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

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/

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

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

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.

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)

INSEMTIVES plans to collaborate with a number of projects during its lifetime. With that respect, we are currently discussing different collaboration possibilities with the European project KIWI which is set out to realize novel means to support knowledge management using Web2.0 and semantic technologies.

Last week I had the pleasure to introduce our project in the KIWI plenary meeting in Prague and in the same sense to get some insights about current work from the KIWI partners.  It was quite interesting to see their work and especially their use cases. The most interesting use case from my point of view is the Sun use case which has some interesting people and technologies in it.  One very interesting part of their use case is current work by Henry Story on FOAF+SSL and by Peter Reiser and his group on the Community Equity (CE) approach. The goal of CE is to implement a system which determines the social value of people’s contribution with respect to contributed content, skills, or participation. CE is definitely interesting with respect to our incentive research in INSEMTIVES and we will for sure monitor what is going on there.
Furthermore it was nice to see the KIWI platform in action while getting an in-depth introduction to it.

So thanks again to Sebastian for inviting me to their meeting and I am looking forward to welcome him next week in our plenary meeting in Innsbruck!

Tobias