Knowledge Sharing, Organization, Social Structures

Social structures are considered as an important channel for knowledge sharing within organizations. In recent years, knowledge management has begun to shift from focusing primarily on technology solutions toward exploring the social relationships through which knowledge is shared. Therefore, a wide variety of social structures have been recognized within the context of organizations. To utilize these social structures as an effective channel for knowledge sharing, necessity of a holistic view on their types and attributes seems crucial. An understanding of the different types and attributes of social structures in organizations will provide a lens through which to examine their dynamic nature in relation to knowledge-sharing activities.

Some months ago, I performed a research on knowledge sharing social structures within organizations. The goal was to extract the different types and properties of social structures and their potential effect on knowledge sharing process within an organization. I  put my report here (report_oss_knowledge) for those who are interested in this area .

Tranquility…

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence… Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”- Calvin Coolidge

There is always a way to find your tanqulity point.  A nice smile, a nice music, a nice poem, a nice thought and a nice conversation are just a few examples of things that can turn you back on the track. Just open your arms and let the destiny target you.

Add Life To Your Days, Not Days To Your Life…

It is always like a blink to pass from the  past to the present. Life is not quantitative, it is very qualitative! There might be one moment worth than whole life of a person. It is very important to add life to our days rather than days to our life. Sometimes we just need to follow the signs, they will steer us to where we have to be. There are a lot of moments which signal us to be on the track. The problem is getting used to our habits instead of listening to the dynamic world which is surrounding us and calling us to wake up. There is always late very soon, sooner than what we imagine. Opportunities come and leave like paper doves in the fly….

- Do the people think that they will be left to say, “We believe” and they will not be tried?!

RDFaCE WordPress plugin

WordPress  uses TinyMCE as its content editor. So, we can easily intergarte RDFaCE into it for the purpose of semantic content authoring. With the integration of RDFaCE into WordPress, the availability of semantically annotated content on the Web would be substantially increased. It can be one step toward the Web of data…

You can download RDFaCE plugin for WordPress from here.

For more information please refer to : RDFaCE project page

RDFaCE– Put a Smile on the Face of Semantic Content Authoring

In his influential paper “The Computer for the 21st Century” Mark Weiser talks about making machines fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter the machine’s environment. He notes, “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

When it comes to semantic content authoring the main question is how to  facilitate this process by removing the gap between content creation and content annotation. There are a lot of tools available for embedding semantic annotations within the Web content but one of the main obstacles  seen in promoting semantic content is the lack of intuitive and user-friendly semantic authoring tools.

  RDFaCE  (RDFa Content Editor ) is an online text editor based on TinyMCE. It supports authoring of RDFa content. In addition to two classical views for text authoring (WYSIWYG and Source Code view) , RDFaCE  supports two novel views for semantic content authoring namely WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) and Triple view (aka. Fact View). WYSIWYM view aims at displaying semantic annotaions on top of classical WYSIWYG view which is ubiqutous among people on the Web. It uses dynamic CSS stylesheets to distinguish semantic content from normal content. Triple view is another semantic view which only shows the facts (triples) stated in the text. RDFaCE provides a syncronizatiion between these four views so that changing in one view causes to change in the other views. Another feature supported in RDFaCE which empowers it in comparing to existing semantic editors is combining the results of multiple NLP APIs to facilitate semantic authoring process. This feature provides an initial set of annotations for users that can be modified and extended by them. a demo version of RDFaCE is available at http://rdface.aksw.org. For more informatiion you can visit here.

Schema.org : where business and academia could meet!

Recently Bing, Google and Yahoo! made an agreement to rely on a standard markup to improve the display of their search results, thereby making it easier for people to find the right web pages. They chose Microdata as annotation format to embed the types and properties of the content within the web pages. Microdata  is a new feature supported in HTML 5 which provides a mechanism to allow machine-readable data to be embedded in HTML documents in an easy-to-write manner, with an unambiguous parsing model. Schema.org aims at providing  a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use for their Microdata markup.

That sounds a great news. It can be considered as a step towards realizing the semantic web. Then, what is the problem?!

There has been a long discussion in semantic web mailing list about this new announcement. Some people do agree on it as a progress to promote the semantic web efforts and some people criticize it  as a new revenue model for the web monsters. In this post I wanted to publish my thoughts about Schema.org approach.

The first question which comes to my mind in this context is: Why Microdata? Why not RDFa or either Microformat?

It looks great that three frontier companies on the web have come to a consensus. I really like and appreciate it. It is a moment that rarely can be seen on a tough competition unless there is  a win-win benefit out of it. But I believe doing a job well is better than doing just a good job when there is an opportunity. About choosing Microdata not RDFa or microformats, they mention:

“Focusing on microdata was a pragmatic decision. Supporting multiple syntaxes makes documentation for webmasters more complex and introduces more overhead in terms of defining new formats. Microformats are concise and easy to understand, but they don’t offer an open extensibility mechanism and the reuse of the class tag can cause conflicts with website CSS. RDFa is extensible and very expressive, but the substantial complexity of the language has contributed to slower adoption. Microdata is the most recent well-known standard, created along with HTML5. It strikes a balance between extensibility and simplicity, and is most suitable for building the schema.org. Google and Yahoo! have in the past supported both microformats and RDFa for certain schemas and will continue to support these syntaxes for those schemas. We will also be monitoring the web for RDFa and microformats adoption and if they pick up, we will look into supporting these syntaxes.”

I don’t think it is a good reasoning for a pragmatic decision. Simple is not always the better! As Samuel says, while there are a number of technical merits that speak in favor of RDFa over Microformats and Microdata (fully qualified vocabulary terms, prefix short-hand via CURIEs, accessibility-friendly, unified processing rules, etc. please take a look at this to see that RDFa is not really so complicated!), the main point is realizing of centralized innovation vs. distributed innovation. The web has always relied on distributed innovation and RDFa allows that sort of innovation to continue by solving the tenable problem of a semantics expression mechanism. Microdata has no such general purpose solution. Although it can facilitate one specific problem like searching data, it is not well scalable with the vision of semantic web. Schema.org as a centralized solution for web of data is really in conflict with the vision of making benefit out of distributed information islands. I wish they could make a better decision to speed up realizing a web of knowledge!

• Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web
• Schema.org – Threat or Opportunity?
• The DEATH of RDFa?
• Microdata chosen over RDFa for semantics by Google, Bing and Yahoo!
• The False Choice of Schema.org

Valentine 2011…

 

+ Moving is living…

Three Butterflies…

Today, I was reading ”Mantiq-ut-Tayr” (“The Language of the Birds”), a collection of poems written by shaykh Fariduddin Attar of Nishapur. It is really amazing. I decided to write one of the poems here:

Once up on a time
There where three peculiar butterflies
Their peculiarity was in their fantasies about the flames
The fantasies where old taboos
That had been forbidden to even think about

“Fire worship is the fate of barbaric moths,
we are the beauty itself
no need to become beautiful in the light of fire,
we are the most sophisticated manifestation of ecstatic;
the chosen one,
to be adore and admire
to be loved.
We are the beloved,
not driven by the gaze of flames,
it is us that awake passion
we need no awakening nor flames”

So was the mantra their parents whisper in their ears each night to bring them in to sleep.

Then it came this day,
They saw a light
and the light was shining in another way
It was not like the daylight, the colour of the sun
Nor was it the reflection the midnight moon

The light was golden like the croon of the king
It was orange like the desert of Indian midland
And deep blue like the tropical oceans
Where the dolphins came to sing

It was a gentle like
A singular light
Silent and solid
Yet
dancing and turning
subtle
to left and right
It was a candlelight

One of the butterflies said:
“Oh I am in love with this gentle light
It warms my heart,
At last the fire captured me”

Yet the mantras of their parents came to her mind:
“this is the forbidden love!
Oh I am a sinner and
I will be punish,
God forgive me for this”
She said and turn away from the light

The other one got closer to the light
“This warmth is boiling me inside,
only light I see,
only heat I feel,
I am melting in this sensation
Let me make love to you candle
Let me hold you with my wings.”

And so he deed. The fire touched gently his little wings
“Oh no, I am burning,
You deceiver,
you barbaric lover,
What do you do to me?
This is then the reason why our folk warn us for love”, he said and flow away from the light.

The third butterfly didn’t say a word;
Nothing to hear from it;
It was a moment of exertion,
From head to tail,
There was a presence,
It lengthen,
Soften and broaden it,
The whole manifestation

Then it jump in to the centre of candlelight
The fire burn it
First it became golden;
Then orange and then deep blue
It was all a sudden and then there was only light…

یک شبی پروانگان جمع آمدند
در مضیفی طالب شمع آمدند 

جمله می‌گفتند می‌باید یکی
کو خبر آرد ز مطلوب اندکی

شد یکی پروانه تا قصری ز دور
در فضای قصر یافت از شمع نور

بازگشت و دفتر خود بازکرد
وصف او بر قدر فهم آغاز کرد

ناقدی کو داشت در مجمع مهی
گفت او را نیست از شمع آگهی

شد یکی دیگر گذشت از نور در
خویش را بر شمع زد از دور در

پر زنان در پرتو مطلوب شد
شمع غالب گشت و او مغلوب شد

بازگشت او نیز و مشتی راز گفت
از وصال شمع شرحی باز گفت

ناقدش گفت این نشان نیست ای عزیز
همچو آن یک کی نشان دادی تو نیز

دیگری برخاست می‌شد مست مست
پای کوبان بر سر آتش نشست

دست درکش کرد با آتش به هم
خویشتن گم کرد با او خوش به هم

چون گرفت آتش ز سر تا پای او
سرخ شد چون آتشی اعضای او

ناقد ایشان چو دید او را ز دور
شمع با خود کرده همرنگش ز نور

گفت این پروانه در کارست و بس
کس چه داند، این خبر دارست و بس

آنک شد هم بی‌خبر هم بی‌اثر
از میان جمله او دارد خبر

تا نگردی بی‌خبر از جسم و جان
کی خبر یابی ز جانان یک زمان

هرکه از مویی نشانت باز داد
صد خط اندر خون جانت باز داد

نیست محرم نفس کس این جایگاه
در نگنجد هیچ کس این جایگاه

عطار (منطق الطیر)

31 July 2010

Six month ago an important event occurred in my life. I can describe it as one of the three important moments every person would have! Yes, you are right! It was marriage! Birth and death are out of our control, but marriage is a decision you would take during your life to create a change by your own. Now, the circle of my loneliness has a smaller radius, I have someone to share my life with and continue my path with a synergy…

Spring is coming…

We have had cold windy weather here during the past months. This year it feels more cold than usual. It is really winter. Winter comes right after fall to freeze falling down of leaves; and halting all movements in a clever position. It brings a new season for patience. It is time to whitening your past and get ready for your mysterious future. What I have learned by experience is that behind the veil of every silence, an inevitable wave of storm is hidden. Don’t trust in darkness of night, dawn will come indeed ….