WiserEarth Re: eEnvironment Terminology Workshop deadline extended

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:     bernard.vatant@mondeca.com <mailto:bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>
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Received on Monday, 6 October 2008 10:07:54 UTC