Accelerating Science Openly

Congratulations to Jean Claude Bradley and his co-authors Khalid Baig Mirza, Tom Osborne, Antony Wiliams, Kevin Owens for publishing in JOVE.

"..... we have demonstrated that it is possible carry out research under Open Notebook Science conditions, write an article openly on a wiki, post it on a pre-print server (like Nature Precedings) and finally publish it in an peer reviewed journal. No, this won't work with every publisher. But if communicating science openly (beyond the confines of the regular Open Access model) is important to you, there are options out there that don't take anything away from the traditional system of academic validation." UsefulChem.

This kind of innovative initiatives and creative scientists make scientific publishing business exciting, and an industry that you want to be in.

The value of blogs, wikis and RSS for Intel

Jeff Moriarty's post describes how Intel is using Blogs, Wikis, forums and RSS in internal communication and information sharing. In summary:

"The summary is that the major value I see in these tools is smashing through internal behavioral and cultural walls. Breaking those down will bring benefits in reducing redundancy, breaking down silos, improving product quality, and increasing team agility."

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."

Discourse DB brings Semantic Web to politics

Discourse DB uses semantic wiki technologies to "collect the opinions of the world's journalists and commentators about ongoing political events and issues"

Freebase

If Freebase (sub req) team can integrate scientific content this can turn into a very interesting and useful application for scientists and researchers.

Knowledge Management Challanges within Corporations

It's not surprise that one of the main problems faced in the corporations is to manage and locate the knowledge within the company. Henry Story from Sun highlights 3 main problems:

"Large companies such as Sun Microsystems have a number of knowledge management needs. Plain text search engines can help find documents by searching through keywords in document content. The problem is that

1. This can return a huge number of documents
2. The keywords the user is thinking of may not be the right ones
3. The things searched for may not be text documents – they could be pictures, people or things"

1. 
   

One of the solutions that he is proposing is tagging and wiki implementation within the corporate wall. No wonder why IBM also is diving into this arena.