Re: eEnvironment Terminology Workshop deadline extended

To all SW enthousiasts with a weak spot for its application in the support of civil society at large,



Yes the European community HAS discovered the Semantic Web and two
organizations are at the forefront of implementing it to give
meaningful content to the UN ICT Taskforce's intention of using ICT to
empower sustainable development stakeholders worldwide.



Rainbow Warriors Core Foundation, based in Aruba, Dutch Caribbean, an
ICT driven organization and the Ekolibrium Foundation, based in Leyden,
The Netherlands are working out the details of a bold plan to engage
all civil society organizations in the process of embracing SW
technologies to give meaningful content to ICT as a tool for all
stakeholders.



In particular what the UN calls the Major Groups in sustainable development:

http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/mgroups/mgroups.htm



The Dutch academia are at the forefront at the open access revolution
as well, acknowledging the fact that without open access to online
journals and data/information repositories, much of the ICT tools for
empowerment phrase will remain just that, a hollow hyped up phrase.



Our work hinges on expanding on open source software, open licenses
schemes and open access agreements in addition to using the Eclipse
Foundation (www.eclipse.org) framework, W3C initiatives and guidelines
and the valuable input of companies like Sun Microsystems, Sybase and
Google and many other software companies embracing initiatives to
engage non-profits in general and SW technologies.





Milton Ponson
GSM: +297 747 8280
Rainbow Warriors Core Foundation
PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
Aruba, Dutch Caribbean
www.rainbowwarriors.net (under revision)
Project Paradigm: A structured approach to bringing the tools for sustainable development to all stakeholders worldwide
www.projectparadigm.info (under construction)
NGO-Opensource: Creating ICT tools for NGOs worldwide for Project Paradigm
www.ngo-opensource.org (proposed project)
MetaPortal: providing online access to web sites and repositories of data and information for sustainable development
www.metaportal.info (proposed project)
SemanticWebSoftware, part of NGO-Opensource to enable SW technologies in the Metaportal project (proposed site: www.semanticwebsoftware.org)


--- On Sun, 10/5/08, Thomas Bandholtz <tbandholtz@googlemail.com> wrote:
From: Thomas Bandholtz <tbandholtz@googlemail.com>
Subject: eEnvironment Terminology Workshop deadline extended
To: public-lod@w3.org
Cc: "Rudolf Legat" <rudolf.legat@umweltbundesamt.at>
Date: Sunday, October 5, 2008, 8:29 AM

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