Monday, June 23, 2008

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

In the meanwhile, taking co-ordination to an extreme level

Lightweight women’s double (LW2x) final race for Olympic Qualification, today, Poznan, Poland.
Six remaining teams wanted the two Olympic spots. Perhaps the Netherlands wanted it the most. Kirsten van der Kolk of the Netherlands finished with bronze at Athens. Van der Kolk then semi-retired from rowing, had a baby, named the baby Nike and came back to join her Athens partner Marit van Eupen late last year. They put gold shoes in their boat and started their comeback. Jumping out at the start, however, wasn’t the Dutch. It was Poland with Renee Hykel and Jennifer Goldsack of the United States following closely. This didn’t last long as the Dutch worked their way into the lead with a steady 35 stroke rate pace. In the last 500m it looked like only Goldsack and Hykel had enough to hold on to the Dutch leading pace. What could Poland do? At the line the Netherlands add another boat to their Olympic team and the United States add boat number 13 to their Olympic team. Congratulations Marit, Kirsten and their coach Josy.

Friday, June 06, 2008

Now we're getting somewhere: Thinkbase

Thinkbase allows people to visually explore the relationships that Freebase can expose. Thinkbase employs the Thinkmap visualization software to visually represent the semantic relationships between objects on Freebase as an interactive mind map. Each object on the map is represented by an icon that corresponds to the type of object it is. For example, person, place, movie, song, or artwork. The site uses a two-pane display, putting the relationship map in the left pane, and the Freebase entry for the active node in the right pane. Every node on a Thinkbase map and be expanded to see concepts related to that object, or collapsed to clean the graph of relationships you're unconcerned with. Every map you create can also be linked to via a dynamic share URL. Thinkbase is a usefull visual front end to the Freebase database that exposes the semantic relationships that such a database can reveal in a compelling way. Tools like Thinkbase can help us start to think about what type of questions we should be asking by clearly showing the type of semantic relationships that databases like Freebase excel at finding.

Thursday, June 05, 2008

KM Review publishes case study of EUROCONTROL's SKYbrary


SKYBRARY: A WIKI FOR AVIATION SAFETY KNOWLEDGE EUROCONTROL, an intergovernmental aviation industry body, is committed to making European aviation safer, more secure and more environmentally friendly. That means providing a forum where civil and military aviation specialists can learn from safety lesson promotion and best practice dissemination. With that in mind, EUROCONTROL is now in the final stages of creating “SKYbrary”, a wiki for aviation safety knowledge. Here, my colleague Eelco Kruizinga (DNV) and EUROCONTROL's project manager Tzvetomir Blajev tell KM Review readers about this ambitious and forward-thinking KM project. KM Review Vol 11 Issue 2 May/June 2008 (Melcrum).