Description:
SEASR will deliver a means of addressing the challenges of transforming information into knowledge by constructing the software bridges that are required to move from the unstructured and semi-structured data world to the structured data world. We aim to make content collections more useful by integrating two well-known research and development frameworks–NCSA’s Data-To-Knowledge (D2K), and IBM’s Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA)–into an easily usable analytical platform that researchers in any discipline, but particularly the humanistic fields, can easily learn and adapt for their own scholarly research.Project page: The SEASR project web site.

Description:
Modern times challenge organizations and their leaders to adapt quickly and well to comples, fast-moving circumstances under trying conditions. Data sources are numerous, distributed, and contradictory. Problems are difficult to detect and diagnose, widely dispersed, and constantly changing. Knowledge sources and expertise are distributed, of varying quality, and difficult to integrate. Moreover, the tools created to address these problems are increasing in technological sophistication, computational intensity, and require specialized hardware, software, and maintenance. Against this backdrop, large-scale computer networks—most notably, the Internet—have developed at a rapid pace, allowing organizations to interact through web portals, e-mail, instant messaging, and other tools. These tools have had immediate impact in allowing individuals to communicate with one another conveniently and efficiently. This has enabled the traditional means of human-to-human organizational collaboration to be carried out more effectively at a distance. Nonetheless, the sheer amounts of data available, the numerous sources of expertise—both human- and machine-based—and the relentless speedup of events threatens to challenge even these technological improvements to the workings of modern organizations.As a result, many have sought to build combinations of information technology under the rubric of knowledge management (KM) to support collaboration and the integration of multiple data sources.

Loosely defined, knowledge management integrates IT and people to improve organizational learning and improvement. KM initiatives may be as simple as building databases of organizational competence or they may involve integration of ones customers directly to production, marketing, and product planning staff. However, first-generation KM looks like a simple extension of batch processed management information systems of the 70s and 80s, and, even when continuous improvement is involved, it consists of a slow-moving single loop. Modern challenges demand a more integrated, interactive, and evolvable process to make the most of human and computational inputs to better answer the challenges presented by complex environments.

Project page: The DISCUS project web site.

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