SynapticWeb / FrontPage. Stay updated about the Synaptic Web on Twitter via @SynapticWeb The Synaptic Web By Khris Loux, Eric Blantz, Chris Saad and you... The Internet is constantly evolving. As the speed, flexibility and complexity of connections increase exponentially, the Web is increasingly beginning to resemble a biological analog; the human brain. But what exactly is it that’s makes us, or the Web, smart? In the brain, neurologists now believe that it is the density and flexibility of the connections between neurons, not simply neurons themselves, which are at the root of intelligence. Even if the total number of brain cells, or neurons, begins to diminish in early adulthood, our ability to generate new connections between neurons and between different parts of the brain – what neurologist call “plasticity” - persists throughout life.
Signs of the emerging Synaptic Web abound. The same is true for Social Networks. Social profiles are becoming real-time streams. Databases are becoming data peers. Synaptic Web (synapticweb) Ontology of Folksonomy. Thomas Gruber TomGruber.org and RealTravel.com Published in Int’l Journal on Semantic Web & Information Systems, 3(2), 2007. Originally published to the web in 2005.
Ontologies are enabling technology for the Semantic Web. A while ago, the Artificial Intelligence research community got together to find a way to “enable knowledge sharing” (Neches et al., 1991). In the context of the Semantic Web, “ontology” is an enabling technology — a layer of the enabling infrastructure — for information sharing and manipulation.
Not so long ago, keen observers of the Internet (Vander Wal, 2004),(Sterling, 2005), (Mieszkowski, 2005) and inventors of social software (Shachter, 2003), (Fake and Butterfield, 2003) began to notice that people who don’t write computer programs were happily “tagging” with keywords the content they created or encountered. Like all vague but evocative terms, both of the words ontology and folksonomy have taken on many senses. Yes, we agree, tags are cool. How to proceed? Synaptic web « Collective Web. In previous posts, especially in those related to content mapping, I frequently referred to collective actions and efforts in describing certain concepts, but never elaborated on the exact meaning of these terms. One could think that collectivity and collaboration are identical (they often are mentioned in the same context) as both have something to do with individuals working together.
In fact, I find it important to highlight their differences for I expect collectivity to play as vital a role in Web 3.0 as collaboration did in Web 2.0. Transition As already understood from popular Web 2.0 applications such as Wikipedia, Google Docs, or WordPress, we define collaboration as sharing workload in a group of individuals who engage in a complex task, working towards a common goal in a managed fashion, and are conscious of the process’ details all the way. Different realms Collaboration and collectivity operate in different realms. The synaptic web Hence the synaptic web calls for collectivity. Stephen Downes: 'Connectivism' and Connective Knowledge.