About this Event

SO WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA!?

We
believe in making Knowledge freely accessible to all. Our
emerging story is that we are catalysing the building of a Global Semantic
Knowledge Commons for Climate Change (GSKC), a self-improving network of
semantic tools. The Sept 2022 Climate Hackathon is a first step towards that,
and we will use the IPCC report as exemplar and template.

This
is a very powerful idea and can transform the way the world collects and uses
knowledge. Initially this will be for climateChange and that is why we are
(in)formally demonstrating it at our Hackathon. But more importantly, we are
using this Hackathon as an opportunity to include many other groups in a
self-organizing, bottom-up process. (We did this very successfully for Open
chemical software in the BlueObelisk network, that makes nodes and connections
organically: we intend to grow in the same manner to emerge as the
#SemanticObelisk.

Our
longer term goal is to make this wider and create a community of Climate
Enthusiastic Open Scientists by getting other groups involved. Communities grow
at their own rate. But we can start using the language and vision!

 

OUR
RATIONALE & PURPOSE

Currently
information around the world is largely "published" as monolithic
documents. Scholarly publishing is irretrievably broken (cannot be mended), and
the PublisherAcademicComplex has crippled the development of the Semantic Web
in creating/distributing knowledge.

Our
project GSKC (aka SemanticObelisk) is a bottom-up low-profile approach to
redress this, by promoting Open Data, Open Source software, and Open Standards.
If we promote and coordinate our existing tools and resources we can build an
impressive and useful Knowledge Commons : TODAY!

This
Hackathon is planned as a collaborative half day event to showcase our open
source policy and research/solutions. We have limited spaces but this is a
first step, and a small one, we intend to run wider follow-up events later this
year, and next. Your inputs and involvement will be critical for this vision.

On
the 24th of September 2022, together with like minded Climate Enthusiasts, we explored how to extract knowledge from locked literature (such as IPCC
reports in PDF format) – using our in house (Open source!) tools and materials
over Google Colab and Jupyter notebooks. We bought 4-5 Climate Change
organisations on board, to explore the best ways of using a virtual environment
while aiming to:

·        
Understand
and create climate knowledge (esp. IPCC)

·        
Learn/Develop
human/machine knowledge systems

·        
Make
new contacts in the India Climate Landscape

·        
Feedback
knowledge and technology to ClimateHunt

 

INFOCUS: IPCC & SEMATIC-CLIMATE

The
#semanticClimate is an important project. The United Nations' IPCC is the most
authoritative resource in the world on climate change. It releases its findings
reports every 5 years on everything climate related. The 2022 (AR6) report is
the most recent and here is what we know:

·  
It
runs to over 10,000 pages of text, tables, diagrams and references. 

·  
It's
written in English for specialists and uses a great deal of jargon (technical terms,
abbreviations, acronyms).

·  
These
technical terms are usually explained only once. There's a PDF glossary.

·  
It's
published as large PDF documents (sometimes 3000 pages).

·  
There's
a Table of Contents but no index.

·  
Many
chapters reference each other but links have to be traversed by humans.

 

ABOUT THE EVENT

This was a hackathon, NOT a competition! There’s no set goal or outcome, but it was the first in a planned series of events and this helped to determine their
format. We too are learning by Doing!

In
the previous section, we explained how we liberate locked documents in
#semanticClimate, and you're welcome to bring your ideas and/or knowledge that
you hope to liberate.

We
will all be creating knowledge together. A key aspect is to find what climate
knowledge *you* want or have beforehand. This is why we need you to fill the
Registration Form carefully, telling us about yourself (More about this in a
later section on "About You"). No prior coding skills are required!
It’s wonderful if you have these skills, but we are assuming there will be
several delegates who have little experience of working online and they will
need guides. We are hoping to have at least 6 helpers to enable this. Everyone
will take part in a short project over two hours and then talk about it.

 

OUR SOCIAL
GOALS

·        
Get
everyone talking naturally and excitedly about the material and the philosophy

·        
Learn
from each other.

·        
Explore
the IPCC report in discussion and with simple games

·        
Find
the most important diagram/s for a Chapter

·        
Test
our tools and material.

·        
Emphasize
the value of Early Career Researchers

·        
Explore
multilinguality and collaboration

·        
Spread
the word

·        
Discuss
the future!

 

OUR
TECHNICAL GOALS

·        
Introduce
participants to Semantic Operations

·        
Create
semantic chapters of the IPCC report

·        
Current
focus / materials are built around four Chapters [AR6/WG3] of the IPCC

·        
Create
per-chapter dictionaries by several methods and link to Wikidata.

·        
Search
chapters with dictionaries and create annotated HTML (already prototyped).

·        
Encourage
technical delegates to explore other chapters automatically

 

EVENT
INFRASTRUCTURE

·        
Hosted
from NIPGR, New Delhi

·        
Delivered
over Zoom

·        
Groups
to work in dedicated Theme-specific Breakout rooms

·        
All
materials available over Sematic Climate in Github

·        
Encourage
all delegates have Github IDs

·        
Everyone
will get Links to Cloud Workspace over Google Colab

·        
Communal
message tool: We will create a Slack Channel for Delegates

 

 Recorded Video