How do we know if we are any good at what we do?
Does the global occurrence of disease match the application of money and the interest of the media?
Do any of the feeds that I read get read by others and how often and to what level of satisfaction and to what effect?
A central observation of the Accenture report , that came out a while back, that I have written about before, was that nonprofits spend a dispropotionate amount of time and energy on fundraising relative to mission advancement. Similarly, this is the area where nonprofits seem to apply the bulk of their data mining.
Where are the good examples of data mining, collection, dissemination and aggregation in the mission based nonpropfit sector. The researchers and the universities do an OK job with this and then they produce pretty pdf's. I read. I read a lot. I don't read data. I use data. I can't use pdf's. (Yes, I did just reference a study that is published on a pdf.)
Looking at the questions above, what if the global occurrence of disease was provided via an xml feed from the World Health Organization to anyone that was interested. Same with the the occurrences of cash applied to alleviating disease.
And, for those of you that read the Economist, yes, I did steal this idea from Tim Berners-Lee "Inventor Of The Internet". (Does he make people call him that?) Anyway, on the very last page of the recent bonus edition of the Economist "The World in 2007", they were looking ahead a what they thought would be the big issues of 2007. Tim Berners-Lee article centered on his dedication to the Semantic Web but with a very interesting twist.
"The most exciting discoveries will come from the serendipitous combination and integration of data drawn form diverse sources."
"For this sort of integration to happen, an essential technical step is to publish the data using the Semantic Web standards (RDF, OWL, SPARQL), and link them together with definitions of the terms used to express their data"
Uh oh. Herding cats. Standards agreed upon BEFORE they can be effective.
Tagging
I have been fighting with tagging for about a year now. I am someone who puts way too much food on my plate at a smorgasbord. When I first started, I went nuts with every possible permutation of classification for anything I was tagging. For instance, here is my delicious page. Totally useless. I have grown up a bit know and I tend to use far fewer tags. My last.fm page is evidence of this. I try to find tags that are already in use. Sometimes I try to find tags that are actually popular or specifically agreed up like nptech or netsquared, or is it net2? What I am getting at is that tagging, what I originally understood to be the opposite of the sematic web, is actually quite semantic. But it is only so in some sort of evolutionary sense. Also, it has a lot to do with audience. I will tag this blog with lots o' tags because I am vain and I want people to find it even if they do happen to be looking for porn. if I was more interested in being helpful (like I am when I tag things for my own use, to be able to find them later) I would try to use tags much more judiciously.
Microformats
I need to know a lot more about microformats, but in my imaginary world (yes, microformats are in my imaginary world and yes that would seem to be a sign of a fairly limited imagination) microformats could occupy this middle space between The Semantic Web (That phrase seems to need some sort of musical fanfare when ever it is referred to. Can we make a microfirmat for that?) and tagging. (That paragraph is a lot easier to read if you ignore the parentheticals but maybe not interesting enough to try it again?)
Musical interlude...
So I just went over to http://www.microformats.org and wandered around a bit (5 mins max).
It seems clear that microformats are fairly organic in how they are developed/created. Actually, what microformats are not is more helpful than descriptions of what they are.
microformats are not:
* a new language
* infinitely extensible and open-ended
* an attempt to get everyone to change their behavior and rewrite their tools
* a whole new approach that throws away what already works today
* a panacea for all taxonomies, ontologies, and other such abstractions
* defining the whole world, or even just boiling the ocean
* any of the above
So, what they are is a representation of data that is easily created by humans while being machine readable by web scrappers (like the wonderful Greasemonkey ) and eventually will be natively supported in browsers. So, if I am creating a web page where I am announcing an event, I can simply add attributes (ie "<span class="vevent"> or class="dtstart" or dtend) to html tags and that event will be identifiable as a link that will add it to my web2.0 calendar.
Data
So, know we know have to make it easy for everyone to get your latest event on their calendar. Yup. Ho hum. But, let's go back to the earlier example. what if their was a microformat for instances of disease with attribute like "diagnosis" and "#effected" and we included in this microformat geo information. And, what if there was a microformat for grant money applied to solve specific issues with attributes like "amount" and "issue" and we included geo information in that too...
Some Interesting Links
Accessible Information on Development Activities
http://open.bellanet.org/aida/schema_explained.htm
http://aida.developmentgateway.org/aida/AidaAbout.do
Reliefweb
http://www.reliefweb.int
Grantsfire (microformats for grant rfp's)
http://blueoxen.net/c/boa/wiki.pl?GrantsFire
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