Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

November 16, 2014

Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure — Updated October 2014

Filed under: Encyclopedia,Ethics,Government — Patrick Durusau @ 3:32 pm

Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure — Updated October 2014 by the Department of Defense, Office of General Counsel, Standards of Conduct Office. (Word Document)

From the introduction:

The Standards of Conduct Office of the Department of Defense General Counsel’s Office has assembled the following selection of cases of ethical failure for use as a training tool. Our goal is to provide DoD personnel with real examples of Federal employees who have intentionally or unwittingly violated the standards of conduct. Some cases are humorous, some sad, and all are real. Some will anger you as a Federal employee and some will anger you as an American taxpayer.

Please pay particular attention to the multiple jail and probation sentences, fines, employment terminations and other sanctions that were taken as a result of these ethical failures. Violations of many ethical standards involve criminal statutes. Protect yourself and your employees by learning what you need to know and accessing your Agency ethics counselor if you become unsure of the proper course of conduct. Be sure to access them before you take action regarding the issue in question. Many of the cases displayed in this collection could have been avoided completely if the offender had taken this simple precaution.

The cases have been arranged according to offense for ease of access. Feel free to reproduce and use them as you like in your ethics training program. For example – you may be conducting a training session regarding political activities. Feel free to copy and paste a case or two into your slideshow or handout – or use them as examples or discussion problems. If you have a case you would like to make available for inclusion in a future update of this collection, please email it to OSD.SOCO@MAIL.MIL or you may fax it to (703) 695-4970.

One of the things I like about the United States military is they have no illusions about being better or worse than any other large organization and they prepare accordingly. Instead of pretending they are “…shocked, shocked to find gambling…,” they are prepared for rule breaking and try to keep it in check.

If you are interested in exploring or mapping this area, you will find the U.S. Office of Government Ethics useful. Unfortunately, the “Office of Inspector General” is distinct for each agency so collating information across executive departments will be challenging. To say nothing of obtaining similar information for other branches of the United States government.

Not from a technical standpoint for a topic map but from a data mining and analysis perspective.

I first saw this at Full Text Reports as Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure — Updated October 2014.

July 30, 2014

JudaicaLink released

Filed under: Encyclopedia,History,Humanities,Linked Data — Patrick Durusau @ 3:07 pm

JudaicaLink released

From the post:

Data extractions from two encyclopediae from the domain of Jewish culture and history have been released as Linked Open Data within our JudaicaLink project.

JudaicaLink now provides access to 22,808 concepts in English (~ 10%) and Russian (~ 90%), mostly locations and persons.

See here for further information: http://www.judaicalink.org/blog/kai-eckert/encyclopedia-russian-jewry-released-updates-yivo-encyclopedia

Next steps in this project include “…the creation of links between the two encyclopedias and links to external sources like DBpedia or Geonames.”

In case you are interested, the two encyclopedias are:

The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, courtesy of the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, NY.

Rujen.ru provides an Internet version of the Encyclopedia of Russian Jewry, which is published in Moscow since 1994, giving a comprehensive, objective picture of the life and activity of the Jews of Russia, the Soviet Union and the CIS.

For more details: Encyclopediae

If you are looking to contribute content or time to a humanities project, this should be on your short list.

May 10, 2014

The Encyclopedia of Life v2:…

Filed under: Bioinformatics,Biology,Encyclopedia,Semantic Inconsistency — Patrick Durusau @ 4:11 pm

The Encyclopedia of Life v2: Providing Global Access to Knowledge About Life on Earth by Cynthia S. Parr, et al. (Biodiversity Data Journal 2: e1079 (29 Apr 2014) doi: 10.3897/BDJ.2.e1079)

Abstract:

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL, http://eol.org) aims to provide unprecedented global access to a broad range of information about life on Earth. It currently contains 3.5 million distinct pages for taxa and provides content for 1.3 million of those pages. The content is primarily contributed by EOL content partners (providers) that have a more limited geographic, taxonomic or topical scope. EOL aggregates these data and automatically integrates them based on associated scientific names and other classification information. EOL also provides interfaces for curation and direct content addition. All materials in EOL are either in the public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons license. In addition to the web interface, EOL is also accessible through an Application Programming Interface.

In this paper, we review recent developments added for Version 2 of the web site and subsequent releases through Version 2.2, which have made EOL more engaging, personal, accessible and internationalizable. We outline the core features and technical architecture of the system. We summarize milestones achieved so far by EOL to present results of the current system implementation and establish benchmarks upon which to judge future improvements.

We have shown that it is possible to successfully integrate large amounts of descriptive biodiversity data from diverse sources into a robust, standards-based, dynamic, and scalable infrastructure. Increasing global participation and the emergence of EOL-powered applications demonstrate that EOL is becoming a significant resource for anyone interested in biological diversity.

This section on the organization of the taxonomy for the Encyclopedia of Life v2 seems particularly relevant:

Resource documents made available by content partners define the text and multimedia being provided as well as the taxa to which the content refers, the associations between content and taxa, and the associations among taxa (i.e. taxonomies). Expert taxonomists often disagree about the best classification for a given group of organisms, and there is no universal taxonomy for partners to adhere to (Patterson et al. 2008, Rotman et al. 2012a, Yoon and Rose 2001). As an aggregator, EOL accepts all taxonomic viewpoints from partners and attempts to assign them to existing Taxon Pages, or create new Taxon Pages when necessary. A reconciliation algorithm uses incoming taxon information, previously indexed data, and assertions from our curators to determine the best aggregation strategy. (links omitted)

Integration of information without agreement on a single view of the information. (Have we heard this before?)

If you think of the taxon pages as proxies, it is easier to see the topic map aspects of this project.

October 12, 2013

NYCPedia

Filed under: Encyclopedia,Linked Data — Patrick Durusau @ 7:21 pm

NYCPedia

From the about page:

NYCpedia is a new data encyclopedia about New York City.

This is a beta preview, so bear with us as we work out the bugs, add tons more features and add new data.

NYCpedia is organized so you can search for information about a borough, neighborhood, or zip code. From there you can find insights about jobs, education, healthy living, real estate, transportation and more. We pull up-to-date information from open data sources and link it up so it’s easier to explore, but you can always check out the original source. We are constantly looking to add new data sources, so if you know of a great dataset that should be in NYCpedia, let us know.

Need data services for your NYC-based business, non-profit, or academic institution? Contact us to find out how you can link your organization’s data to NYCpedia.

Based on the PediaCities platform, whose about page says:

Ontodia created the PediaCities platform to curate, organize, and link data about cities. Check out our first PediaCities knowledgebase at NYCpedia.com for a demonstration of what clean linked data looks like. Ontodia was founded in 2012 by Joel Natividad and Sami Baig following their success at NYCBigApps 3.0, where they won the Grand Prize for NYCFacets. The PediaCities platform, with NYCpedia as the first PediaCity, is our attempt to add value on top of NYC’s incredible open data ecosystem.

I was disappointed until I got deep enough in the map.

Try: http://nyc.pediacities.com/Resource/CommunityStats/10006, which is the 10006 zip code.

It’s clean, easy to navigate, not all the data possible but targeted at the usual user.

I suspect a fairly homogeneous data set but I can’t say for sure.

Probably because it is in beta, there did not appear to be any non-English interfaces? Would suspect that is going to be an early added feature if it isn’t already on the development map.

BTW, if you are interested in data from New York City, try NYC Open Data with over 1100 data sets currently available.

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