Biocultural Diversity Working Group

My 0.02

 

Many (maybe most, maybe all) organisations and groups listed in WiserEarth, and in this respect WiserEarth itself, are political organisations, if one abides by this definition from Wikipedia (I do).

 

A political organisation as distinct from a Political Party is generally a non-partisan body that is established and engaged in the political process in order to bring about or support a particular issue or cause or system. (eg Environmental Organisations are also in most cases Political Organisations which are separate from Political parties in that they do not endorse and run candidates for public office, their membership is open and non-partisan).

 

The very objectives of WiserEarth are political in this meaning, the original one of the term : engaged in the government of the city. Our city is now the Earth. As far as I am concerned, political parties are organisations among others, and as long as their main objectives are tuned to those of WiserEarth, I don't see the rationale of not allowing them in the directory. As I posted a while ago about changing WE "solutions" to "actions", the important criteria for including organisations is that they should be clear on what they do, where, when and how, as soon as the "why" is consistent with the global WE "why's".

hello there

 

my 0.02 on this - along the path on this morning exchange with Camilla on LinkedIn Informethic discussion (well, basically in French, but there it is http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=2065835&discussionID=7391632

 

I'm happy with neither the current "Solutions" which conveys a simplistic view of the world : "You've got a problem, we got solutions" ... looks too much like my salesman speaking ... nor proposed alternatives. "Toolkit" and "Best practices" go down a similar alley, meeting "problem" with "solutions". Too complicated, too abstract.

 

OK why do I propose then? Actually not renaming but deprecating this ill-defined category and replace it by something both more attractive and meaning what it says : "ACTIONS". When I get into action, I'm never sure if it's a solution, I'm not even sure to have perfectly and completely figure out what the problem is, because reality is so complex and interconnected. Maybe at the end on the day it turned out to have side effects I'd not thought about (think about bio-fuels, for instance).  But I can most of the time explicit WHAT i've done, WHEN, WHERE, and certainly HOW and WHY, and what were the expected and/or observed results. Good or bad, let people find out by themselves. Who are WE, individually or as an organisation, to say "this is bad, this is good"? Added to that WHO I am, there you have the basis for the description of Actions..

 

Rationale : we have 100,000 + organisations and 30,000 people. What do they *do* actually, or have done in the past, or plan to do in the future. For each action one would have to fill the 6W's fields :

 

WHO? Linking to a Person or Organisation (some foaf:Agent), preferably in WE data base of course!

WHERE? geo-location (always dreaming there of pointing at geonames.org ids, for semantic interoperability sake)

WHEN? beginDate - endDate. A day granularity is enough. No need to drill down to hours, I guess.

WHAT? description + type of action (let open the vocabulary there, let's free tag or tap dbpedia - there again, look at faviki, Zemanta and the like)

HOW? describe the tool / method used. If it can be identified in some ontology, the better. See above, same proposal than for WHAT

WHY? can be declined on both general concepts, and practical situation at hand. Exemple of general concept : right to clean tap water access. Exemple of situation : lack of clean tap water in city X.

 

To add to that are results (observed for a past action, expected for a current and future action).

 

Look at current "Solutions" with this grid of analysis in mind, and you will quickly sort out those who are clearly grounded into action, and would face those questions with serenity, from these who are just academic brainstorming or pie in the sky.

 

BTW, always targeting integration of WE data into the Linked Data cloud, I'm working of a draft ontology of actions, basically a formal expression of the above, which I would like to propose as a tool for the community at large (WE and Sem Web community). I can of course publish it on a personal page, but given the importnace of URI stabilty and namespace issues etc, would it be technically possible to have it published under WE umbrella/namespace, something like http://www.wiserearth.org/ontology  ... after due approval process, of course.

 

Waiting for lively discussion on those, I acknowledge, rather radical proposals.

 

Best to all.

 

@Bret

As Bowo mentions correctly, it has never be proposed to replace WE taxonomy by DBpedia taxonomy with its hundreds of thousands of crazy categories, but two things instead.

#1. To map each of the 12-50 WE taxonomy entries, whichever they happen to be at the end of the day, to one or more DBpedia resource, carefully chosen. Can be DBpedia "category" or DBpedia "resource". The important point is to hook the WE taxonomy to entries in the linked data cloud, and DBpedia is rich enough to tap in.

#2. Use DBpedia tags instead of free tagging, a la faviki.

#1 is built-in, under the hood, and the final user does not know about it. #2 would be made using auto-completion, but I agrees that maybe it's too rich for the task at hand, and is at risk to be abused, misused or not used. I like Faviki, but it has not been a killer app so far. Maybe opencalais is a better choice. It does not put any burden on the user. So we would have human categorization on a simple taxonomy, mapped to other entries in DBpedia or any other resource we see fit in the SemWeb cloud, and automatic semantic tagging of the content with opencalais. Why not.

@Camilla Yes the format for the categories-to-DBpedia mapping you propose is OK

@Bowo Searching DBpedia maybe difficult, but you can search Wikipedia instead, and as soon as you have found a relevant article, you have just to change the namespace to get the DBpedia resource, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture > http://dbpedia.org/resource/Permaculture

 

First apologies to have been off this discussion for a while. Not a lot of bandwidth those days for WE unfortunately. So I will be short, here is where I stand after reading the various posts. Particular thanks to Bret for joining in and being pushy for action.

• Go for the simplified two-levels Earth-Charter taxonomy. Supporting Angus #1 / Bowo / Camilla / Bert. Yes?
• Keep the historical AoF index legacy for existing resources, for those who want to use them (optional)
• Integrate semantic DBpedia tagging with auto-completion à la Faviki rather than free tagging which tends to be messy (to say the least). A very important feature of this is that this kind of tagging is natively multi-lingual. I can tag using French, and a Japanese guy will see the tags in Japanese. Very cool and very important for internationalization. I guess Faviki editor would be willing to share his experience on this. Angus, I can put you in contact with him.
• Link historical AoF with the new semantic indexing by tagging/matching the AoF themselves with DBpedia entries. As said before I can help with this mapping, there again bandwidth permitting. Even publish this mapping as linked data as a first step to push WE in the linked data cloud.

Further on, integrate the semantic annotation of WE pages in RDFa. If you are not aware of it, Google announced two days ago that it will start to support RDFa. This can look arcane, but monitor closely this space.

And, like Bert, I'm done :)

Bonjour Camilla

 

J'ai commencé la traduction des FAQ, en soutien à Béatrice. Je remplace au fur et à mesure le texte original par la traduction. Ce n'est pas grave si la page reste un moment bilingue?

Camilla

 

Very detailed tips indeed!

 

For #24, geographical search/alerts would help. Whenever a new individula member joins in the area of interest of the local group (to be defined as a coordinates box), it should be automatically invited, and the manager of the group alerted.

English is indeed a weird language.  Is "indigenous people" a singular or plural form? Trying to figure it in French I get this:

 

People (as plural of person) = "personnes" or  "gens" (like in : "people think that ..." = "les gens pensent que ...")

People (as singular of peoples) = "peuple"

Peoples = "peuples"

 

So we definitely say "les peuples indigènes" and not "les personnes indigènes".

 

Hmm, just checked in "Blessed Unrest" ... Paul got it wrong too :))

Sur Paris et Ile de France, le "Jardin dans tous ses états" est représenté par le réseau Graines de Jardins, qui fédère les jardins partagés d'Ile-de-France. Des gens à inviter au groupe WE Paris!

Et pourquoi pas une prochaine réunion du groupe WE au printemps dans un jardin partagé?

Camilla

 

I thought I have answered I could help with that. Which task do you keep in store for me?

Since I've joined this group I had wondered what this cryptic metaphor about a third rail was exactly about, and did not take the time to figure it out, being more interested by the issue itself than by the metaphor. I just checked the Wikipedia link and "Ha!".

This indicates that this metaphor is not portable at all outside USA - in France at least, there is no third rail that I know of, but overhead lines. I guess it's not portable in many more countries.

Since the topic of this group is worldwide, I suggest to get rid of the metaphor at least in the group title. Can be kept in the "about" section, but indicating that the metaphor is US-only.

And BTW, I also find that the role of the USA in this issue is largely over-stressed. Demographic politics of China and India have done much more lately to curb world population growth (whether the ways to achieve that were acceptable or not is another issue).

 

Bernard