ConceptVISTA is a free software created through the collaboration of researchers at the Geographic Visualization Science, Technology and Applications Center (GeoVISTA) at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southampton, University of Leeds, and UC Santa Barbara. Using the priniciples of the semantic web, ConceptVISTA is a browser for mapping of concepts, teaching objects, and their related contexts in a way that “allows users to define and link concepts and resources pertaining to a conceptual domain.”1 It is designed to provide a rigorous user-based environment that allows users to add, view, and manage information and related to concepts and resources, primarily for pedagogical purposes through a web browser. Using the Web Ontology Langauge (OWL)2, it is based on the semantic web, and can also be used to import and organize outside ontologies.

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Research Report by Lindsay Thomas

Related Categories: Search & Data Mining Innovations | Online Knowledge Bases | Social Networking Systems

Summary:

The goal of the Social Networks and Archival Contexts Project (SNAC) is to rethink the ways in which primary humanities resources are described and accessed. A collaborative project from the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley, and the California Digital Library, SNAC uses the new standard Encoded Archival Context — Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF) to “unlock” the descriptions of the creators of archives from the records they have created. The project aims to create open-source tools, not yet released, that allow archivists to separate the process of describing people from that of describing records and to build a prototype online platform, released in December 2010 and currently in alpha stage, that links descriptions of people to one another and to descriptions of a wide variety of resources. The project received $348,000 over two years starting in May 2010 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the project team is directed by Daniel Pitti and Worthy Martin and also includes Ray Larson, Brian Tingle, Adrian Turner, and Krishna Janakiraman [i].

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