Disaster Relief and Appropriate Tech Metadata

[Woody Evans]

Problem: there's no single readily consult-able library for metadata ontologies related to disaster relief, aid work, and appropriate transfer of sustainable technology.

[Woody Evans]

(This might should come under a different discussion heading) at the STAR-TIDES group pages on google, I planted some citation abstracts related to disaster relief. Most of these focus on Katrina, and are tied to either anthropolog* or sociolog* as search terms.
http://groups.google.com/group/star-tides/web/anthro-disaster-abstr...

The formatting of the above page is all in EBSCOhost's database formatting (all from one or more of: Academic Search Complete, Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, Legal Collection, Military & Government Collection, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection), and that formatting itself may be proprietary. My guess is that it is.

But the data there, the titles, authors, sources, author-or-editor-provided keywords and abstracts, that gets down to publication level. How might we start abstracting these abstracts, pulling concepts and indexing in a way that treads on no toes? Can we build a [united states, southern states, hurricane, cultural aspects] ontology from this kind of source material?

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[Chris Watkins]

Semantic MediaWiki seems like a logical choice.

We're setting up a test site for Appropedia, to make sure it doesn't conflict with our other extensions - hopefully we'll be using it very soon.

[Woody Evans]

Chris that's excellent. Love to see it in action. The MediaWiki version sounds like it's meant to be an alternative/competitor with things like Drupal?