FORCE11 Hackathon Kickoff -- Climate Knowledge Hunt Hackathon FSCI Edition 2023
#climate-knowledge-hunt-hackathon #climate #fsci #fsci2023
The semanticClimate team is excited to host an asynchronous hackathon from July 31 to August 4, 2023, where everybody learns about climate and tech by participating in the event! Feel free to drop in anytime.
Join us on the FSCI Slack - channel #hackathon-semanticclimate.
About the Event
Want to see how semantic tools can make climate knowledge in scientific reports more accessible?
The hackathon will contribute to a semantic layer on top of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023 from its Sixth Assessment Cycle from March 2023. The UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the report as a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb.”, but the report has barriers to its use — it’s complex, jargon-rich, and comes as a dumb PDF.
In the hackathon, you will try the tools like Wikibase and Wikimedia tools to provide an interactive editing, query and display system for our #semanticClimate knowledge base.
The hackathon will have three key activity tracks led by #semanticClimate team members that follow dedicated topics:
- Cities, (Mahvish, Renu, Waheb)
- Mountains and Glaciers, (Shiwani) and
- Food Security (Yasin),
In addition there will be a prototype track for making custom readers for city climate plans. This is organised in conjunction with FSCI class E08 – Publishing from Collections (Simon).
Key goals of the hackathon are improvement of the semantification of IPCC Report chapters related to the topics covered in the hackathon: Cities, Mountains and Glaciers, and Food Security; and the prototype mockup of ‘IPCC Reports and City Climate Change Plans’ project.
Read our blog to know more about the motivation behind running the hackathon.
How to take part
Find details on the FSCI Sched, join us on the FSCI Slack - channel #hackathon-semantic climate. The hackathon is asynchronous so you don't have to be present or have to present (unless you want to). Participants are welcome to drop in at any time for as little or long as they want.
Schedule
- 31 July: Opening session;
- 1-3 August: asynchronous hackathon (join us on FSCI Slack);
- 4 August: Closing session.
Tasks for participants (optional)
Participants can choose tasks that suit them. If you have a special expertise or passion we can add to the example list below.
All tasks, hackathon stages and workflows, as well as any software guides can be found linked from the documentation section.
Each track — the topics: Cities, Mountains, and Food, as well as the custom reader for city climate plans — is led by a team member. Participants can join tracks and learn about the different tasks or run code themselves if they like. All tracks have the same core workflow:
- An IPCC chapter is selected to work on and teams browser and discuss contents
- Chapters are converted from PDF to HTML
- Machine learning are run on chapters to annotate them
- Dictionaries are automatically extracted and then refined through group discussion
- Semantically enriched content is outputted and stored on GitHub
- The team reviews progress and gives feedback to SC organisers
- Bibliographic analysis
- Conversion of large corpora to semantic formatting
- Your ideas and suggestions
The participants will be split into smaller teams, each with a theme – cities, mountains, and food, and #sC team member. The themes may be technical or related to climate topics. Some thought-out ones are:
- Climate dictionaries with Wikidata links
- Knowledge Graph – create Markdown files that can be read by Obsidian
- Structure of IPCC Reports – help us work out which bits to read!
- Documentation
Goals, outcomes, and learning activities
- Testing and developing tech
- Semantic collection of semantic facts that can be read by fifteen year olds and citizen with poor eyesight, and support local initiatives such as city climate plans
- Improvement of semantification of IPCC Report chapters related to our topics covered in the hackathon: Cities, Mountains and Glaciers, and Food Security,
- Prototype mockup of ‘IPCC Reports and City Climate Change Plans’
- Documentation improvement
What you’ll need to take part in the hackathon?
Documentation: Programme of activity and software installation step-by-step guides.
- Installation Guide: Step-by-step guide
- User Guide: Hackathon programme of activity, stages, and workflows
Resources and links
GitHub repository: https://github.com/petermr/semanticClimate
semanticClimate and the Hackathon
A significant part of any research effort is ‘Review of literature’, a task that often begins and closes by reading a few papers without contextualizing one’s own work in terms of all the existing knowledge in the field. Currently information around the world is largely “published” as monolithic documents ( PDF format) that further prevent one from ingesting or analyzing the work that has ever been conducted in a given field. Our emerging story is that we are catalyzing the building of a Global Semantic Knowledge Commons for Climate Change (GSKC), a self-improving network of semantic tools. In this Hackathon participants will use Open Source text and data mining tools developed by us in #semanticClimate to unlock the information trapped in the UN IPCC Climate Change reports. Our aim is to use PDF documents and release crucial scientific knowledge trapped in these by enriching them with annotations linked to #Wikidata — it makes the data accessible and understandable to everyone, be they citizens, scientists, datatech enthusiasts, or machines. We also hope to enable active conversations on Climate Data Access & Just Transitions, while addressing and finding real solutions by extracting Climate Knowledge together. The general goal is to show how humans and machines can create useful re-usable knowledge; and to make friends!
The Hackathon will Unlock and bring Science to Citizens via Open Source Technology, and we have quite successfully done this over the past two years in collaboration with like minded Climate Enthusiasts among you! You are welcome to Bring your questions and/or knowledge of Climate to the Hackathon! IT experience (e.g., creating web pages) is valuable but NOT required; Willingness and excitement to work in small teams would be wonderful!
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