Ideal Case v2

In further refining the type of case I want, I would like to add problems of desertification and community level attempts to mitigate such phenomena.

Something else also needs to be included that was not mentioned in the previous post: this project is intended to focus on the use of ICT systems to support community monitoring of NRM based projects to support ecological sustainability, cultural integrity and economic development.

Along with the development of an application which integrates numerous elements from GIS, online deliberation and community modeling with patterns, this project would due well to incorporate some sort of parallel project aimed at building community information literacy.

This could make for a nice intersection for others interested in studying rural capacity building and info literacy.

Musings over the Implications of Tagging for Research, aka Social Bookmarking

Below is my out-loud thinking during an e-mail with one of the Assistant Directors here at CTLT that focused on folksonomy

Cleaned-up a bit:

An interesting thesis might be to gauge how tags help researchers branch into cross-disciplinary domains. For example, I hypothesize: as more people start actively tagging content, and as people start using tags to find interrelated information, more people will start coming across tags that connect to seemingly unrelated information. In this sense a researcher could essentially begin to traverse a vast amount of content that is now linked, but in more traditional domains of academia would be considered disconnected and unrelated. I would think that these newly identified connections might open up researchers to new ways of viewing their research domain, as well as provide opportunities for more interdisciplinary study.

This also prompted an investigation into the idea of community based ontology.

Now, one might ask, "How did you go from tagging and the growth of interdisciplinary research to thinking about community ontology?"

Well, community, because I started thinking of how social bookmarking/tagging might be useful in a system focused on environmental monitoring and collaborative planning. And ontology, because that is what we are thinking about when trying to define some piece of information and its relationships.

Anyway, I came across this very simple and yet useful slide show.

Is Environmental Informatics, GIS?

When doing a literature review on Environmental Informatics I find nearly every article or journal publication emphasizing the application of GIS type technologies. While I don't discount the usage of these technologies in a collaborate environment, my concern is that the literature seems to miss a very large piece of the human-centered and communicative aspect of information systems for NRM.

As my primary interest is in developing collaborative web-based systems, it seems that there really does need to be a discussion on the ways in which content is managed, developed, maintained and consumed. How about when seemingly oppositional groups seek to collaborate? In what ways do current IS models fall short in protecting privacy but help maintain a collaborative space?

While the mapping technology is important it appears that the dialog that these products promote is what we want to be enabling. Yet, the field appears so focused on the mapping product.

What about how information is shared to other groups that might benefit from previous work?

In some ways, the integration of GIS is only one element of the equation. This parallels the concept of a pattern language. For instance, a single pattern in of itself provides value, yet the power of patterns is more fully realized in relation to one another and in this way we might find that addressing and evaluating the ways our larger technological systems support the theory, vision, language, education process and work practices necessary for successful community centered NRM.

I guess anytime an emerging field is predominately focused upon a single application or niche, makes me think that the scholars involved might be missing other opportunities for relevant and even critical questioning and investigation.

GeoDjango for Environmental Informatics

So I found a very cool Django project called GeoDjango. It is a geo-spatial extension of the Django code project and seems to be a very promising application framework. I’m still very new to GIS, yet my interests and program of study is meant to incorporate some of the elements that this project seeks to address.

One of the things that I’m really interested in as a correlation to using L.V. patterns is the integration of simple geo-spatial data for community groups to collaboratively develop, extend and utilize in their work.

Along with the usage of this data is the ability to create maps to help in decision-making. However, next to the application of maps and collaborative mapping is the need to preserve community memory and the decisions that groups make to address community resource issues.

Along, with the potential to use Django as a framework for through the web GIS, I have been looking at applications such as EarthBrowser and Google Earth. Both seem promising additions. However, I was reading the EarthBrowser blog and he notes his interest in Django and I’m wondering what he is doing to enable through the web geo-spatial views. Plus, it seems at this point EarthBrowser is a much more rich application. Perhaps, this is due to its long development history. I guess in this sense I'm pretty agnostic. I just want whatever is cheapest, i.e. free and easiest to integrate into my web apps.

Anyway, with the ability to integrate these elements and along with the integration of a collaborative pattern language design module it is hoped that we can begin to provide not only the quantitatively appropriate data, but also a qualitatively appropriate approach to the design and usage of this data.