Guerilla science: what can we do in 10 days?

Greetings everyone,

I recently invited participants in the upcoming e-Biosphere conference 
(June 1-3, London) to join me in a collective demonstration of the 
semantic web in action [1].

The short story is that we'll be integrating wildlife observations with 
background biodiversity data to enable as many interesting queries (e.g., 
"show species out of range") as we can. Photos and twitter feeds will come 
in, more or less randomly, from around the world. As well, there will 
likely be more focused monitoring efforts (e.g. bioblitzes) in California, 
DC, Toronto (maybe), and wherever else people care to self-organize. As 
data comes in over the 3 days of the meeting, 
interesting views on it will be displayed on monitors throughout the 
conference center. If we can fairly label the experiment a success, I'll 
buy beer for all involved (that are either in London in 2 weeks, or ever 
in Toronto).

(The concept we're trying to illustrate, a global human sensor net, is one 
that we've previously experimented with in the context of blogging [2].)

>From this group (LOD + Taxacom), I'm mainly hoping for pointers to 
biodiversity data in RDF, and help with the glue (mostly, I suspect, 
owl:equivalentClass statements) that can tie it together. Some of you I've 
already spoken with, but I wanted to cast a wider net to include efforts 
I'm unaware of.  So please don't hesitate to point to RDF (yours or 
someone else's) that might be relevant.

Of course, you are all very invited to participate in other ways as well, 
and also to share  thoughts, comments, and better ideas.

Many thanks,
Joel.

1. http://forum.e-biosphere09.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=133
2. 
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2007/09/14/semantic-eco-blogging-spotter-10-released/

Received on Thursday, 21 May 2009 19:05:06 UTC