Archive for the ‘Knowledge’ Category
Geographies of the World’s Knowledge
Who owns the world’s knowledge? Who produces it? Who is able to consume it? Has the Internet democratized geographies of information? This free interactive book containing accessible, informative and beautiful maps and graphics illustrates geographies of knowledge in our Internet Age. It visualizes and explores contemporary patterns of commercially produced and peer-produced knowledge. The intriguing results should be seen by anyone interested in better understanding the global flows of knowledge.
DBpedia: Structured information from Wikipedia
DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data. We hope this will make it easier for the amazing amount of information in Wikipedia to be used in new and interesting ways, and that it might inspire new mechanisms for navigating, linking and improving the encyclopaedia itself.
Wikipedia has grown into one of the central knowledge sources of mankind, maintained by thousands of contributors. The DBpedia project leverages this gigantic source of knowledge by extracting structured information from Wikipedia and by making this information accessible on the Web under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and the GNU Free Documentation License.
SKOSsy – generate Thesauri on the fly!
Imagine you could generate any thesaurus you would like for nearly any knowledge domain you can think of with quite a good quality! Sounds impossible? Reminds you of all the promises made by text mining software which generates “semantic nets” from scratch?
Let me introduce you to SKOSsy. I will explain what this web service can do for you:
SKOSsy generates SKOS based thesauri in German or in English for a domain you are interested in. Not any domain but nearly any: SKOSsy extracts data from DBpedia, so it can cover anything which is in DBpedia. Thus, SKOSsy works well whenever a first seed thesaurus should be generated for a certain organisation or project. If you load the automatically generated thesaurus into an editor like PoolParty Thesaurus Manager (PPT) you can start to enrich the knowledge model by additional concepts, relations and links to other LOD sources. But you don´t have to start in the open countryside with your thesaurus project.
Quora
Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.
One way you can think of it is as a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking other people. Eventually, when you see a link to a question page on Quora, your feeling should be: “Oh, great! That’s going to have all the information I want about that.” It’s also a place where new stuff–that no one has written about yet–can get pulled onto the web.
People use Quora to document the world around them. Over time, the database of knowledge should grow and grow until almost everything that anyone wants to know is available in the system. When knowledge is put into Quora, it is there forever to be shared with anyone in the future who is interested.
Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet
Here is an intellectual extravaganza, a dazzling history of the key institutions that have shaped and channeled knowledge in the West from the classical period to the present. Fashioned with elegance and wit, this exhilarating survey carries us through the pivotal points of institutional change and cultural transformation. It is full of memorable characters, from the flamboyant founder of the great library at Alexandria and the arrogant medieval logician Peter Abelard to the dashing global adventurer von Humboldt. In its compact history we find the perfect context for understanding the vast changes we are experiencing now in the landscape of knowledge.
