Yesterday the joint press release went out on the collaboration and Space Act Agreement we’re been working on with NASA for sometime. We’re really excited about working with NASA to process many datasets like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and make them available in WorldWide Telescope. Having these images available in the TOAST (tesselated octahedral adaptive subdivision transform) projection format will not only benefit WWT but any viewer supporting that format. The benefit of using TOAST as Jonathan Fay one mentioned “It creates a 360-degree wraparound view that’s either a planet surface or the infinite sphere of the sky, and lets you represent it using a 3D graphics accelerator, very rapidly and efficiently. So we can have an image pyramid the way Deep Zoom does, and TerraServer before it, but we don’t have to give up the poles.”
NASA and Microsoft to Make Universe of Data Available to the Public
There is a really good article out talking about some of the background behind Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay’s labor of love. WorldWide Telescope Puts Wonders of Space on a PC
The other big news is that at Mix09 we put out a alpha release of the worldwide telescope web client built using SilverLight. Now all the folks running Macs can see what all the buzz was behind Scoble’s post What made me cry: Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope from last year.
At ETech 2009 today, the announcement went out that Science Commons in conjunction with MSR External Research released the source code to two Word 2007 add-ins to allow scientists to markup terms and phrases in their documents/papers with ontologies, such as the ones at http://neurocommons.org. Some of this is based on previous collaboration with Phil Bourne from UCSD.
“Microsoft’s openness in working with the Science Commons has significant implications for the scientific research community because it will make it easy for authors to link their documents straight into the semantic Web of science — making that research, data and material easier to find and use,” said Philip E. Bourne, Ph.D.
You can seem more about the add-ins at Pablo’s Blog - Ontology Add-in for Word 2007
Microsoft Releases Open Tools to Enhance Scientific Research Efforts Building on Science Commons Ontologies REDMOND, Wash., and SAN JOSE, Calif. — March 11, 2009 — The nuggets of information necessary for science to progress are often hard to find, submerged deep within the Web, or within databases that can’t be easily accessed or integrated. As a result, many scientists today work in relative isolation, follow blind alleys and unnecessarily duplicate existing research. Addressing this critical challenge for researchers, Microsoft Corp. and Creative Commons announced today, before an industry panel at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech 2009, http://en.oreilly.com/et2009), the release of the Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 that will enable authors to easily add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies, to their documents and research papers. Ontologies are shared vocabularies created and maintained by different academic domains to model their fields of study. This Add-in will make it easier for scientists to link their documents to the Web in a meaningful way. Deployed on a wide scale, ontology-enabled scientific publishing will provide a Web boost to scientific discovery. Science Commons, a division of Creative Commons, is incubating the adoption of semantic scientific publishing through creation of a robust database of ontologies (http://neurocommons.org) and development of supporting technical standards and code. Microsoft Research has built a technology bridge to enable the link between Microsoft Office Word 2007 and these ontologies. [more]
REDMOND, Wash., and SAN JOSE, Calif. — March 11, 2009 — The nuggets of information necessary for science to progress are often hard to find, submerged deep within the Web, or within databases that can’t be easily accessed or integrated. As a result, many scientists today work in relative isolation, follow blind alleys and unnecessarily duplicate existing research.
Addressing this critical challenge for researchers, Microsoft Corp. and Creative Commons announced today, before an industry panel at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech 2009, http://en.oreilly.com/et2009), the release of the Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 that will enable authors to easily add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies, to their documents and research papers. Ontologies are shared vocabularies created and maintained by different academic domains to model their fields of study.
This Add-in will make it easier for scientists to link their documents to the Web in a meaningful way. Deployed on a wide scale, ontology-enabled scientific publishing will provide a Web boost to scientific discovery.
Science Commons, a division of Creative Commons, is incubating the adoption of semantic scientific publishing through creation of a robust database of ontologies (http://neurocommons.org) and development of supporting technical standards and code. Microsoft Research has built a technology bridge to enable the link between Microsoft Office Word 2007 and these ontologies.
[more]
Microsoft Releases Open Tools to Enhance Scientific Research Efforts Building on Science Commons Ontologies: Breakthrough collaboration helps researchers make easier connections on the Web.
The NYTimes.com article by Ashlee Vance, included a great picture by Stuart Isett for The New York Times showing the dome that was put together for TechFest to demonstrate the planetarium projection mode of WWT as well as the gesture interaction from Andy Wilson and Hrvoje Benko.
Microsoft Maps Course to a Jetsons-Style Future Stuart Isett for The New York Times Hrvoje Benko demonstrating a Microsoft projection system that lets people manipulate large video images with their hands. Microsoft Maps Course to a Jetsons-Style Future - NYTimes.com
Stuart Isett for The New York Times
Hrvoje Benko demonstrating a Microsoft projection system that lets people manipulate large video images with their hands.
Microsoft Maps Course to a Jetsons-Style Future - NYTimes.com