“The Overture Maps Foundation (OMF), a collaborative effort to enable current and next-generation interoperable open map products, today announced the release of its first open map dataset….”
“The Linux Foundation, a global nonprofit organization enabling innovation through open source, today announced the formation of the Overture Maps Foundation, a new collaborative effort to develop interoperable open map data as a shared asset that can strengthen mapping services worldwide. The initiative was founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom and is open to all communities with a common interest in building open map data.
Overture’s mission is to enable current and next-generation map products by creating reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data. This interoperable map is the basis for extensibility, enabling companies to contribute their own data. Members will combine resources to build map data that is complete, accurate, and refreshed as the physical world changes. Map data will be open and extensible by all under an open data license. This will drive innovation by enabling a network of communities that create services on top of Overture data….”
“Google Maps is getting some competition. The Linux Foundation has announced Overture Maps, a “new collaborative effort to develop interoperable open map data as a shared asset that can strengthen mapping services worldwide.” It’s an open source mapping effort that includes a list of heavy hitters: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom, with the foundation adding that the project is “open to all communities with a common interest in building open map data.”…
If you’re saying, “Wait! isn’t there already an open source map community out there?” There is, and it’s called “OpenStreetMap,” the Wikipedia of maps that anyone can edit. The Overture press release says, “The project will seek to integrate with existing open map data from projects such as OpenStreetMap and city planning departments, along with new map data contributed by members and built using computer vision and AI/ML techniques to create a living digital record of the physical world.” …”
“Unfortunately, Meta’s grand vision is unlikely to be realised – because of copyright. Unless online material is released under a permissive licence such as the ones devised by Creative Commons, it will be necessary to obtain permission from the copyright holder before a full translation can be made using Facebook’s new tools. It will only take a few high-profile lawsuits from bullying publishers to frighten people away from daring to translate mainstream online articles into their own, poorly-served language without a licence.
And so, once again, copyright maximalism will throttle an exciting chance to make the world a better, fairer place by improving access to knowledge – and all to preserve the sanctity of an outdated intellectual monopoly….”
“Automated tools can help identify gibberish or statements that lack citations, but helping human editors determine whether a source actually backs up a claim is a much more complex task — one that requires an AI system’s depth of understanding and analysis.
Building on Meta AI’s research and advancements, we’ve developed the first model capable of automatically scanning hundreds of thousands of citations at once to check whether they truly support the corresponding claims. It’s open-sourced here, and you can see a demo of our verifier here. As a knowledge source for our model, we created a new dataset of 134 million public webpages — an order of magnitude larger and significantly more intricate than ever used for this sort of research. It calls attention to questionable citations, allowing human editors to evaluate the cases most likely to be flawed without having to sift through thousands of properly cited statements. If a citation seems irrelevant, our model will suggest a more applicable source, even pointing to the specific passage that supports the claim. Eventually, our goal is to build a platform to help Wikipedia editors systematically spot citation issues and quickly fix the citation or correct the content of the corresponding article at scale….”
“Meta’s AI lab has created a massive new language model that shares both the remarkable abilities and the harmful flaws of OpenAI’s pioneering neural network GPT-3. And in an unprecedented move for Big Tech, it is giving it away to researchers—together with details about how it was built and trained….
Meta’s move is the first time that a fully trained large language model will be made available to any researcher who wants to study it. The news has been welcomed by many concerned about the way this powerful technology is being built by small teams behind closed doors….”
“As it turns out, changing Facebook’s brand to Meta required sunsetting an identically-named academic software company that was acquired by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative….
Meta is a Canadian scientific literature analysis company that was founded in 2009, bought by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) in 2017, and on the day of Facebook’s rebrand the Initiative announced it will shut down by 2022. Meta was the first acquisition of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and controls the URL meta.org. Notably, Facebook—er, Meta—owns meta.com….
In a statement explaining why its reasoning for shutting Meta, CZI alluded to “focusing” the energies of its staff, bringing “immediate value” and “greater opportunity for outsized impact” to the table. …”
“With Meta, our goal was to give researchers, patient communities, science societies, and research organizations more ways to discover the research they need. We did this by mapping biomedical knowledge to help researchers learn a new area or keep up-to-date in a field through precise and flexible feed design, personalized ranking, and surfacing the broadest array of research outputs.
We recognize that Meta is one of many discovery tools available to the research community operating in a complex ecosystem. Since its transition from beta to a public release in fall 2019, more organizations and communities have entered the research discovery space, and they are already exploring and experimenting with new technologies to enhance discovery and keep current with research….”
“Millions of full-text scientific articles will soon be available through an easy copyright-compliant one-click process, thanks to a new partnership between Kopernio, part of the Web of Science Group and Meta, a free biomedical discovery tool from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Meta users will have faster, easier access to millions of full-text scientific articles through Kopernio’s free web browser plug-in, giving scientists one-click access to complete versions of the latest relevant research delivered directly in their Meta feed.
Meta users will have the option to install the Kopernio plugin for one-click retrieval of full-text articles that are accessible to them, either by integrating with institutional subscriptions or by offering a copyright-compliant open access alternative. When the version of record is available via institutional subscriptions, librarians and institutions will receive full usage reporting via the original publisher, as Kopernio usage is COUNTER compliant….”
“Millions of full-text scientific articles will soon be available through an easy copyright-compliant one-click process, thanks to a new partnership between Kopernio, part of the Web of Science Group (a Clarivate Analytics plc company NYSE: CCC; CCC.WS) and Meta, a free biomedical discovery tool from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Meta users will have faster, easier access to millions of full-text scientific articles through Kopernio’s free web browser plug-in, giving scientists one-click access to complete versions of the latest relevant research delivered directly in their Meta feed….
Sam Molyneux, co-founder of Meta said: “Meta’s goal is to ensure you never miss an important paper. We have partnered with Kopernio to ensure that once you have found the paper you need, you know you can access the best version of that paper, copyright-compliant and for free, without changing your research habits. Kopernio prioritises the use of the version of record from publishers.” …”
“There are awesome things happening and changing around how science is done and communicated, so I thought I’d put them in a list thingy. Let’s go! …”
“A serious piece of scholarly infrastructure is being made open, free and effectively non-profit. Meta has built a cutting edge system to mine scholarly papers new and old, and allow the data to be employed in diverse ways–predicting discoveries before they’re made, projecting the future impact of papers just hours old, and unlocking the potential for innumerable applications applying computation at scale across scientific literature. In what must have taken extraordinary patience, persistence and a lot of finesse, they managed to secure access to some of the most strategic closed content in the scholarly world.”