Archives for Knowledge Management

Is it Only Wednesday?

Is it only Wednesday? It feels like a whole week already! I’ve been in back-to-back VC meetings, board discussions and strategy meetings since last week. I think this must be related to the heating-up of the "Web 3.0" meme and the semantic sector in general.… Read More “Is it Only Wednesday?”

Breaking the Collective IQ Barrier — Making Groups Smarter

I’ve been thinking since 1994 about how to get past a fundamental barrier to human social progress, which I call “The Collective IQ Barrier.” Most recently I have been approaching this challenge in the products we are developing at my stealth venture, Radar Networks.… Read More “Breaking the Collective IQ Barrier — Making Groups Smarter”

Diagram: Beyond Keyword (and Natural Language) Search

Here at Radar Networks we are working on practical ways to bring the Semantic Web to end-users. One of the interesting themes that has come up a lot, both internally, as well as in discussions with VC’s, is the coming plateau in the productivity of keyword search.… Read More “Diagram: Beyond Keyword (and Natural Language) Search”

Envisioning the Whole Digital Person

Another article of note on the subject of our evolving digital lives and what user-experience designers should be thinking about:

Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized—from the ways we
communicate, to our entertainment media, to our e-commerce
transactions, to our online research.

Read More “Envisioning the Whole Digital Person”

Capturing Your Digital Life

Nice article in Scientific American about Gordon Bell’s work at Microsoft Research on the MyLifeBits project. MyLifeBits provides one perspective on the not-too-far-off future in which all our information, and even some of our memories and experiences, are recorded and made available to us (and possibly to others) for posterity.… Read More “Capturing Your Digital Life”

Web 3.0 Roundup: Radar Networks, Powerset, Metaweb and Others…

It’s been a while since I posted about what my stealth venture, Radar Networks, is working on. Lately I’ve been seeing growing buzz in the industry around the “semantics” meme — for example at the recent DEMO conference, several companies used the word “semantics” in their pitches.… Read More “Web 3.0 Roundup: Radar Networks, Powerset, Metaweb and Others…”

How the WebOS Evolves?

Here is my timeline of the past, present and future of the Web. Feel free to put this meme on your own site, but please link back to the master image at this site (the URL that the thumbnail below points to) because I’ll be updating the image from time to time.… Read More “How the WebOS Evolves?”

Very Cool Desktop Interface Prototype Video — Bumptop

Check out this very impressive user-interface prototype for a desktop that works more like a real desk — a messy desk in fact. Very delightful design work that makes want to use it now!

What is the Semantic Web, Actually?

I’ve read several blog posts reacting to John Markoff’s article today. There seem to be some misconceptions in those posts about what the Semantic Web is and is not. Here I will try to  succinctly correct a few of the larger misconceptions I’ve run into:

  • The Semantic Web is not just a single Web.
Read More “What is the Semantic Web, Actually?”

New York Times Article About the Emerging Semantic Web

A New York Times article came out today about the Semantic Web — in which I was quoted, speaking about my company Radar Networks. Here’s an excerpt:

Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very
idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable
vision.

Read More “New York Times Article About the Emerging Semantic Web”

Minding The Planet — The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web

NOTES

  • Master Copy can be found at this URL or http://tinyurl.com/yynb93
  • Last Update: Tuesday, November 7, 2006, 10:17AM PST
  • License — This article is distributed under the Creative Commons Deed. If you would like to distribute a version of thisarticle, please link back to http://www.mindingtheplanet.net
Read More “Minding The Planet — The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web”

Playing Proteins as Songs Helps Researchers Hear Patterns

All living things are made up of proteins. Each protein is a string of
amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids, and each protein can
consist of dozens to thousands of them.

Scientists write down these amino acid sequences as series of
text letters.

Read More “Playing Proteins as Songs Helps Researchers Hear Patterns”

Scrybe — A Beautiful Ajax Organizer App

This online video preview of the upcoming Web-based organizer, Scrybe. The app has an unusually elegant and innovative AJAX interface. It’s beautifully designed. Watch the video.

Is There Room for The Soul? – Good Article on Cognitive Science

This is a surprisingly good article on the nature of consciousness — providing a survey of the current state-of-the-art in cognitive science research. It covers the question from a number of perspectives and interviews many of the leading current researchers.

Extremely Cool — Sony Invention Links Digital and Physical World

This is an extremely cool video of a beautifully designed interface that connects physical objects and digital objects in a new way. You can drag things off of your computer, right onto your table, and then from there connect them to physical objects, like a book, which can then be moved around causing the digital objects they are linked with to also move.… Read More “Extremely Cool — Sony Invention Links Digital and Physical World”

The Wikipedia Forks…

The co-founder of the Wikipedia has decided to fork the project, creating a new alternative compendium called the Citizendium. The idea is that it will be comprised of community content that is  moderated by "expert" editors. There seems to be some consternation about this among Wikipedians, while others think it may produce much more reliable content.

Excellent Feedback from Om Malik

Today A-List blogger and emerging "media 2.0" mogul, Om Malik, dropped by our offices to get a confidential demo of what we are building. We’ve asked Om to keep a tight lid on what we showed him, but he may be releasing at least a few hints in the near future.… Read More “Excellent Feedback from Om Malik”

The Ontology Integration Problem

The OWL language, and tools such as Protege and TopBraid Composer make it easy to design ontologies. But what about the problem of integrating disparate ontologies? I haven’t really found a good solution for this yet.

In my own experience designing a number of OWL ontologies (500 classes – 3000 classes on average) it has often been easier to create my own custom ontology branches to cover various concepts than to try to integrate other ontologies of those concepts into my own.… Read More “The Ontology Integration Problem”

Radar Networks is Seeking Search Engineers for Large-Scale Web Mining Initiative

My company, Radar Networks, is building a very large dataset by crawling and mining the Web. We then apply a range of new algorithms to the data (part of our secret sauce) to generate some very interesting and useful new information about the Web.… Read More “Radar Networks is Seeking Search Engineers for Large-Scale Web Mining Initiative”

Sexy Photos of Libraries?

Well if you are into libraries I guess these photos are sexy. Personally I’ve always loved libraries and used to spend hours just exploring in my college library. The Web is similarly fascinating to wander in, but there’s still something special about physical, tangible books that’s missing from the digital revolution.… Read More “Sexy Photos of Libraries?”

I'm Going to Start Blogging About Radar Networks Here

I
haven’t blogged very much about my stealth startup, Radar Networks,
yet. At the most, I’ve made a few cryptic posts and announcements in the past, but we’ve been keeping things pretty quiet. That’s been a conscious  decision because we have been working
intensively on R&D  and we just weren’t ready to say much yet.
Read More “I'm Going to Start Blogging About Radar Networks Here”

Privacy and Search

The recent negative hype about the lack of privacy in search results got me thinking about the needs of online services versus those of individuals. Is there a way to satisfy both constraints?

AOL’s accidental data release was one thing that worried me.… Read More “Privacy and Search”

What is Radar Networks up to?

Shel Israel and I just finished up working together for 10 days. I needed Shel’s perspective on what we are working on at Radar Networks. Shel lived up to his reviews as a brilliant thinker on strategic messaging, branding and positioning.… Read More “What is Radar Networks up to?”

Microsoft Photosynth is Incredible

Check out this video demo of Microsoft Photosynth — an experimental technology that combines multiple photos of the same thing into a 3-D model that can then be navigated and explored — it’s beautiful, visionary and well… just awesome.

Breakthrough in Finding Patterns in Complex Data Such as Sound

A new mathematical technique provides a dramatically better way to
analyze data, such as audio data, radar, sonar, or any other form of
time-frequency data
.

Humans have 200 million light receptors in their eyes,
10 to 20 million receptors devoted to smell, but only 8,000 dedicated
to sound.

Read More “Breakthrough in Finding Patterns in Complex Data Such as Sound”

Harnessing The Collective Mind

Today I read an interesting article in the New York Times about a company called Rite-Solutions which is using a home-grown stock market for ideas to catalyze bottom-up innovation across all levels of personnel in their organization. This is a way to very effectively harness and focus the collective creativity and energy in an organization around the best ideas that the organization generates.… Read More “Harnessing The Collective Mind”

Open IRIS – Semantic Desktop PIM Released!

Yesterday, the first public open-source release of Open IRIS was annnounced. IRIS is a Java-based desktop semantic personal information manager developed by SRI (with help from my own company, Radar Networks — we provided a some of our early semantic object libraries and a native triplestore, and some work on UI; note that our own upcoming products, and our semantic applications platform, are quite different from IRIS and focused on different needs, however), as part of the DARPA CALO program.… Read More “Open IRIS – Semantic Desktop PIM Released!”

Collective Intelligence 2.0

Introduction:

This article proposes the creation of a new open, nonprofit service on the Web that will provide something akin to “collective self-awareness” back to the Web. This service is like a “Google Zeitgeist” on steroids, but with a lot more real-time, interactive, participatory data, technology and features init.… Read More “Collective Intelligence 2.0”

New Text-Mining Project Aims to Help Scientists

A new project applies text-mining to help scientists in the UK discover knowledge in large collections of research articles and data (Found in: KurzweilAI):


Julie Nightingale

Tuesday   January   10, 2006
The Guardian

 
 Scientific
research is being added to at an alarming rate: the Human Genome
Project alone is generating enough documentation to "sink battleships".

Read More “New Text-Mining Project Aims to Help Scientists”

A New Kind of Memory Aid

I recently read a report of new neuroscience research in which researchers are able to predict what a person will recall by analyzing their brainstate. You can read a summary here.

This reminds me of an idea I had a while back for using biofeedback to guide brainstates, in order to improve memory.… Read More “A New Kind of Memory Aid”