Last Friday I had the opportunity to attend an Open Tea organised by Open for Change a network promoting innovation and standardisation of ‘web 2.0′ practices in the Dutch development sector. The session was hosted by CIS-VU, the Centre for International Cooperation at VU University in Amsterdam. Besides meeting and networking it was a chance to get to learn about two projects enabled by open data that are currently being run by CIS in collaboration with their partners.
The first is an initiative run together with IDS Knowledge Services. They have launched an open API project aiming to provide programmatic (machine-to-machine) access to research databases. The data links to each other via a common publishing format (RDF) and thematic tags which makes it easier for applications to access data through the cloud (the same way that researchers/anyone can have links to multiple content on their own website allowing for referencing further research without having to have the full reference available on their own site). API2LOD currently hosts data from ELDIS and IATI allowing reserchers/policymakers the ability to leverage linked data to enrich research and to develop applications that can support policy implementation. Check out a blog post written by one of the project creators, Christophe Guéret on the Semantic Web.
See below a TED talk by Tim Berners Lee that shows the power of linked data in terms of the impact it can have on how we live.
The second project is being run in Mali together with the World Wide Web Foundation and Sahel Eco a local Mali NGO. It is a mobile voice system that supports farmers in rural communities more effectively share knowledge in order to sell their goods in local markets. The unique project innovation is that it uses the web of speech which is a voice-based extension to the web allowing people to create, access, search and share information using only voice via a mobile device with no internet access. This is particularly important in Mali as many farmers are illiterate and do not speak the local French dialect, rather their own local dialects.
Nana Baah Gyan who is doing his PhD on the topic demonstrated to use live how Radio Marche works. You can see below a video demonstration of the prototype.
It was an inspiring way to end off the week and I’m looking forward to the next one!
