We invite you to participate in the Formats For Future hackathon during Open Access Week 2022 from October 24 to 30 where you will use our tools to unlock the information trapped in the IPCC climate change reports, annotate and enrich them with semantic links to wikidata.
Our planet is a terrible thing to waste.
That's why #semanticClimate develops FREE open-access tools that unlock crucial scientific knowledge trapped in PDFs by enriching them with annotations linked to wikidata — it makes the data accessible and understandable to everyone, be they citizens, scientists, or datatech enthusiasts.
Simply put, now everyone (including YOU!) can discover and create new ways to make a difference! Try our FREE software and join us at our FREE events to explore what you can make possible!
Formats For Future is a distributed and asynchronous hackathon taking place over the International Open Access Week 2022 to support #semanticClimate in liberating the IPCC reports and other climate change scientific knowledge.
Scientific knowledge is one of the key tools humanity has available to save itself from the worst effects of climate change. The IPCC reports – which outline the effects of climate change, the evidence, likely outcomes, and mitigating actions – are published as a set of PDF files which makes them extremely hard to read by humans or machines, preventing their widespread use.
The #semanticClimate group looks to liberate the IPCC reports by making their content accessible, usable, and semantified – with the goal of making its knowledge accessible and giving citizens next generation publishing tools to work further with the reports.
#semanticClimate is a group of scientists, students and volunteers developing tools and processes to make the more than 10,000 pages IPCC reports semantic. They recently ran a very successful hackathon The Climate Knowledge Hunt Hackathon attended by Indian policymakers and climate organisations in September 2022.
Registered participants can join the #semanticClimate team's private Zoom Channel for demonstrations, feedback and support! (Even without registering you can start right away with the links and materials in our blog section, but for real time, face-to-face explanation and support from the #semanticClimate team, you should register.)
semanticClimate is hands-on, practical demonstration where you'll learn how to turn (horribly hobbled) PDF files into clean, free-flowing HTML -- enriched with annotated links to wikidata entries (and more!). The result can be used to build a semantic index and annotation of the report – effectively bring the dead PDF to interactive life.
We'll be using Google Colab and Jupyter Notebooks, so no software needs to be installed on your local machine!
How much time may be required of me? It is anticipated that only 3 hours minimum volunteer time per person is needed over the week.
What experience do I need to take part in the hackathon? #semanticClimate is aimed at putting research publications and publishing tools in the hands of people. For this reason the hackathon is designed for people with no prior experience with the publishing tools being used.
Become a Chapter Champion: Subject specialists are needed to coordinate dictionary creation for each chapter.
Hands-on volunteers: Contributions are needed to: use the workflow and give feedback; help create dictionaries; create documentation and visualisations, and; map workflows.