September 15, 2011
The Web Science Trust
Various Authors,
University of Southampton, September 15, 2011.
The Web Science Trust is hosted by the University of Southampton and "is a charitable body with the aim of supporting the global development of Web Science." The idea of Web Science is to view the web as an empirical phenomenon, an object of study in its own right. I think the concept is interesting in its own right, but the website is far too coy about its history and the nature of the subject, preferring to route people to specific presentations rather than stating these things in plain text. I think they're trying to define the discipline before it actually is a discipline. Best to look for specific information in the wiki. See also Nigel Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee, Web Science Emerges.
Web-Based Activities
Various Authors,
Facebook, September 15, 2011.
Something we're a lot more focused on this year in the #Change11 MOOC is the promotion of web-based activities around the course created by participants, not the course organizers. This page lists the activities that have been created and send to the administrators (well, to me) by email. These activities are a crucial part of any MOOC, in my view, because a MOOC is a web of inter-related resources and activities, not centralized on one particular site.
From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics
Peter Turney and Patrick Pantel,
JAIR, September 15, 2011.
This is a survey paper that argues that the vector space mode is a natural consequence of the distributional hypothesis (DH). DH states that words that occur in similar contexts tend to have similar meanings. This can be used not only to identify synonyms, but a range of analogies as well (eg., 'water' "flows in a" 'river', 'data "flows in a" 'pipe'). Some of these analogies can become complex, involving numerous terms. Consider the possible mappings of terms between 'the solar system' and 'the Bohr atom model'. What about logic? We turn to Dominic Widdows (2004) book Geometry and Meaning were he analyzes relations like 'bass' "and not" 'fish'. What's the other way of doing this sort of thing? Well, there's Wordnet, in which "nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept."
SciVerse
Various Authors,
Elsevier, September 15, 2011.
This came up during a meeting - I haven't explored it, but it seems worth a look: "SciVerse offers unprecedented access to a constantly expanding universe of content and solutions resulting in more discovery with less searching. Integrating ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciTopics and targeted Web content, with community developed applications SciVerse is a groundbreaking platform that provides our data, your way."
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