SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
It's All Semantics
from Scientific American
The Internet grew out of an idea to connect various and disparate sources of data, delivering to researchers around the globe unprecedented access to information via their computer screens. As e-Science evolves alongside Web 2.0, however, some are pushing for a fundamental change in the way the Internet catalogues and organizes data to make it more readily available to the growing number of interdisciplinary and highly specialized researchers who spend their working hours nearly entirely online and who tend to collaborate online.
Whereas this is not a new argument--the idea of a more intuitive "Semantic Web" has been kicked around for years--it has gotten a fresh set of legs thanks to the recent funding of a software development tool kit expected to better connect researchers with the information they seek.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a team of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., $1.1 million in October to create a software programming tool kit by mid-2010 that scientists and other researchers will be able to use to make data from their work available to a larger number of their peers as well as laypeople, including educators and policymakers.
Read more...
Click here to listen to podcasts of American Scientist Pizza Lunches, informal lectures where scientists present new research to non-scientists. Originally intended for science communicators in the Research Triangle Park region of North Carolina, the audio slideshows are now available to anyone online. New talks are posted periodically during the academic year.
Science in the Media
Newspapers:
Magazines and Web Sites:
The Science-Media Intersection:
Subscribe to Our Content!
Visit our RSS Feeds page to choose among 13 customized feeds, or create a free My AmSci account to request an email notice whenever a specified author, department or discipline appears online.