental world (about worldly facts). Second, data in Probase, as knowledge in our mind, is not black or white. Probase quantifies the uncertainty. These serve as the priors and likelihoods that become the foundations of probabilistic reasoning in Probase. With this probabilistic Probase, we build several interesting applications, such as topic search, Web table search and document understanding.

You can find all the information about the project at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/probase/

You start by defining a goal, picking a deadline (all good, measurable goals have deadlines), and inviting some of your Facebook friends to verify whether or not you accomplish your goal. Then you make a financial contribution to Goalfinch. This money is “on the line” until you either reach or fail to reach the goal. It’s an additional incentive to motivate you to go out and get it done.

When you reach your goal, your friends should sign in to Goalfinch and confirm that you have succeeded. By default, Goalfinch won’t count your goal as successful until all the friends you invited come to the site and do this. If you succeed before the deadline, congratulations! Goalfinch will send your contribution back to you. If you fail, however, Goalfinch will donate the money to a charitable or non-profit organization (you can select one while defining your goal).

You also have the option to distribute your contribution proportionally: For each friend that confirms you’ve completed your goal, we’ll return a portion of your money to you, up to the full amount. For example, if you invite three friends to verify your goal but only two of them confirm that you complete it, you’ll get two thirds of your money back. The rest will be donated.

You can find all the information at http://goalfinch.com

The real strength of this image advertising platform is how it lets people who visit a site looking for specific products buy them directly by merely clicking on the tags that are featured.

EmmaActive means that no more will anybody have to look for the best spot to buy anything they saw and liked when browsing the Web. This service turns every image that is tagged into something that can be purchased. And since people are being rewarded for taking their time to tag products, everything comes full circle.

Read more: http://www.killerstartups.com/eCommerce/emmaactive-com-tag-products-on-images

The paper is available at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1103/1103.1255v1.pdf

The GEElab will invent new game and entertainment visions, products, services, narratives and business models, whilst critically reflecting the role of games and entertainment in culture and how play, games, and game mechanics can be used to innovate.

At the GEElab, games will be understood as a cross-disciplinary function as well as the engine of entertainment media and Internet innovation. Practice oriented game and entertainment media research will be carried out by the way of cross-medial experimentation and an understanding of science as fiction, and not being afraid to think and design differently and speculatively. GEElab members will investigate how to “gamify“ traditionally non-linear media such as TV, film, radio, developing design strategies, narratives and service prototypes.

One of the major goals of the GEElab is to explore the potential of games and entertainment to positively influence and change behaviour, seeking to suggest solutions for a more peaceful, sustainable, healthy and egalitarian – or playful – world. The GEElab will work closely with stakeholders from across RMIT, international game research institutions and sponsors from the game and entertainment industry.

The GEElab has two locations: the headquarters in Melbourne, impacting the Australian and Asia regions, and in Europe, which will serve as an RMIT satellite location to foster overseas collaborations in IT and creative media industries. Both labs are headed by VC Fellow, Dr Steffen P Walz, an award winning game and interaction designer & researcher, futurist and media experimenter, chart breaking pop musician & producer, former screen writer and TV satire journalist.

In conjunction with the launch, the GEElab websites will go live on March 15:  http://www.geelab.rmit.edu.au / http://www.geelab.eu.

All the information at http://www.rmit.com.au/browse;ID=4660zypgwie6

Thinkbase

Thinkbase is a new way to navigate and explore information on the Web.

Thinkbase – a “Visual Wiki” – is based on Freebase, an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge. It displays the Freebase contents in an interactive graph which allows the user to visually explore more than 12 million inter-connected topics.

Thinkbase is developed by Christian Hirsch at the University of Auckland.

You can find further information at http://www.minglebird.com

Basically, the application let users make their Oscar predictions and compete with their friends, then stay up-to-date on Academy goings-on all year long. During Oscar season, access complete Nominee lists, insider information on each film, viewable trailers and more. Make a prediction in each category, compare with your group of friends and share your picks through Facebook, Twitter, text and email. Real-time scoring lets you see how you scored against your group and the rest of the community. YEAR-ROUND: Find out about all the other official Academy events, and get the latest Academy news and updates throughout the year. Download the one and only official Oscar app from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

You can dowload the application from the App Store are: http://itunes.apple.com/es/app/the-oscars/id354102052?mt=8#

Definitely, a nice example of using directed gamification to get users installing a much wider purpose application. What do you think?

The idea is to allows users to upload high-resolution images, work on them adding information over specific areas of the image and interact with other users through standard social network tools.

If you want more information, do not hesitate to visit their website at http://www.speakingimage.org or having a look at the tour.

Players are not only scored and ranked based on how much they play; they are scored by nature, depending on how well their virtual designs can be rendered as real, physical molecules. An additional incentive for users to participate in the game – beside the one of being able to contribute to real scientific research – is provided by the integration of the game with Facebook. Players can there talk about the game, post their accomplishments and compete with each other.

Read more about it at: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2011/January/jan11_eterna.shtml

• Identifiers for terms in specific languages linked to many external resources (WordNet, thesauri, ontologies, etc.). Examples: English ‘school’, Chinese ‘朋友’
• Over 7,000 language identifiers with names in many languages, links to script URIs, geographic region URIs, etc. Examples: Spanish, Afrikaans, Oriya, Taungyo
• Script URIs identify scripts such as the Latin and Cyrillic scripts, Indian Devanagari, or the Korean Hangul system.
• Character URIs based on the Unicode standard, linked to script URIs, with semantic information about CJK characters. Examples: U+5A34, U+0047 (‘G’)
• Also: ISO 3166-1 / UN M.49 geographical regions (example), WordNet 3.0 (example), KangXi radicals (example), etc.

You can find all the information about this initiative at http://www.lexvo.org/ .

The purpose is the evaluation of some heuristics that are used to determine a ranking of facts within a knowledge base such as e.g. DBpedia.

You can find the whole blog entry at http://moresemantic.blogspot.com/2010/11/who-knows-semantic-web-game.html

When you start doing things in Jume, you will quickly notice:

• Motivation: How your friends and social circle motivate you to get things done faster.
• Participation: How your friends participate in real-life to help you complete your tasks.
• Learning: How you can gain more local knowledge to get things done.
• Socializing: How you’ll find new people with similar interests around you.
• Saving: How you can save with cool offers and discounts offered to applicable tasks.

In fact, this is how jume.in works:

You can find all the information at http://jume.in

They invite developers of all experience levels to participate in creating awesome games for the open Web. It seems they have some fun surprises in store between now and January 11, 2011 when the contest wraps.

More info at https://gaming.mozillalabs.com/

Future updates are going to introduce badges so that users will get badges depending on their use of Google’s email client.

Definitely a nice way of encouraging users to put good email management habits into practice

The handbook explains the term collective intelligence and why studying collective intelligence is important nowadays.Furthermore, it gives examples of collective intelligence in different environments as for instance: business organizations, computer science/A.I. and biology. The handbook deals with measuring collective intelligence and associated influence factors and more interesting, it lists several factors which either facilitate collective intelligence (e.g. diversity, incentives for contribution) or inhibit it (e.g. self-interest and the free-rider problem, implementation issues).

But there are strict rules:
- MathOverflow is only for serious mathematicians. It’s not for homework help. It’s not for wide open problems.
- When asking a question, be specific.
- Opinions about non-math topics like capitalism or the sexual orientation of colleagues bring quick suspension.
- “Be polite. Be honest. Be professional,” Geraschenko said.

Game Mechanics are a means of rewarding users. They aren’t a great fit for everyone. Here are some of the characteristics the people behind IActionable have found that are a natural fit for accelerated growth through game mechanics:

• You have a community or are social where users are aware of each other.
• There are many ways a user can interact with your application or with each other.
• Ideally your users visit repeatedly; generally once a week or more.

Here are some of the basic building blocks they work with:

• Points: Do something good, get a few points. Do something great – get a lot of points. Do something bad? Lose points. It’s a concept we are all familiar with. Provide users with immediate feedback by adjusting their points – but be careful – it’s a powerful tool and you can easily find your users doing exactly what you reward them for. When used properly points can provide context within a site so user’s can quickly identify members who have been around for a while and are experienced members of the community.
• Achievements: Achievements are milestones or goals that, once accomplished, rewards users visibly, letting them and everyone else that they’ve “unlocked” that achievement. While points are great for smaller tasks, achievements are good for grander accomplishments and are seen as a source of pride for users. They usually appear in a list of “locked” and “unlocked” achievements. This provides an easy way for users to see what they can do to unlock more achievements and helps educate them about the possibilities your application offers.

All these capabilities are exposed by means of a REST API.

You can find all the information at the IActionable website at http://iactionable.com/.

Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research.

The current series of Science Puzzles, the Grand Challenges, are meant to generate the evidence needed to prove that human protein folders can be more effective than computers at certain aspects of protein structure prediction. That’s what all the puzzles in Foldit are about right now: predicting the structure of a protein based on its amino acid sequence.

For protein structure prediction, the eventual goal is to have human folders work on proteins that do not have a known structure. This would require first attracting the attention of scientists and biotech companies and convincing them that the process is effective. Another goal is to take folding strategies that human players have come up with while playing the game, and automate these strategies to make protein-prediction software more effective. These two goals are more or less independent and either or both may happen.

The more interesting goal for Foldit, perhaps, is not in protein prediction but protein design. Designing new proteins may be more directly practical than protein prediction, as the problem you must solve as a protein designer is basically an engineering problem (protein engineering), whether you are trying to disable a virus or scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It’s also a relatively new field compared to protein prediction. There aren’t a lot of automated approaches to protein design, so Foldit’s human folders will have less competition from the machines.

You can learn more about the science of Foldit here: The Science Behind Foldit.

Currently, more than 80% of the information exchanged on the Web carry personal data and are primarily of multimedia nature (video, audio, images, etc.). Two main reasons are behind this phenomenon: 1) each of the major players on the Internet (individual users, companies, local and/or regional authorities, etc.) is both data producer and data consumer at the same time, and 2) the use of various tools of Web 2.0 (blogs, social networks, etc.) allows to ease sharing, accessing, and publishing information on the Web. While such tools provide users many easy-to-use functionalities, several issues, however, remain unaddressed. For instance, how to automate the processes of annotation and description of some photos using the annotations/descriptions provided by the user friends on his/her blog/wiki/social network? How to provide the user with more effective and expressive means to multimedia information retrieval? How to protect a multimedia data repository (e.g., photo album) while several related information about the same content is already published (by some user friends) on the same or other blog/wiki/social network?

The general aim of this special issue is to assess the current approaches and technologies, as well as to outline the major challenges and future perspectives, related to the use of Web 2.0 in providing automatic annotation and easing retrieval and access control of multimedia data. It aims to provide an overview of the state of the art and future directions in this field, by including a wide range of interdisciplinary contributions from various research groups.

Topics

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• Semantic Web and Web 2.0
• Social Networks
• Multimedia Semantics
• Contextual Multimedia Metadata
• Annotation Enriching
• Query Rewriting
• Metadata Modeling and Contextual Ontologies for Multimedia Applications
• Management of Multimedia Metadata (Relational and XML Databases, Semantic Stores, etc.)
• Multimedia Authoring
• Multimedia-based Access Control and Authorization
• Multimedia Retrieval
• Personalizing Multimedia Content
• Cross-media Clustering
• Mobile Applications
• Multimedia Web Applications and Related Metadata Support
• Novel and Challenging Multimedia Applications

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: November 15, 2010
• Notification of First Round of Review: January 30, 2011
• Submission of the Revised Manuscript: March 15, 2011
• Notification of Final Acceptance: April 30, 2011
• Camera-ready Submission: May 30, 2011

Submission

Authors are invited to submit contributions at the journal Online Submission System ( http://www.editorialmanager.com/mtap ) not exceeding 8000 words (approx. 20 pages single-spaced) including diagrams and references with at least 10-point Times Roman like font. All submissions will undergo a blind peer review by at least three external expert reviewers to ensure a high standard of quality. Referees will consider originality, significance, technical soundness, clarity of exposition, and relevance to the special issue topics above. Since a “blind” paper evaluation method will be used, authors are kindly requested to produce and provide the full paper, WITHOUT any reference to any of the authors. The manuscript must contain, in its first page, the paper title, an abstract and a list of keywords but NO NAMES OR CONTACT DETAILS WHATSOEVER are to be included in any part of this file.

Guest Editors

• Richard Chbeir (Bourgogne University, France, richard.chbeir@u-bourgogne.fr)
• Vincent Oria (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA, oria@homer.njit.edu)

You can read the whole article at http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/20/brightkite-badges/

Uppy Media won DEMO gold award among alpha pitch companies in DEMO 2010 spring conference. See the video here.

The company makes money through affiliate links, so if you just have to have that dress your best mate wore on Friday night, you’re in luck – and so are Uppy.

For similar ideas in this space check out Pixazza, Udorse , and Coolspotters.

• Dr. Iyad Rahwan, Masdar Institute& MIT (www.mit.edu/~irahwan)
• Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland, MIT (http://web.media.mit.edu/~sandy)

The successful candidate will work on a collaborative interdisciplinary research project. The project , titled “Influencing Collective Human Behavior Using Distributed Intelligent Systems,” aims to help people use resources more efficiently. The project will have (1) a theoretical component focusing on game-theoretic and incentive mechanism design issues, and (2) an empirical component to test these techniques in behavioral experiments using lab experiments and real deployment through mobile computing and sensor technologies.

For further details, please see: http://www.mit.edu/~irahwan/docs/20100529_postdoc_advert.pdf

Although mashups fully embrace the idea of customization on the Web, read-write is another story. The complexity of application development using Javascript makes it hard for average developers to create new mashups and to customize the existing ones. To solve this problem, several companies are developing tools for mashup creation that require little or no programming knowledge. These tools, exemplified by Yahoo! pipes, IBM’s QEDwiki and Google’s Mashup Editor, facilitate the selection of some number of RESTful Web services or other Web resources and chain them together by piping one service’s output into the next service’s input while filtering content and making slight format changes.

SA-REST is a microformat to add additional meta-data to (but not limited to) REST API descriptions in HTML and XHTML. Developers can directly embed meta-data from various models such an ontology, taxonomy or a tag cloud into their API descriptions. The embedded meta-data can be used to improve search (for example: perform faceted search for APIs), data mediation (in conjunction with XML annotation) as well as help in easier integration of services to create mashups.

SA-REST submission to W3C can be found here: http://www.w3.org/Submission/SA-REST/

More information about SA-REST can be found here: http://wiki.knoesis.org/index.php/SA-REST

Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content.

You can find all the information about Twitter Annotations at groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/fa5da2608865453?pli=1

What do you think about this upcoming feature? What would be the potential of semantically tagging tweets using Common Tags, for example, instead of hastags? Leave your comments below to start the discussion

Tags are increasingly used to organize user generated content. They give the users the freedom to tag their content with the words that make sense to them making it easier to find their own content. Unfortunately, different words are used for the same things and it is very common to find tags that are missing spaces, have typos, and are redundant or not informative. A publisher with tags of this sort is unable to connect content properly or target advertising effectively. Tags enriched by Bueda can provide not only a better overall user experience but can increase revenue generated from user content.

The Bueda API can transform noisy and redundant tags into back clean, normalized tags, with a breakdown of the semantic concepts represented in the tags. This means that your users still have the freedom of tags, and you still get the benefits of neatly categorized and curated content.

The result is happier users, a better user experience and more revenue.

The Bueda API is currently in private beta.

You can find all the info and even a demo at the Bueda website:  http://www.bueda.com

For example, imagine you are watching a short documentary about clean water issues in India. As the video plays, adjacent windows will dynamically generate links to actions and media directly related to each scene. These could include organizations involved in clean water and sanitation, action campaigns related to water issues, relevant videos from YouTube, articles from research organizations, and the latest updates from news services and blogs.

The site will automatically create these links using semantic Web tools. Rather than simply scanning for keywords, this new technology also analyzes context and meaning to find the most relevant results from all the latest information and links available. It will also employ the Linked Data model, which assigns unique identifier tags to specific “entities” and organizes data in ways that can be read and understood by other applications. This allows the site to easily differentiate whether the word “Sahara” is being used to refer to the desert in North Africa or a hotel-casino in Las Vegas, and to communicate about the correct topic with other websites that hold related information.

By tapping into the semantic Web, the Linked Data model, and partner APIs, ViewChange.org is taking the latest advances in online technology and harnessing them for social change.

LinkTV created the working model for ViewChange.org by fostering relationships with semantic technology innovators such as OpenCalais and Zemanta. They are also actively experimenting with the open APIs of sites like YouTube and Kiva.org.

Link TV‘s long-term Web development partner Definition is responsible for building the platform and will utilize Freebase, Zemanta, OpenCalais, and other APIs help to provide an innovative customizable user experience.

In addition, ViewChange.org will feature an open API, inviting third-party sites and developers to create applications and pages fueled by our content. This API will feed into the Linked Data model. The code behind the platform will be made freely available.

Objective 1 of the annotation project is to have human beings (you) identify whether an ASD citation contains mention of a gene. At this point we are asking people to annotate 20 articles but it is fine if you do less. If Objective 1 goes well, later objectives will include spotting particular mentions of genes in ASD citations and the holy grail of genetics text mining, relationships between genes and other biologically relevant entities.

You can find all the information about the BioNotate project here: http://bionotate.hms.harvard.edu/autism/index.html

• Twitter hashtags,
• user IDs, and
• arbitrary URIs.

by a simple yet powerful syntax. For example, users can easily state that two hashtags mean the same:

#muenchen = #munich

The Hypertwitter application can extract and interpret such special tweets (Twitter messages) for two purposes, namely:

1. To expand your queries / search in Twitter (e.g. turn a query for tweets containing #muenchen into those also containing #munich), and
2. to create an RDF graph of all such statements for usage in other Web applications.

Now, given the millions of Twitter users, this could naturally lead to chaos, so there are two a simple yet effective ways to control which subset of statements should be considered:

1. Just use your own tweets.
2. Create a new public or private Twitter list that contains all users whose tweets you want us to consider. We call the list used for HyperTwitter the “trust list”.

In the simplest form, you will just trust your own statements, so you would use your Twitter ID without a list.

You can find all the information at http://semantictwitter.appspot.com/.

The three questionnaires are designed to:

1. Conduct a survey on present ontology education/training content and quality.
2. Conduct a survey to elicit information about the knowledge and skills ontologists need, or are expected to have, in a variety of working contexts.
3. Conduct a real-time delphi study to elicit expert opinion and shared vision on the future of ontologists, their education and the field of ontology. [*to access this questionnaire for the first time, you will have to register yourself first ... and then, when prompted, enter the study code: "ontology"]

You can find all the information about the surveys here.

“The Vienna-based company punkt. netServices is just about to release a demo version of their PoolParty service, a SKOS-based thesaurus management tool with linked data capabilities. I had the chance to pre-read a white paper and test their service. Here is a brief overview. You can also try a demo.

PoolParty is aiming to be easy to use for people without a strong Semantic Web background or special technical skills. The GUI is entirely web-based and utilizes AJAX so the user can e.g. quickly merge two concepts via drag & drop. An overview over the thesaurus can be gained with a tree or a graph view on the concepts.

PoolParty also helps to semi-automatically add concepts to a thesaurus as it can be used to analyse documents (e.g. web pages or PDF files) relevant to a thesaurus’ domain in order to glean candidate terms.“

You can find the whole article here

On the last 4th of February, IBM patented a way to improve traditional free-text tagging with semantic capabilities basically to improve the exploitation of those annotations/tags. If you are interested on the patent, you can find it just here.

Regarding this free-text tagging vs. more semantic tagging techniques, we should not forget the existence of an specification on these same matters called CommonTag. Of course, the IBM’s patent is more focused on the automatic generation/extraction of the semantics behind free-text tagging (tag clouds) than to directly tag resources semantically. ]]> http://blog.insemtives.eu/2010/02/ibms-patent-about-tagging-and-the-semantic-web/feed/ 0 http://blog.insemtives.eu/2010/02/schemaweb-rdf-schema-directory/ http://blog.insemtives.eu/2010/02/schemaweb-rdf-schema-directory/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 08:13:17 +0000 gtorodelvalle http://blog.insemtives.eu/?p=220

Here you are the abstract of the paper:

Radiological images contain a wealth of information, such as anatomy and pathology, which is often not explicit and computationally accessible. Information schemes are being developed to describe the semantic content of images, but such schemes can be unwieldy to operationalize because there are few tools to enable users to capture structured information easily as part of the routine research workflow. We have created iPad, an open source tool enabling researchers and clinicians to create semantic annotations on radiological images. iPad hides the complexity of the underlying image annotation information model from users, permitting them to describe images and image regions using a graphical interface that maps their descriptions to structured ontologies semi-automatically. Image annotations are saved in a variety of formats, enabling interoperability among medical records systems, image archives in hospitals, and the Semantic Web. Tools such as iPad can help reduce the burden of collecting structured information from images, and it could ultimately enable researchers and physicians to exploit images on a very large scale and glean the biological and physiological significance of image content.

You can find the complete paper at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2655990/?tool=pubmed.

Players of Phrase Detectives have submitted nearly 1 million relationships between phrases, with over 200 documents completed – a total of 60,000 words. From this point, a panel of expert linguists analysed a selection of documents and in most cases the top answer from Phrase Detectives (i.e. the answer that most detectives agreed with) was correct. This is great news as it shows that, by collaborating in a group, players make the right decisions in the end.

This month’s competition is a daily prize draw where you could win an Amazon voucher just by playing the game. The more you play each day the greater chance you have of winning. Winners will be updated on the homepage and contacted via email. More details are on the website…

On the other hand, there have also been updates to the game. You can now see all the completed documents – maybe you were the one who made the final decision on a document? There are also more hints and tips about playing the game. And remember you can score points for signing up new players, just email the link on your player homepage to your friends.

More info at: http://anawiki.essex.ac.uk/phrasedetectives/

Noticings are interesting things that you stumble across when out and about. For example: perplexing pavement markings, a discarded photo, and a ceramic space invader are all noticings.

Players are awarded points for things like spotting the first thing in a neighbourhood, or noticing something every day for a week.

You play Noticings by uploading your photos to Flickr, tagged with ‘noticings’ and geotaggedwith where they were taken. We’ve got a page with the rules and some instructions to help you out.

They offer an iPhone app to upload and to tag your images directly from your iPhone.

More info at http://noticin.gs/.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Noticings: Geotagging Photo Game Powered by Flickr API (readwriteweb.com)

The questionnaire contained in the link below is a short survey to gather the requirements for this approach.

http://ecustomersurvey.com/dsm/ViewSurvey.do?id=d23138e6-ac89-4e6c-9f43-bc91c11ab433

I guess we have something to say filling this survey and as a way to help Supun

SAPIENT stands for “Semantic Annotation of Papers: Interface & ENrichment Tool”. It is an annotation interface implemented as a web application, to help users annotate scientific papers in XML, sentence by sentence, with a set of concepts called General Scientific Concepts (GSCs, see http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/88/). GSCs constitute the set of concepts essential for describing a scientific investigation. However, SAPIENT can also be used in conjunction with other annotation schemas to annotate papers in XML sentence by sentence.SAPIENT also incorporates Oscar3 functionality, allowing the automatic annotation of chemical named entities.

SAPIENT includes the so called SAPIENT Sentence Splitter (SSSplit). SSSplit is an XML-aware sentence splitter which preserves XML markup and identifies sentences through the addition of in-line markup. The reason for developing our own sentence splitter was that sentence splitters widely available could not handle XML properly. The XML markup contains useful information about the document structure and formatting in the form of inline tags, which is important for determining the logical structure of the paper.

SSSplit has been written in the platform-independent Java language (version 1.6), based on and extending open source Perl code for handling plain text. In order to make our sentence splitter XML aware, we translated the Perl regular expression rules into Java and modifed them to make them compatible with the SciXML schema.

Via: http://zillman.blogspot.com/2009/11/sapient-semantic-annotation-of-papers.html

The Federal Register is “[t]he official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents.” It’s published by the U.S. government, five days a week. The Federal Register tells citizens what their government is doing, in a lot more detail than the news media do.

FedThread makes the Federal Register more open and accessible. FedThread gives users:

• Collaborative annotation: users can attach a note to any paragraph of the Federal Register; a conversation thread hangs off of every paragraph.
• Advanced search: users can search the Federal Register (going back to 2000) on full text, by date, agency, and other fields.
• Customized feeds: any search can be turned into an RSS feed. The resulting feed will include any new items that match the search query. Feeds can be delivered by email as well.

Via: PrivacyDigest.com

In some sense, it reminded me of the Google Gaudi initiative.

Via: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/kutano_launches_first_client_for_google_sidewiki.php

The Scribo project will take part in the Open World Forum, the leading global summit bringing together decision-makers from across the world to discuss the technological, financial and social impact of open technologies. On October 1,2 2009, the Open World Forum 2009 will bring together all the key players in the open source ecosystem to cross-fertilize initiatives for innovation and economic growth.

To create annotations users need a Google account, being able to annotate the whole Web page or portions of it.

The current version of Google sidewiki allow users:

• To keep track of the comments they have already read.
• To value other’s annotations as useful or not.
• To share annotations via link, email, Twitter and Facebook.
• To access all the annotations created by any user.

Once installed from http://www.google.com/sidewiki/intl/en/index.html, you can visit http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/prevention.htm to see Google sidewiki in action.

IMAGINATION is a Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) under the European Union’s 6th Framework programme’s (6FP) Information Society Technologies (IST) priority, more specifically under the IST action line “Access to and preservation of cultural and scientific resources“. The project was started in May, 2006.

The main objective of IMAGINATION is to bring digital cultural and scientific resources closer to their users, by making user interaction image-based and context-aware. Our aim is to enable image-based navigation for digital cultural and scientific resources. Their vision is a system where users receive meaningful contextual information about images and image parts, which makes images easier to understand. Moreover, users can simply navigate to new, relevant images and texts in the knowledge repository only by clicking on interesting image parts.

BTW, you can find very interesting readings at http://www.imagination-project.org/page.php?id=8

The workshop is an international forum where academic researchers and industrial practitioners meet to analyze and discuss application issues related to methods, theories, tools and applications based on formal ontologies.

It is implemented using Silverlight technology by Microsoft.

You can find all the information at: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html

As stated on the OAC’s Web site: 

Annotating is a pervasive element of scholarly practice for both the humanist and the scientist. It is a method by which scholars organize existing knowledge and facilitate the creation and sharing of new knowledge. It is used by individual scholars when reading as an aid to memory, to add commentary, and to classify. It can facilitate shared editing, scholarly collaboration, and pedagogy. Over time annotations can have scholarly value in their own right. Yet scholars remain dissatisfied with the options available for annotating digital resources. Scholars wanting to annotate have to learn different annotation clients for different content repositories, have no easy way to integrate annotations made on different systems or created by colleagues using other tools, and are often limited to simplistic and constrained models of annotation. The importance of annotating as a scholarly practice coupled with the real-world limitations of existing practices and tools supporting annotation of digital content has had a retarding effect on the growth of digital scholarship and the level of digital resource use by scholars.

The overarching goals of this project (consisting of multiple phases) are:

• To facilitate the emergence of a Web and Resource-centric interoperable annotation environment that allows leveraging annotations across the boundaries of annotation clients, annotation servers, and content collections. To this end, interoperability specifications will be devised.
• To demonstrate through implementations an interoperable annotation environment enabled by the interoperability specifications in settings characterized by a variety of annotation client/server environments, content collections, and scholarly use cases.
• To seed widespread adoption by deploying robust, production-quality applications conformant with the interoperable annotation environment in ubiquitous and specialized services, tools, and content used by scholars — e.g.: Zotero, AXE, LORE, Co-Annotea, Pliny; JSTOR, AustLit, MONK.

(via: DigitalKoans)