LSU Researchers Create Topic Map of Oil Spill Disaster
From the post:
The Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill incident has impacted many aspects of the coastal environment and inhabitants of surrounding states. However, government officials, Gulf-based researchers, journalists and members of the general public who want a big picture of the impact on local ecosystems and communities are currently limited by discipline-specific and fractured information on the various aspects of the incident and its impacts.
To solve this problem, Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science Yejun Wu is leading the way in information convergence on oil spill events. Wu’s lab has created a first edition of an online topic map, available at http://topicmap.lsu.edu/, that brings together information from a wide range of research fields including biological science, chemistry, coastal and environmental science, engineering, political science, mass communication studies and many other disciplines in order to promote collaboration and big picture understanding of technological disasters.
“Researchers, journalists, politicians and even school teachers wanted to know the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill incident,” Wu said. “I felt this was an opportunity to develop a tool for supporting learning and knowledge discovery. Our topic map tool can help people learn from historical events to better prepare for the future.”
Wu started the project with a firm belief in the need for an oil spill information hub.
“There is a whole list of historical oil spill events that we probably neglected – we did not learn enough from history,” Wu said.
He first looked to domain experts from various disciplines to share their own views of the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. From there, Wu and his research associate and graduate students manually collected more than 7,000 concepts and 4,000 concept associations related to oil spill incidents worldwide from peer-reviewed journal articles and authoritative government websites, loading the information into an organizational topic map software program. Prior to these efforts by Wu’s lab, no comprehensive oil spill topic map or taxonomy existed.
“Domain experts typically focus on oil spill research in their own area, such as chemistry or political communication, but an oil spill is a comprehensive problem, and studies should be interdisciplinary,” Wu said. “Experts in different fields that usually don’t talk to each can benefit from a tool that brings together and organizes information concepts across many disciplines.”
Wikipedia calls it: Deepwater Horizon oil spill. I think BP Oil Spill is a better name.
Just thinking of environmental disasters, which ones would you suggest for topic maps?