Bernard - thanks for this posting. Your thinking was clearly spot on when you put forward your suggestion to improve WiserEarth's taxonomy using the semantic web. If we can move this initiaitive forward, we may even be able to provide the speaker with this as a case study to present at the workshop in March!  In terms of moving forward, I have invited the WiserEarth tech team to post here, however, they are shortly about to release a new piece of functionality around best practices/solutions, so have been dedicating their time to this. Hopefully, we will get some feedback shortly.

Thanks David for your comment - indeed, the inconistencies definitely would be addressed I think under this initiative.

 

Thanks Clayton for your insights. Perhaps Bernard could respond to why a newly created taxonomy is not an idea solution for WiserEarth in the long term.

 

This suggestion proposes that the existing 379 categories would be combined and reorganized (and if duplication exists, some may be eliminated) under the Earth Charter's 61 categories. However, the specificity of the many categories would be maintained using DBpedia labels.

 

As Bernard mentioned below, the suggestion would be for multilingual Earth Charters to then be hooked to a single set of URIs. Including links to related concepts in DBpedia. This would allow the specificity of the existing Areas of Focus to be maintained (without duplication or giving too much emphasis on certain categories) while providing a simpler taxonomy for users/orgs/groups to work with.

 

DBpedia

URI

 

Bernard, sorry I didn't really answer your question. Should I wait for the technical contact you mentioned to post to the LOD forum, and ask folks to get in touch with him directly? Or do you want me to go ahead now and keep making the go-between for a while between the two communities?

 

If you are OK with this, it would be great if you could act as the go-between for the time being as you have a good understanding of the 2 communities (LOD and WiserEarth) so you are in a good position to help us move this initiative forward.

Thanks Mike for joining in on this discussion. That's great feedback. I hadn't thought of Wii.  In terms of other sites, names like Wikipedia and del.icio.us are also hard to spell and also to pronounce, but these sites keep a single brand name and still manage to transcend borders. The idea of translating the brandname into multiple languages doesn't sound attractive to me from a branding perspective (as it is likely to create confusion...is it the same site, or a different site). Since WE is hoping to build on to add languages by building on to the existing site rather than creating multiple sites, I think I would still recommend using the existing brand name or a derivative thereof. 

What does everyone think of shortening the WiserEarth name to WE? This could avoid issues when translating the name - The WiserEarth logo could be revised to emphasize the WE of WiserEarth while still keeping the name. The language to describe WiserEarth and the objectives of the site could be easily changed to 'WE', on the non-English pages, we could explain that the WE is not only represents the acronym of WiserEarth (la terre plus sage) in English, but also refers to 'working together' and that this translates as 'nous/nosotros etc' in other languages.

Bernard, Thank you once again for meeting up with me in Paris and for explaining more about the semantic web and the work you do with Mondeca. We are very much looking forward to exploring this initiative further as we believe it will greatly improve the ability to find and share WiserEarth content.

Let's resurface this suggestion (sept 08) as it is becoming more critical to have Areas of Focus that are easier to use (379 are too many) and have the benefit of being easily integrated into an existing taxonomy created by the global community. The only amendment to this suggestion would be to take all of the AoFs and fit them into those under the Earth Charter.

I agree that the idea put forward by Bernard to use DBpedia sounds an excellent one. When combined with Bowo's recommendation for using the overlying taxonomy of the Earth Charter instead of the current 379 AoFs, this could be an ideal solution for WiserEarth.

 

More information about Linked Data and the DBpedia data set: 

http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Interlinking

Bernard, Thanks for this posting.

 

I thought it would be useful to give you a bit of background on why the original Area of Focus (AoF) taxonomy was created.

 

WiserEarth's orginal AoF taxonomy was driven by the content that was found through researching the 100,000 organizations that populate the organizations database. WiserEarth had about 100 people all over the world (including staff, volunteers, interns) who inputted the data and helped to develop the taxonomy based on their research (if the work of an organization didn't fit with any of the existing AOFs, a new area was created). A naturalist also helped to consult on the AOFs and many of his recommendations were integrated into the list.  

 

As a result, it was a very organic process and therefore not a very scientific one - it was also based on the fact that WiserEarth was only created as part of a vision of Paul Hawken to bring visibility to the organizations working towards a just and sustainable world by counting them and listing them in a database. 

 

The need to be found and linked, however, is a critical one now that the site has become more than just a simple database. There have been discussions around establishing the taxonomy (mostly due to the unwieldy nature of the existing taxonomy). A suggestion was made last year to use the same taxonomy as that of the Earth Charter (however technical and funding resources have been limited the implementation of any work in this area yet)

 

Discussion on Earth Charter AoFs (posted last year):

http://wiserearth.org/forum/view/273c26a131b7283968a34ff2b6478b19

 

Earth Charter research carried out by Bowo:

http://wiserearth.org/article/f1800201c074b24c9c18cb1e8275e9c6

 

I hope your posting can revive some of these discussions so that the AoF issue can be addressed. 

 

Best

Camilla

 

Agree that this is an issue, but maybe the problem can be resolved with a simple flagging system to show that this is an organization, not an individual would suffice (just as WE has done to differentiate between NGOs and for-profits?