Eric Blue's Blog

The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) project at Tufts is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.

At its core, the Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is a concept and content mapping application, developed to support teaching, learning and research and for anyone who needs to organize, contextualize, and access digital information. Using a simple set of tools and a basic visual grammar consisting of nodes and links, faculty and students can map relationships between concepts, ideas and digital content.

Concept mapping is not new to the educational field. In fact, the benefits of concept mapping as a learning tool have been documented by over 40 years of cognitive science research. VUE provides a concept mapping interface, which can be used as such, or as an interface to organize digital content in non-linear ways.

Check out the VUE screencast here. According to an email I just received this afternoon, VUE 2 was just released with the following features:

• Tools for dynamic presentation of maps
• Map merge and analysis tools
• Enhanced keyword tagging and search capabilities
• Support for semantic mapping using ontologies
• Expanded search of online resources (Flickr, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Twitter, PubMed, etc.)
• Ability to publish your VUE maps directly to Fedora digital repositories and Sakai

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I found a nifty PowerPoint presentation on a summary of Semantic Wikis (originally posted on ontoworld.org). I figured I'd share, and also give Scribd a whirl. With the recent release of their product called iPaper, Scribd offers an *Amazing* service that allows you to share and embed many different types of docs (namely PDF, PPT, DOC). I'm currently working on a way to use Scribd to embed PDFs directly into my Wiki. More on that later... for now, here is the embedded presentation:

Source: http://colab.cim3.net/file/work/SICoP/SWIM/SemanticWikiReview.ppt

Posted by EricB at 06:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

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For readers that know me, it's not a stretch to say that I *love* learning new things. I've always been a bit of a self learner (autodidactic if you want to get technical), and a few years ago I started a search (a quest actually) for finding tools to help streamline the learning process. Over time I discovered that the realm of knowledge management is vast and, quite honestly, fairly nebulous at times. In the next few months, I'm going to shift the focus of the blog for a little bit and write some more in depth posts on discoveries I've made with respect to personal knowledge management and highlight software that facilitates organization, collaboration, and learning.

Personal Knowledge Management

First of all, what exactly is "Personal Knowledge Management", or PKM? I think the following collection of quotes from the KnowledgeBoard (Technologies for Personal Knowledge Management) summarizes best:

"PKM involves a range of relatively simple and inexpensive techniques and tools that anyone can use to acquire, create and share knowledge, extend personal networks and collaborate with colleagues without having to rely on the technical or financial resources of the employer."

AND

"PKM is a conceptual framework to organize and integrate information that we, as individuals, feel is important so that it becomes part of our personal knowledge base. It provides a strategy for transforming what might be random pieces of information into something that can be systematically applied and that expands our personal knowledge."

In my personal experience, I've used a range of tools to help organize my information. These have included traditional PIMs (Personal Information Managers), outliners and note taking applications, and mind maps. I highlighted a number of these tools in my recent post on Mind Maps as Personal Dashboards. What I find intriguing is the potential to enhance PKM by leveraging newer technologies and applications(semantic and "web 2.0"). This recent breed of applications and technologies can help people discover, collect, aggregate, and share knowledge in new and interesting ways.

Personal Learning Environments

Organizing information and sharing knowledge is critical, but it helps to have a strategy and framework for approaching your learning endeavors. Personal Learning Environments, or PLEs, are defined as follows:

Personal Learning Environments are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to

* set their own learning goals
* manage their learning; managing both content and process
* communicate with others in the process of learning

and thereby achieve learning goals.

The following diagram is courtesy of Jeremy Hiebert:

Again, I think there is *huge* potential in this area. Advances in social networking and further development of the "Social Graph" will help accelerate learning and the development of communities geared towards specialized learning goals.

Posted by EricB at 07:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

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Wow, now that's a tall order to fill! And, it appears that gnizr has delivered that order. Gnizr (short for organizer) is one of the latest additions to the Google code repository, and this code-base has been donated from Image Matters LLC.

I haven't had a chance to install yet, but from looking over the website and screenshots it looks pretty amazing!

gnizr™ (gə-nīzər) is an open source application for social bookmarking and web mashup. It is easy to use gnizr to create a personalized del.icio.us-like portal for a group of friends and colleagues to store, classify, and share information, and mash-it-up with information about location.

* Archive saved bookmarks and organize bookmarks using tags and folders.
* Edit notes using WYSIWYG bookmark editor.
* Assign geographical location values to bookmarks and view bookmarks on a map.
* Define relationships between bookmark tags -- broader, narrower and member-of.
* Tag bookmarks using Machine Tags.
* View bookmarks in Clustermap and Timeline.
* Import new bookmarks from user-defined RSS subscriptions -- RSS, Atom and GeoRSS.
* Create new application behaviors using gnizr API. For example:
o Add modules to support custom Machine Tags;
o Add listeners to handle bookmark change events;
o Develop custom RSS crawlers to perform automated bookmark imports; and
o Create third-party mashups from data published by gnizr (RDF, RSS and JSON).

Screenshots (Click here for more)

Thanks to James at Semantic Wave for bringing this to my attention via del.icio.us!

Posted by EricB at 07:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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It's obviously hard these days to ignore the Web2.0 phenomenon (although the term still causes me to cringe), and the labels given to the forthcoming Semantic Web (the "real" semantic web or web<put your version number here>). See Mike Bergman's post Please, Squash that Web3.0 Cockroach if you want to gauge a common reaction to the latest buzz word o' the day attached to new technologies. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see the memes that sometimes burst onto the collective web consciousness, and take on lives of their own.

I've used Google Trends in the past and thought it would be interesting to see how some of these hot topics fare against each other in popularity: Web2.0, Web3.0, Web4.0, The Semantic Web, and Social Networking. Here are a few observations:

Social Networking virtually popped out of nowhere starting early Sept '05. And apparently it's more popular in India, Singapore, and New Zealand than the United States.

Web2.0 was born on Sept 30th 2005 when Tim O'Reilly published What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Since then, there's been a plethora of "Web 2.0" applications and sites. And, there's been no shortage of controversy of what "Web 2.0" actually is. Lack of definition or not, Web 2.0 doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

Web 3.0, Web 4.0, and the Semantic Web seem to be fairly close in popularity. Although, Web 3.0 is beginning to gain in search popularity over the Semantic Web. I honestly can't tell you what Web 3.0 or Web 4.0 is, so please don't ask ;)

Posted by EricB at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Mike at AI³ has posted a great in-depth article titled:

Did You Blink? The Structured Web Just Arrived

From the article:

"DBpedia is the first and largest source of structured data on the Internet covering topics of general knowledge. You may have not yet heard of DBpedia, but you will. Its name derives from its springboard in Wikipedia. And it is free, growing rapidly and publicly available today.

With DBpedia, you can manipulate and derive facts on more than 1.6 million “things” (people, places, objects, entities). For example, you can easily retrieve a listing of prominent scientists born in the 1870s; or, with virtually no additional effort, a further filtering to all German theoretical physicists born in 1879 who have won a Nobel prize [1]. DBpedia is the first project chosen for showcasing by the Linking Open Data community of the Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) interest group within the W3C. That community has committed to make portions of other massive data sets — such as the US Census, Geonames, MusicBrainz, WordNet, the DBLP bibliography and many others — interoperable as well."

Posted by EricB at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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One of my areas of interest that has grown over the last couple years has been data visualization. I'm a visually-oriented learner, and I look forward to seeing any techniques, illustrations, or technologies that:

1) Allow people to assimilate information as fast as possible.

2) Deepen understanding of knowledge by visually illustrating data in new and interesting ways. There is nothing like having an intellectual epiphony after looking at a picture for a few seconds (pictures can definitely be worth a thousand words).

3) Present information in an aesthetically pleasing way. Or, in extreme examples, inspire a sense of awe!

Thanks in large part to del.icio.us, I've come across a wide assortment of sites and blogs that really illustrate some amazing work in this area. While cleaning up my knowledge management related bookmarks, I started to revisit many of the sites I've tagged in recent months. I thought I'd share some of the illustrations that really stuck out at me.

Before I dive into some of the great examples, I figured I'd address the main theme of this article: 'Dataesthetics'. Traditionally, the popular term used to describe data visualization and the aesthetics of information is called "Info-Aesthetics". Info-Aesthetics was coined by Lev Manovich, and is also the title of his semi-open source book. After some Googling on the subject, and some internal debate, I decided that the term Dataesthetics rolls off the tongue easier and sounds more appealing.

Now for the visually stunning sites. These first 2 at the top of the list collectively represent some of the most amazing data visualization projects out there. I've only listed a dozen or so of my favorite examples. But if you're inclined to explore further, I'd recommend spending a few hours going through Infosthetics and Visual Complexity.

Sites

http://infosthetics.com/ - Inspired by Manovich's definition of information aesthetics, this weblog explores the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization, in an emergent multidisciplinary field what could be coined as 'creative information visualization'.

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/ - VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.

Business

LinkSViewer - interactive visual networking tool for venture capital relationships in Silicon Valley. I just blogged about this a couple weeks ago here.

Census and Maps

Breathing Earth - Displays the carbon dioxide emission levels of every country in the world, including birth and death rates.

Social Explorer Maps - Demographic information with hundreds of interactive data maps of the United States, including historical data back to 1940.

Emotion

We Feel Fine - Harvest and graphs human feelings from a large number of weblogs.

Greenwich Emotion Map - Artist Christian Nold has been invited to collaborate with local residents from the Greenwich Peninsula to explore the area afresh and build an emotion map of the area that explores people's relationship with their local environment.

Government

Death and Taxes - A visual guide to where your federal tax dollars go to.

Global Military Spending - Beautifully illustrates how much countries spend per year on their military.

The Government Grind - How much government officials get paid.

History

Imperial History of the Middle East - Who has controlled the Middle East over the course of history?

Music

The Shape of Song - What does music look like?

MusicMap - Visual music search application.

MusicLens - Music recommendation.

LivePlasma (Music) - Music browser and recommendation.

News

NewsMap - Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator.

Digg Labs Stack and Swarm - A broader and deeper view of Digg.

WeekInReview - Hand drawn weekly summary of current events.

Statistics (charts and diagrams)

Understanding USA - "Understanding information is power".

NameVoyager - Explore the sea of names, letter by letter...watch trends rise and fall, and dive in deeper to see your favorite name's place in the historical tides.

Karl Hartig: Data Visualization - Great collection of charts, diagrams, and information graphics.

Del.icio.us Treemap - Del.icio.us most popular tree map.

Technology

The History of Programming Languages - plots over 50 programming languages on a multi-layered, color-coded timeline.

Java Technology Concept Map - Get an overview of the Java landscape as well as learn more about the details of its components.

Text Processing

Graphical visualization of text similarities - Amazing text visualization illustrations.

War/Conflict

Interactive Middle East Network Map - Shows both both attracting and repelling forces between various players who have interests in various regions.

The Middle East Buddy List - Who is a friend or enemy?

Strife and Power in the New Middle East - NY Times article.

Iraq War Fatalities - Iraq war coalition fatalities since Mar 2003.

Posted by EricB at 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (1)

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