The Hypermedia Discourse team has been busy for the last fortnight. Since the end of April, they have been presenting and participating in workshops at the ACM CHI conference (San Jose), Center for Science, Technology and Society (Santa Clara University), the Compendium Institute Annual Workshop (NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View), and SRI International (Menlo…
KMi is already one of the world’s leaders in Semantic Web research and deployment. Now we’re showing the way with the Pragmatic Web, which focuses on the design of Web tools that recognise how context fundamentally shapes conversations and commitments. After presenting KMi’s work on Hypermedia Discourse at the inaugural 2006 conference, Simon Buckingham Shum…
The latest version of the Compendium visual hypermedia system for conceptual modelling has just been released after extensive testing. It introduces a powerful new tagging interface, alnog with a host of minor improvements. With this release we depart from our previous practice of restricting beta releases to a small, select group before making the "production"…
The GlobalArgument.net project, led by KMi’s Simon Buckingham Shum with former Australian cabinet minister Peter Baldwin, is an internet experiment in Computer-Supoprted Argumentation of complex social, technical and political debates. "Players" from around the world use their software tools to show how they would approach the analysis and communication of an issue, and discuss their…
Today I was in London as an invited speaker on Design Rationale, helping to introduce the "Why?" dimensions of Requirements Engineering. The Institution of Engineering and Technology offered the seminar, entitled "Answering the Six Questions about Requirements": "As the applications of requirements is becoming increasingly popular, it is being applied to many aspects of systems…
I recently returned from Long Island, New York, where I joined an invitational workshop at the Dolan DNA Learning Center, to explore "New Horizons in Internet Site Development". Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) where DNALC is based, is a private, non-profit basic research and educational institution. Established more than a century ago, CSHL conducts research…
UNESCO’s International Migration programme studies the impact of migration patterns. One aspect we’ve all heard about is "Brain Drain" as skilled citizens emigrate. However, you can be in many places at once on the Net, leading to a more positive view, that of "Brain Gain" since many of these diaspora want to continue helping their…
I’ve just returned from an interdisciplinary gathering at the 1st International Pragmatic Web Conference in Stuttgart. Borrowing from the linguistic metaphor of Syntax/Semantics/Pragmatics, the emerging vision of the Pragmatic Web focuses on the contextual factors that make formalisms (like ontologies) and other communicative acts over the Web, meaningful. I described how my work on Hypermedia…
Today KMi’s Simon Buckingham Shum ran the international "MMAD" workshop: Modelling Meetings, Argumentation & Discourse, in conjunction with COMMA, the 1st Int. Conf. on Computational Models of Argument, Univ. Liverpool. MMAD brought together leading researchers working on the next generation of meeting capture and replay tools, with specific interest in approaches that model the structure…
The Open University announced today a £5.65 million (US $9.9 million) Open Content Initiative (OCI) to make a selection of its learning materials available free of charge to educators and learners around the world. KMi's OCI team has played a key role in shaping this, and will be integrating its collaboration, presence and knowledge mapping…
