"This specification provides a model and grammar for representing the structure of information resources used to define topics, and the associations (relationships) between topics. Names, resources, and relationships are said to be characteristics of abstract subjects, which are called topics. Topics have their characteristics within scopes: i.e. the limited contexts within which the names and resources are regarded as their name, resource, and relationship characteristics. One or more interrelated documents employing this grammar is called a “topic map.”"

XML Topic Maps (XTM) 1.0

If Alexis de Tocqueville were writing about America in the information age, this is the book he'd write. In Making the Information Society, Dr. James Cortada offers profound new perspective on the meaning of the information age in American society."

Making the Information Society: Experience, Consequences, and Possibilities

Every four years, the military issues the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) Report, a document that is key in setting military goals and priorities. [...] "Even before the attack of September 11, 2001, the senior leaders of the Defense Department set out to establish a new strategy for America's defense that would embrace uncertainty and contend with surprise, a strategy premised on the idea that to be effective abroad, America must be safe at home." [...] the strategy seeks to move the US military "from a 'threat-based' model that has dominated thinking in the past to a 'capabilities-based' model for the future."

Quadrennial Defense Review 2001

"This special briefing from _Foreign Affairs_ collects the full text of ten previously published articles and thirteen book reviews that "contribute to an understanding of the tragic attacks on New York and Washington." The articles range from David Fromkin's 1975 "The Strategy of Terrorism," which gives the history of terrorism and some governmental strategies for combatting it, to Richard K. Betts' prescient 1998 "The New Threat of Mass Destruction," discussing the dangers of terrorist attacks on the US. Other writers include Ahmed Rashid, Walter Laqueur, and Ashton Carter."

Special Briefing from _Foreign Affairs_

The Dublin Core provides an excellent baseline data structure for an online recommender system.

Dublin Core Metadata Element Set: ANSI/NISO Z39.85-2001

"We are interested in desiging systems that support communication and collaboration among large groups of people over computing networks. We begin by asking what properties of the physical world support graceful human-human communication in face-to-face situations, and argue that it is possible to design digital systems that support coherent behavior by making participants and their activites visible to one another. We call such systems "socially translucent systems" and suggest that they have three characteristics -- visbility, awareness, and accountability -- which enable people to draw upon their experience and expertise to structure their interactions with one another. To motivate and focus our ideas we develop a vision of knowledge communities, conversationally based systems that support the creation, management and reuse of knowledge in a social context. We describe our experience in designing and deploying one layer of functionality for knowledge communities, embodied in a working system called "Barbie" and discuss research issues raised by a socially translucent approach to design."

Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes

This article is available on request via email. Also, follow the "similar" link for a number of good papers.

Social navigation: techniques for building more usable systems

"Sufficiently frequent interaction between partners has been identified by, a.o., Axelrod as a more-or-less sufficient condition for stable cooperation. [...] In this paper, we develop a model for 'embedded trust' [...] The analysis reconfirms the standard predictions about how the level of trust depends on the payoffs and the shadow of the future. We provide new predictions both on between-network effects ("which network is more favorable for cooperation?") and on within-network effects ("in which network position can you trust more?")."

Cooperation via social networks

"Conventional techniques for finding information on the web are time-consuming and often yield unreliable results. This has led to renewed interest in referral systems, which support the interactions of people with others by directing users toward others who might have the answers they seek. We consider a social network of agents who assist each other in helping their users find information. Unlike in most previous approaches, our architecture is fully distributed and includes agents who preserve the privacy and autonomy of their users. These agents learn models of each other in terms of expertise (ability to produce correct domain answers), and sociability [...]"

The MARS Adaptive Social Network for Information Access: Architecture and Experimental Results (ResearchIndex)

"Trust is important wherever agents must interact. We consider the important case of interactions in electronic communities, where the agents assist and represent principal entities, such as people and businesses. We propose a social mechanism of reputation management, which aims at avoiding interaction with undesirable participants. [...]

A Social Mechanism of Reputation Management in Electronic Communities