KMi Seminars
Dynamics of online peer production and collaborative sensemaking
This event took place on Tuesday 02 November 2010 at 12:00

 
Dario Taraborelli Centre for Research in Social Simulation at the University of Surrey

This talk consists of two parts: the first part focusses on a study of the dynamics of online peer production systems; the second discusses crowdsourcing strategies to semantically structure a large body of knowledge.

Despite a large interest in the research community for online peer production, little has been done to study the dynamics of online communities that form part of larger ecosystems, and in particular what determines the performance and ultimately the survival of individual collaborative communities within such an ecosystem. This is partly due to the lack of large-scale data on the temporal evolution of collaborative ecosystems, partly to a poor understanding of what it means for communities that form these ecosystems to be "viable". Studying how these communities evolve over time can help us understand the determinants of their growth and assess their viability as a function of their social structure, internal functioning and relationship with competing communities. In this talk I present two case studies looking at community dynamics in the context of the wiki and social media ecosystem. I also present a tool called WikiTracer whose goal is to help us collect in a standardised way detailed data on wiki-based communities from a variety of heterogeneous platforms.

The second part of this presentation describes the CrowdLinks project, a proposed framework to allow large populations of users to semantically annotate the relationship between scholarly articles. Online reference management services offer a unique opportunity to add a collaborative semantic layer on top of a citation network. In this talk I present the rationale, design and expected outcome of this framework and discuss how collaborative citation typing can help us better understand the structure and progress of scientific research.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities