Zzzoot

I am happy to announce that I have just been appointed to the Canadian National Committee for CODATA , which is an ICSU committee. I have been an observer on this committee since 1999, and look forward to continuing my work with this committee. :-) CODATA wikipedia entry ICSU wikipedia entry

Recently I was composing an email in gmail and - like I sometimes do - decided to press the discard button and not send the email. But not before gmail indicated that it had saved my message. After I discarded the email, I checked my "Drafts" to see if it showed up there. No, as I expected. But where do they go? Anywhere? Are they in some kind of Google never-never land? And more important: are they retrievable when someone comes to Google with a court order for someone's emails? Are they stored but Google doesn't release them because technically they are not email? Might they be of value, perhaps revealing information someone had decided was too hot to send in an email? These things are not clear from gmail's Privacy Policy Notice and Google's broader Privacy Policy . And no, I wasn't concerned about any of my own discarded emails. :-)

Two books have recently been published on open source technology for education: Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning (2009) George Siemens, Peter Tittenberger, University of Manitoba. 61p. Free-as-in-beer, creative commons license. Wiki for book . Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace (2009) Edited by Susan d'Antoni and Catriona Savage, UNESCO. 172p. 12 Euro!! [ OK, if UNESCO wants to sell dead-tree books, fine I guess, but they definitely should be giving away the digital versions of the books too. ] These new releases both deal with Open Educational Resources (OER). For more in OER, see the Resources list below. The tables of contents of these two books are farther below. Resources: Open Educational Resources (Wikipedia entry) Open Educational Resource Commons Open Educational Resources (OER) and Libraries (2009) Paula J. Hane. InfoToday Open Educational Resources in India’s national development (2009) MSV Kumar. Open Learning: The Journal of Ope...

As yet another newspaper "gets it" and launches an API (" Open Platform ") to its content (" Newspaper as a Platform: Guardian Launches API" - ReadWriteWeb), leveraging the creativity of the masses for the creation of mashups, mixins and just plain wonderful and wonky applications, I can only hope that the holders of significant scientific content, like scientific publishers and aggregators, will also move in this direction. Nature's OTMI seems a rather Web 1.0 inspired effort, and with limited usability at that (although Nature has stopped working on OTMI). Exposing research article contents (full text, metadata, citations, datasets, ontologies, etc) - even it be 6+ months old - to the world through a sensible (and maybe even shared/standard) API would create an explosion of mashups ranging from incredible researcher-oriented knowledge discovery tools to normal human being-oriented applications for finding things like as-yet-unreported possible da...

The January 2009 issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems is a special issue on the Semantic Web and science knowledge integration: The Emerging Field of Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration . McGuinness, Deborah L.; Fox, Peter; Brodaric, Boyan; Kendall, Elisa Ontology Design for Scientific Theories That Make Probabilistic Predictions . Poole, D.; Smyth, C.; Sharma, R. Semantic Support for Quantitative Research Processes . Rijgersberg, H.; Top, J.; Meinders, M. MatSeek: An Ontology-Based Federated Search Interface for Materials Scientists . Cheung, Kwok; Hunter, Jane; Drennan, John Annotation and Image Markup: Accessing and Interoperating with the Semantic Content in Medical Imaging . Rubin, Daniel L.; Mongkolwat, Pattanasak; Kleper, Vladimir; Supekar, Kaustubh; Channin, David S. Enabling Cross-Disciplinary E-Science by Integrating Geoscience Ontologies with Dolce . Brodaric, B.; Probst, F.

Obama goes 'all in' for science New Scientist, Mar 4 2009 Sigh. Related: Editorial: The pitfalls of Obama's science bonanza , New Scientist, Mar 4 2009 Obama to restore science to its rightful place . New Scientist, Jan 20 2009

Lecture: " Open Source Licences and the Boundaries of Knowledge Production " Michael Madison , Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research, University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Date: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 Time: 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Place: Fauteux Hall , room 351 Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa Description: What is the future of open source licensing? The presentation will use Jacbosen v. Katzer, a recent opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that analyzes an open source software license, to frame a discussion of open source issues that are conceptual, historical, and practical. For more information . RSVP needed to techlaw@uottawa.ca or on Facebook group . Dr. Madison appears to be a fairly enlightened lawyer who has studied and published on IP, copyright and (software) licensing issues: Intellectual Property and Americana, or Why IP Gets the Blues . 18 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 677 (2008). The Idea of the Law Rev...

The Interagency Working Group on Digital Data to the National Science and Technology Council (U.S.) has release its report, Harnessing the Power of Digital Data for Science and Society" . " The report lays out a strategic vision for ´a digital scientific data universe in which data creation, collection, documentation, analysis, preservation, and dissemination can be appropriately, reliably, and readily managed, thereby enhancing the return on our nation’s research and development investment by ensuring that digital data realize their full potential as catalysts for progress in our global information society .' "