Representatives from the IPI and VOICES project partners (Hans Akkermans, Anna Bon and Chris van Aart from VU, and Mary Allen from Sahel Eco), and I have just returned to Bamako after a trip to the cities of Ségou and Tominian, where we visited two of the radio stations with whom we are working.
This quick post is to announce an upcoming workshop on whose committee I sit, Downscale 2012. Its aim is to explore the use of semantic Web technologies in resource-poor environments. While I’m not an expert in this area, I anticipate that the demand for semantic Web technologies will grow significantly for a number of our projects, such as GODI, which will increasingly rely on linked data in the near future. What is troubling is that the semweb community is relying more and more on cloud-based options, on centralized data-storage that requires stable, high-speed internet – resources which are very often unavailable in low and middle-income countries. Generally speaking, this disadvantages clients (computers) which have limited resources (disk, cpu) and where connectivity is unstable and with low-bandwidth. The aim of this workshop is to see how to adapt semantic web technologies to such conditions.
Downscale 2012 is part of the Extended Semantic Web Conference 2012 that takes place May 27-31, 2012, in Heraklion, Greece.
The deadline for submission is 4 March 2012.
If you are interested, please see the call for participation.
NITA GODI Sign for Stakeholders Meeting
It’s been an exciting week in Accra. My colleague Stephane Boyera and myself have spent the last week there in meetings to kick-start a new project. It is our pleasure to announce that the Web Foundation will be supporting the National Information Technology Agency (NITA), to spearhead the Ghana Open Data Initiative (GODI).
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