Hello all
I take the opportunity of Thomas's message to put another community,
somehow related, in the LOD community radar.
It's been a while indeed since I've thought that a missing bubble in the
LOD cloud was some data about environmental, sustainable development,
and other similar and critical issues of our time, and in this respect
I'd noticed for quite a while the WiserEarth site and community at
http://www.wiserearth.org <http://www.wiserearth.org.%C2%A0>
Basically WiserEarth is a community-built data base, along with social
networking tools, of the who-what-where-when-how in those areas. The
main part of data is about over 100,000 organisations with their
whereabouts, including location, address, description, type, activities,
areas of focus, relations etc. Lately I joined this community and
started to speak about bringing their data in the LOD cloud, and added
them to the LOD shopping list.
What I have found interesting in my conversation so far is that
WiserEarth people have quickly understood that linking their data would
definitely be a win-win strategy in terms of both outreach, gained
visibility in the common LOD space, and access and organisation using
shared categories, e.g., DBpedia categories (we've not considered yet
other resources like UMBEL, but they are in the radar, too). They know
their current taxonomy is suboptimal, and see the potential benefit of
using shared categories.
If people in WiserEarth staff are quite excited at the idea, their
technical team is quite small, and would be happy to see people from LOD
community bring about a bit of their know-how and technical expertise to
support them if needed.
I for one have proposed to help, bandwidth permitting, with the mapping
or redefinition of current categories, and/or definition of a supporting
ontology, leveraging as far as possible current LOD ontologies (FOAF,
Geonames ...). But I guess other geeks around will be happy to help
WiserEarth folks with server configuration, data migration, format of
RDF publication, and all the gory details of 303 redirects. :-)
Thomas, I have forwarded the Workshop announcement to WiserEarth folks.
Their representative in Europe might be interested in attending.
Thanks for your attention
Bernard
Thomas Bandholtz a écrit :
Hi all,
the European Environmental Information community is currently
discovering Semantic Web technologies and, more specific, LOD.
Environmental data consists of billions of measurement records which may
be published in a LOD style and be linked to the environmental
terminology. This would be a huge use case to satisfy legal reporting
obligations of the EU member states.
One of the milestones in this development will be the eEnvironment
Terminology Workshop of the European conference of the Czech Presidency
of the Council of the EU "TOWARDS eENVIRONMENT", March 25-27 2009,
Prague, Czech Republic
http://www.e-envi2009.org/?workshops
"Environmental terminology and its semantics constitute a major
building block of SEIS and SISE as important instruments for
discovery, understanding, and integration of any kind of accessible
information. They have already taken a long way starting with early
subject heading systems of the libraries, moving on to multilingual
thesauri such as GEMET, some of them evolving towards more expressive
ontologies.
This workshop will present several domain-specific and
interdisciplinary examples and discuss common design issues such as
terminology structure models, cross-referencing, symmetric vs.
asymmetric multilingualism, identity and reference, publishing
terminology in the Web, and linking environmental data to such
published terminology."
What's "SEIS" and "SISE"?
The European Commission has recently decided on building a "Shared
Environmental Information System"(SEIS)
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/seis/index.htm
accompanied by a European research strategy "Towards a Single
Information Space for the Environment in Europe" (SISE)
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/sustainable-growth/workshops_en.html
with a high awareness of explicit semantics.
This was again one of the topics of the EnviroInfo conference in
September.
http://www.enviroinfo2008.org/detail_wednesday.php
Those who are interested in contributing in these activities should
submit an abstract at
http://www.e-envi2009.org/myreview/SubmitAbstract.php before the
deadline Oct 31.
Kind regards
Thomas Bandholtz
innoQ.com
www.semantic-network.de
--
*Bernard Vatant
*Senior Consultant
Vocabulary & Data Engineering
Tel: +33 (0) 971 488 459
Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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