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Planet-saving information is a terrible thing to waste

If we are to hold any hope of mitigating the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on our planet and its inhabitants, we must ensure that the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic knowledge on climate change is not just widely available, but immediately comprehensible to politicians, industrialists, educators, citizens, and scientists alike.

Our most important and up-to-date resource, the UN IPCC AR6 Climate Assessment Report, is a 50-chapter, 10,000 page monster filled to the brim with climate-science information and data...and all of it trapped in the inflexible PDF format.

The medium is the monkey wrench

As if the sheer volume and complexity of the information weren't enough, the PDF format itself throws a spanner in the works:

1. Meaning is lost in the haze of acronyms, abbreviations and scientific jargon densely populating these important documents. These documents set a very high bar for comprehension (and therefore, attention) from policy makers that should be championing the cause — let alone the coalition of willing laypeople needed to implement meaningful changes on a global scale. Throughout this document and others like it, such terms must be understandable, in situ.
2. An untapped wealth of knowledge remains buried in the document's rich text, charts, graphs and images. It must therefore be made machine-readable so that it can be mined, extracted, and exported to new and potentially planet-saving uses.

We need to not only remove these obstacles, we need to create entirely new possibilities!  And that's where YOU come into the picture!

The #semanticClimate task force needs YOU!!

#semanticClimate is an industrious, international, multi-talented group of young scientists of diverse fields. Together, we are developing a FREE open-access toolkit that releases climate-related knowledge from PDF prison.

OUR MISSION

We transform and enrich climate-related documents to make them understandable, useful, and accessible to anyone and everyone— be they citizens, scientists, or policy-makers.

YOUR MISSION (should you choose to accept it...)

Join us! Apply your skills! Be a part of building and enhancing powerful new tools that take information and transforms it into new, structured, filtered, and actionable knowledge!

In alpha-tests, our toolkit is successfully:

• converting PDFs into editable and accessible HTML, XML, and CSV;
• extracting important keywords and concepts from the text (including named entities, scientific terms, acronyms, and abbreviations);
• creating specialized dictionaries and glossaries linking those terms to wikidata entries containing their definition; and,
• semantically enriching the converted HTML with annotations linked to the wikidata so that anyone can simply click on, or mouse-over an unknown term to learn their meaning, thus making comprehension of these critically important documents available to everyone — even machines!

And this is just the beginning! Imagine what will be possible with YOU on our team!

Looking for a meaningful challenge?

Join our coding crew!

We're looking for smart-thinking, enthusiastic volunteers keen on helping us transform climate science and policy information into action. Are you or someone you know one of them?

We're looking for:

• CODERS skilled in python, HTML
• CLIMATE SCIENTISTS
• TERMINOLGISTS and ONTOLOGISTS
• TRANSLATORS
• WIKIMEDIANS
• WEBSITE DEVELOPERS who can build and maintain (mainly static) sites
• COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM ARCHITECTS/MANAGERS to help develop and attract people to interrelated networks of communities and facilitate participation.

Contact us!

Introduce yourself to us, and we'll introduce you to the world of difference you can make — given the right opportunity!

Just click here to begin.