DOWNSCALE: Linked Data for Development

Victor de Boer - Anna Bon - Christophe Guéret Open Development Camp 2014

www.worldwidesemanticweb.org

Need for information sharing in rural

developing areas

• Agriculture – Market Prices – Business opportunities – Support – Sharing indigenous

knowledge – Etc.

• Health – Prevention – Access to healthcare – Detection of disease

outbreak – etc.

• Education • Etc.

Based on Sbc4d.com

Barriers to the Internet

1. Technology: The lack of connectivity and electricity, cost of devices and cost of connection are limiting the adoption and usage of new technologies;

2. Capacity: Lack of time and resources limits the participation in data sharing processes. There are also issues related to low education levels, low capacity to interpret data, and illiteracy;

3. Relevance: Power balance, culture, apathy, lack of incentives, lack of interest and dis-empowerment are also all threats to having citizens engage in data sharing.

Information sharing should be made

1. usable on small, affordable, hardware deployed in various connectivity contexts;

2. accessible to individuals with varied cultural backgrounds / literacy levels;

3. relevant and directly useful to the target public they aim to empower.

Infrastructure

Interface

Relevancy

Why the Semantic Web?

• Information (from NGOs) in silos – Specific products – Specific communities

• Lot of knowledge is lost due to lack of publication

Sharing (heterogeneous) knowledge is essential

• LD is well-suited because of: – Language-agnostic – Interface-agnostic – De-centralised authoring

• Slicing

– Re-usability • Local • Global

Img: flickr/elcovs

Web of Documents (WWW) Linked Documents

Web of Data Linked Data Semantic Web

With the mainstream

• Dev. countries can leapfrog directly into the information age, – jumping many phases of

immature technologies

• Linked Data is mainstream

computer science research. – Let’s worry about the 4.5 B

unconnected prosumers now!

Img: flickr/n3v3rv0id

Interface: Mobile phones and Community radios

http://vimeo.com/68218759

Can the Web (be made to) mean something for knowledge sharing even under very constraining conditions?

•No internet, no computer, no electricity

•Multitude of languages, levels of literacy

Market Information

Citizen Journalism

Event Organiser

Bottom-up

•Involvement of local communities –Trust and ownership

–Co-creation

•Bottom-up: field visits, workshops, demos, roadshows, etc

•Local communities: innovation co-creation, “Living Labs” socio-technical approach

–Use case gathering

–Observation and prototyping

–Test, adapt

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“Shea Nuts”@en

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Speakle voice labels

Low-powered hardware

• OLPC XO laptop

• Raspberry Pi

• Sheevaplug etc.

ERS: Distributed Networks Mesh VS Infrastructure network

Christophe Gueret

STUDENT PROJECTS at VU AMSTERDAM

ICT4D Course

•MSc Computer Science course –this year 3rd time

–Core Computer Science: CS4D

•Make students aware of importance of context •Hands-on experience

•Train CS researchers in ICT4D

Nichesourcing for pluvial data digitization for the Sahel

[M.Sc. thesis by Binyam Tesfa]

1.How does violent conflict in recipient countries affect aid activities?

2.How does aid spending as registered in the IATI standard compare to World Bank indicators?

http://iati2lod.appspot.com/

IATI2LOD (Kasper Brandt)

Voice Interface design for low-literate users

•Design guidelines (Deepak Chhettri) •Evaluation experiment (Onur Akgun and Serdar Parlak) •Access to DBpedia / Wikipedia (Rianne Nieland)

Icon-based interaction

(Project Julia Salomons)

Knowledge sharing platform (aka “The Box”)

•Brings together many strands •Rapid prototyping platform

–Flexible use cases •Rainfall, land rights, market places, seed exchange, messaging platfomr

–Knowledge sharing on multiple levels –Small, low-power, low-cost hardware

–Multi-model interface

–Privacy and data sharing

VU Network Institute Research Assistant Project w/ Julie Ferguson (Org. Sci)

DOWNSCALE 2014

ICT4D 3.0 : Complex adaptive system User-centric Different backgrounds

DISTRIBUTED IATI/CONTRACTING: ERS-like networks for local and global sharing of data

PRIVACY AND DATA CONTROL Multi-layered architecture can help with privacy/ Linked Private Data?

More information?

http://worldwidesemanticweb.org

http://w4ra.org

christophe.gueret@dans.knaw.nl v.deboer@vu.nl