Xerox Innovation and R&D in action in Second Life

Sophie Vandebroek who is the Chief Technology Officer and President of the Xerox Innovation Group talks about R&D and innovation in virtual world. via Endless Innovation

Practical Applications in Semantic Web

Econtent has an interview with Eric Miller from Zepheira You can also get additional information on Semantic Web from Zepheira's publications section which is a very nice implementation of presenting content.

Opportunity for STM publishers in Facebook

Now that Facebook opened up it provides an opportunity for STM publishers to create applications and widgets to make their content available in multiple platforms.

So far there are only few applications in the Education section. We should be able to create applications similar what Forbes did like tracking an author, technology, citations etc....

Yahoo's new strategy and the world's knowledge

Jeff Weiner explains the rationale on the new strategy for Yahoo to “ connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge.”

"Our goal is to tie these underlying stores of knowledge together wherever and whenever it might be useful for you. In other words, we want to leverage our assets to build the most relevant, comprehensive, dynamic, and open repository of knowledge and content on the Web. One of the things we’re most excited about is the concept of “open,” and all of the potential we have yet to tap by opening up some of the most trafficked pages on Yahoo.com to the highest quality publishers on the Web, regardless of their size. " via Yodel Anecdotal

It would be interesting to see how Yahoo will integrate world's scientific knowledge in their new strategy.

Who will be acquired next in text mining?

First Clearforest was acquired by Reuters ( and if everything goes well with Reuters & Thomson merger, they will be part of Thomson ), then today Business Objects purchased Inxight.
The next candidate might be Temis.

JumpKnowledge an annotation tool

Click here to view an annotation of Really Simple Sidi (RSS)

more at JKN

Library Sector, Talis and semantic web

Talis is one of the visionary technology companies that gets the value that of what semantic web brings to information management. They have developped Talis Platform.

"Using Semantic Web technologies coupled with advanced indexing and fast searching, any type of unstructured or semi-structured data can be managed by the Talis Platform and made available to share, remix and reuse. Developers have access to a wide range of open web services that use standard protocols and formats to dramatically reduce the complexity and cost of application development."

Today they also announced that Danny Ayers has joined their team.

Where are the widgets for researchers?

Westin has it.. via EndlessInnovation

After the impact factor now comes the Eigenfactor

Eigenfactor which is developped by the Bergstrom lab is a new method of evaluating the influence of scholarly journals. "The Eigenfactor score of a journal is an estimate of the percentage of time that library users spend with that journal." via Loomware

Here are some statistics comparing ISI's impact factor and article influence.

EOL: Encyclopedia of Life

EOL "will serve as an online reference source and database for every one of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet, as well as all those later discovered and described. Encyclopedia of Life will be used as both a teaching and a learning tool, helping scientists, educators, students, and the community at large gain a better understanding of this planet and all who inhabit it."

Widgets and scientific publishers

Isn't it time to create some widgets that can add some flavor to scientific information retrieval and increase the usage of primary publishers?

Spire aims to apply semantic web technologies in science research

Spire is a collaborative research project that will develop "a framework to facilitate science research and education on the semantic web, and will implement and evaluate prototype tools and applications for use in the biocomplexity and biodiversity domains".

The testbed of the project will be at The National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII)

Splickr is a Spire implementation using Flickr.

In few years visionaries will create (easy to use) semantic web applications in different scientific domains like chemistry, biology and vertical markets like oil & gas, automotive, pharma etc.....

Expectnation

Expectnation a "professional web-based conference, training and event management" solution will launch at Xtech 2007

More on the benefits of Semantic Web from Tim Berners Lee

Globe has an interview with Tim Berners Lee

"Globe: What do you mean when you use the term "semantic Web?"

TBL: "It's a way of taking the data that is in lots and lots of different systems and connecting it together -- for example, in a company or a database -- and not just connecting it together, but realizing that it's part of a community, that there are partners and suppliers and customers who all want to see and use this data in different ways. There's a lot of excitement in the life sciences about doing this, where there are scientists looking for drugs and so on, and they have huge amounts of different sources of data. They're looking for creative solutions to medical problems, but not everyone who is working on the problem has access to the right data.""

Tim Berners Lee's presentation: Two Magic of Web Science

Tim Berners Lee gave the keynote address at 16th International World Wide Web Conference

Thomson Confirms Approach to Reuters

Finally this ends the speculations if Reuters was approached by Thomson.

As I mentioned to a colleague deals like this makes our lives in product development more exciting and makes us think more creatively how to develop new products that will solve users business questions. via Thomson

Benefits transferring your data to RDF

Dean Allemang provides insights on the benefit of transferring the data to RDF in creating mashups.

Science Foo 2 is coming in August

Science Foo which is organized by Nature, Google and O'Reilly is having their second reunion in August via Jean Claude Bradley

Excellent initiative and concept from Bio::Blogs

One would wonder why any STM publisher is not doing what these folks are doing at Bio::Blogs
which is a blog journal related to bioinformatic blogs. They review, comments and create editorials. You can also get a PDF version of their monthly journal. Great work! I wonder if there is a similar journal in other subjects where the scientist acts as "analysts" and synthesize, filter and select the important stuff the we should be paying attention.

Microsoft releases Astoria

"The goal of Astoria is to facilitate the creation of flexible data services that are naturally integrated with the web"

"In order for the system to understand and leverage semantics over the data that is surfacing, Astoria models the data exposed through the data service using a model called the Entity Data Model (EDM), an Entity-Relationship derivative. This organizes the data in the form of instances of "entity types", or "entities", and the associations between them." via e-science

It would be very interesting to see how researchers and scientists will use scientific data with Astoria...