A Sugar Activity for Subsistence Farmers

[reblogged from http://worldwidesemanticweb.org/2015/03/06/a-sugar-activity-for-subsistence-farmers/ This post is written by Tom Jansen]

Screenshot of the Sugar activity (Tom Jansen)
Screenshot of the Sugar activity (Tom Jansen)

Subsistence farming or agriculture is a form of farming where farmers mainly focus on growing enough food to be self-sufficient. Especially in African countries, where people are very dependent of own-grown food, this type of farming is very common. Subsistence farming, however, in these countries has so much to gain and has so much potential. Improving the farming skills of the farmers could make significant contributions to the reduction of hunger. Unfortunately, farmers often haven’t had enough agricultural education to optimally grow their own food. To help these farmers, I developed an activity that will improve their farming skills. The application helps the farmers to identify diseases of their crops and animals and will present them ways to manage the diseases and prevent them in the future. Giving them an opportunity to manage diseases of their crops and livestock means giving them an opportunity to improve their harvest. The opportunity of a bigger harvest could be a substantial contribution to a better way of living for farmers in (a.o) West Africa.

The activity is Sugar based and is therefore perfectly suitable for the XO-Laptops that are commonly used in West Africa. The activity revolves around a database with a lot of information about diseases of crops and livestock. When the farmer opens the activity, he will be led through two menus with possibilities. When the right crop or livestock is selected, a list with diseases will be shown containing identification possibilites for a particular diseases. When the farmer notices that one description of the disease is very similar to what is happening to his crops or livestock, he clicks on the disease. When the choice is made another window pops up showing the information the farmer needs to manage and prevent the disease.

Right now it is only possible to access the database and read the information inside the database. What would improve the activity is a way where farmers can access the database and not only read, but also change and add information from the database. This way the information and thus the quality of the activity could be improved without any help from the outside.

The activity can be found on the following page (containing all the code): https://github.com/WorldWideSemanticWeb/farming-activity

Read the full report here: Helping Subsistence Farmers in West Africa

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Linked Data for International Aid Transparency Initiative

In August 2013, VU Msc. student Kasper Brandt finished his thesis on developing, implementing and testing a Linked Data model for the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). Now, more than a year later, that work was accepted for publication in the Journal on Data Semantics. We are very happy with this excellent result.

Model fragment
Model fragment

IATI is a multi-stakeholder initiative that seeks to improve the transparecy of development aid and to that end developed an open standard for the publication of aid information. Hundreds of NGOs and governments have registered to the IATI registry by publishing their aid activities in this XML standard. Taking the IATI model as an input, we have created a Linked Data model based on requirements elicitated from qualitative interviews using an iterative requirements engineering methodology. We have converted the IATI open data from a central registry to Linked Data and linked it to various other datasets such as World Bank indicators and DBPedia information. This dataset is made available for re-use at http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/iati .

burundi country page
Screenshot of an application bringing together information from multiple datasets

To demonstrate the added value of this Linked Data approach, we have created several applications which combine the information from the IATI dataset and the datasets it was linked to.  As a result, we have shown that creating Linked Data for the IATI dataset and linking it to other datasets give new valuable insights in aid transparency. Based on actual information needs of IATI users, we were able to show that linking IATI data adds significant value to the data and is able to fulfill the needs of IATI users.

A draft of the paper can be found here.

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Master Project Esra Atesçelik: Cluster Analysis Applied to Europana

[This post was written by Esra Atesçelik. It describes her MSc. project supervised  by Antoine Isaac and myself]

The digital libraries and aggregators such as Europeana provide access to millions of Cultural Heritage Objects (CHOs). Europeana is one of the libraries which does not maintain collection-level metadata. Europeana can cluster the objects that have common information with each other. It can use collection-level information to organize results and help users.

Karola Torkos - Cluster earrings (click to view on Flickr)In this project we want to show how we can cluster the objects from Europeana datasets. We also aim at finding the best way of clustering on Europeana metadata and the best parametric setting for clustering. We apply various clustering methods on Europeana metadata and aim at proposing a clustering technique that is most appropriate to group Europeana CHOs. In the experiments we evaluated the cluster results manually, on qualitative and quantitative level.

The results of experiments showed that it is difficult to define the best parametric setting and best clustering method only based on a number of experiments. However, we have shown a way to cluster Europeana objects which may be useful for Europeana.

View Esra’s presentation [pdf] and her thesis [pdf]

 

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Master Project Andrea Bravo Balado: Linking Historical Ship Records to Newspaper Archives

[This post was written by Andrea Bravo Balado and is cross-posted at her own blog. It describes her MSc. project supervised  by myself]

Linking historical datasets and making them available for the Web has increasingly become a subject of research in the field of digital humanities. In the Netherlands, history is intimately related to the maritime activity because it has been essential in the development of economic, social and cultural aspects of Dutch society. As such an important sector, it has been well documented by shipping companies, governments, newspapers and other institutions.

janwillemsen: foto Rotterdam historische schepen (click to view on flickr)In this master project we assume that, given the importance of maritime activity in every day life in the XIX and XX centuries, announcements on the departures and arrivals of ships or mentions of accidents or other events, can be found in newspapers.

We have taken a two-stage approach: first, an heuristic-based method for record linkage and then machine-learning algorithms for article classification to be used for filtering in combination with domain features. Evaluation of the linking method has shown that certain domain features were indicative of mentions of ships in newspapers. Moreover, the classifier methods scored near perfect precision in predicting ship related articles.

Enriching historical ship records with links to newspaper archives is significant for the digital history community since it connects two datasets that would have otherwise required extensive annotating work and man hours to align. Our work is part of the Dutch Ships and Sailors Linked Data Cloud project. Check out Andrea’s thesis[pdf].

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Master project Rianne Nieland: Talking to Linked Data

[This post was written by Rianne Nieland. It describes her MSc. project supervised  by myself]

People in developing countries cannot access information on the Web, because they have no Internet access and are often low literate. A solution could be to provide voice-based access to data on the Web by using the GSM network.

afbeeldingIn my master project I have investigated how to make general-purpose data sets efficiently available using voice interfaces for GSM. To achieve this, I have developed two voice interfaces, one for Wikipedia and one for DBpedia. I have made two voice interfaces with two different kinds of input data sources, namely normal web data and Linked Data, to be able to compare them.

To develop the two voice interfaces, I first did requirements elicitation from literature and developed a user interface and conversion algorithms for Wikipedia and DBpedia concepts. With user tests the users evaluated the two voice interfaces, to be able to compare them on speed, error rate and usability.

[Rianne’s thesis presentation slides can be found on slideshare and is embedded below. Her thesis is attached here: Eindversie-Paper-Rianne-Nieland-2057069]

 

[slideshare id=37310122&w=476&h=400&sc=no]

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CSWS2013 summer school and keynote in Shanghai

ShanghaiLast week, Knud Moeller from datalysator and I were invited to give a set of lectures about Linked Data in the CSWS 2013 summer school in Shanghai, China. As far as we are concerned the summer school was a success. About 60 students received three mornings worth of lectures about the principles and practice of Linked Data from the two of us. In the afternoon, they heard talks about Semantic Web efforts from the likes of Baidu and Google.

Interested students Because of the unavailability/-reachability of twitter, facebook, slideshare and wordpress in China, the lecture materual can be found are online as pdfs through a HTML page at my VU homepage.

I also had the honour of giving a keynote speech about Linked Data for Cultural Heritage and Digital History in the main conference. Those slides can be found on Slideshare.

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ICT 4 Development course final presentations

[crosspost from worldwidesemanticweb.wordpress.com]

This friday, a brand new course at the VU University Amsterdam came to a satisfying close. The ICT 4 Development course (ICT4D) was offered to VUA Computer Science students for the first  year and I feel it was a success. The course, which was a collaboration between the Computer Science department and the Center for International Cooperation of the same university, aimed to teach students how one should go about designing and deploying ICT projects in developing areas.

Student group presenting their XO deployment planTo this end, the students learned about the importance of considering local socio-economic contexts but also got to experience two technologies often used for development projects. The students received a crash course in the Sugar operating system for the XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child project and were presented with a tutorial on VoiceXML for developing voice-based applications. Students formed groups and chose either one of these technologies to solve a real-world problen in its development context.

The course ended today with student group presentations. Three groups presented an XO deployment. One of these included an agricultural program in Namibia that involves teaching children about growing local food next to their schools. The XO laptop can assist this education by providing tips for growing the crops. Two other presentations focused on XO deployments in neighbouring countries Iran and Iraq and included mockups and prototypes for XO programs (activities) that assist children both inside and outside school. There is even a good chance that the program in Iraq will actually be deployed and one of the teachers (who happened to be one of the student’s mother) was present at the presentation.

student group presenting their VoiceXML moduleThe fourth group developed an additional voice module for the RadioMarché system currently deployed in Mali, allowing local farmers to call in with their mobile phones when they want to sell produce. A voice menu enables them to tell the system how much of a specific product they have to offer and how much money they want in return.

All in all, this trip around the world showed how much the students have learned. We hope some of the projects will actually lead to real deployments and are looking forward to teaching the course again next year.

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Nichesourcing pluvial data digitization for the Sahel

Example pluvial records digitized through Binyam's nichesourcing effort (photo's W. Tuijp)
Example pluvial records digitized through Binyam’s nichesourcing effort (photo’s W. Tuijp)

At EKAW 2012 I presented a position paper co-authored with a number of VU-colleagues on nichesourcing as a next phase in crowdsourcing practice. In Nichesourching, tasks are not distributed to the faceless crowd but rather to small groups of amateur experts that share a set of characteristics. These characteristics ensure that they can perform tasks that require specific knowledge with higher quality and furthermore they are more motivated through their connection with the context. The presentation slides are archived on Slideshare, the paper itself can be found here.

The paper and presentation features two use cases. One use case concerns the Master’s project by Binyam Tesfa, supervised by me and Pieter De Leenheer. Binyam investigated a Nichesourcing approach for digitizing pluvial data from the Sahel region in Africa. He developed and published a nichesourcing application on the web targetin the African diaspora (African expats currently living in the North). Binyam evaluated its success in terms of attracting dedicated participants and digitizing considerable amount of digital data. With one week release of our Nichesourcing application, the participants produced more than 5000 cells of structured digitized pluvial data. We also found that the anticipated niche (people with African affiliation) dedicatedly participated in the digitization. Binyam’s thesis can be found here: Nichesourcing: a case study for pluvial data digitization for the Sahel by B. Tesfa [PDF]

The other use case presented is the Rijksmuseum print annotation use case where 700.000 prints are to be annotated by amateur experts. Prints depicting flowers are distributed to flower-enthousiasts, prints of castles to castle-geeks etc. For this use case, the people in the COMMIT/ SEALINCMedia project are currently developing a nichesourcing methodology and application.

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VU Computer Science videos

Screenshot of nine videos (click to go to media page)

A while ago, the VU Computer Science commissioned the production of ten videos in which VU computer scientists explain their research. Pepijn Borgwat and his friends at Synergique (with a little from myself) made these ten videos, each clocking in at around 2 minutes. The videos will be used for marketing and educational purposes or even for dissemination of scientific results.

The videos are available in Dutch and English at the VUScience Youtube channel and at Pepijn’s Vimeo page. They are embedded below.

Continue reading

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W4RA student mini-workshop

Image
Group photo of the First Web alliance for Regreening in Africa Student mini-symposium

Today, we held an informal workshop for students involved in MSc. projects related to the VOICES project and other activities associated with “the Web for Warm Countries”. The goal of this meeting was for the students to inform eachother about the current status of their research project and to sketch the bigger picture. I gave a short talk decribing the various running projects (VOICES, Furoba Blon, IDSWrapper, SemanticXO) as well as possible future projects (ICONS, the ICT4D course).

Six students presented us with their updates:

  • Henk Kroon told us a bit about his efforts into creating a client application that uses the  Linked Data based on RadioMarché.
  • Rokhsareh Nakhaei presented us with extensive models for her design of a serious game that will be used to gather voice fragments in different languages.
  • Albert Chifura is talking to many stakeholders to identify sustainable business models for the M-Event use case of VOICES
  • Binyam Tesfa is also developing a crowdsourcing application. He is doing this for digitizing pluvial data from the Sahel. He targets a specific niche (the African ‘diaspora’) to do this.
  • Deepak Chetri is doing literature research into the design of Voice-based interfaces for low-literate users in developing countries.
  • Gavarni Winter is the newest addition to the W4RA family, he is still contemplating the specific research questions.

Also present were Pieter De Leenheer, supervisor for a number of projects and Wendelien Tuyp from CIS, who could answer a number of questions about the African context. From my point of view, the meeting was a succes and we agreed to organize a second installment later this year.

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