Crisis Analytics: Big Data Driven Crisis Response

Disasters have long been a scourge for humanity. With the advances in technology (in terms of computing, communications, and the ability to process and analyze big data), our ability to respond to disasters is at an inflection point. There is great optimism that big data tools can be leveraged to process the large amounts of crisis-related data (in the form of user generated data in addition to the traditional humanitarian data) to provide an insight into the fast-changing situation and help drive an effective disaster response. This article introduces the history and the future of big crisis data analytics, along with a discussion on its promise, challenges, and pitfalls

The Requirements for Ontologies in Medical Data Integration: A Case Study

Evidence-based medicine is critically dependent on three sources of information: a medical knowledge base, the patients medical record and knowledge of available resources, including where appropriate, clinical protocols. Patient data is often scattered in a variety of databases and may, in a distributed model, be held across several disparate repositories. Consequently addressing the needs of an evidence-based medicine community presents issues of biomedical data integration, clinical interpretation and knowledge management. This paper outlines how the Health-e-Child project has approached the challenge of requirements specification for (bio-) medical data integration, from the level of cellular data, through disease to that of patient and population. The approach is illuminated through the requirements elicitation and analysis of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA), one of three diseases being studied in the EC-funded Health-e-Child project.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. Presented at the 11th International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium (Ideas2007). Banff, Canada September 200

Emerging Opportunities: Monitoring and Evaluation in a Tech-Enabled World

Various trends are impacting on the field of monitoring and evaluation in the area of international development. Resources have become ever more scarce while expectations for what development assistance should achieve are growing. The search for more efficient systems to measure impact is on. Country governments are also working to improve their own capacities for evaluation, and demand is rising from national and community-based organizations for meaningful participation in the evaluation process as well as for greater voice and more accountability from both aid and development agencies and government.These factors, in addition to greater competition for limited resources in the area of international development, are pushing donors, program participants and evaluators themselves to seek more rigorous – and at the same time flexible – systems to monitor and evaluate development and humanitarian interventions.However, many current approaches to M&E are unable to address the changing structure of development assistance and the increasingly complex environment in which it operates. Operational challenges (for example, limited time, insufficient resources and poor data quality) as well as methodological challenges that impact on the quality and timeliness of evaluation exercises have yet to be fully overcome

ACCESS: An Inception Report

Imagine a world in which all groups of citizens coming together to realize some public benefit measure and communicate the character and consequences of their work. Imagine further that all those groups have adopted a common reporting system that enables their individual reports to be compared, thus creating powerful descriptions of the relative and collective performance of citizen association for public benefit. Imagine, too, that this common measuring and reporting carries across to all forms of public-private partnership and corporate social responsibility. This is the world envisioned by ACCESS.For the past 18 months a growing number of concerned actors have been meeting, studying, and testing opinion around one of the great structural weaknesses in the world's institutional infrastructure -- inefficient and weak social investment markets. This inception report sets out the results of this enquiry in the form of a proposal to establish a reporting standard for nonprofit organizations seeking to produce social, environmental and, increasingly, financial returns. The ACCESS Reporting standard is one important contribution to redressing a major global system weakness, but it is certainly not the only one. Nor is it one that can operate in isolation from other initiatives. Accordingly, the ACCESS proposed plan of work involves convening a global dialogue on NGO transparency, accountability and performance with the objective of promoting ACCESS and other practical solutions to the challenges of social investment and civil society accountability.This report sets out the background and rationale for these proposals. You will meet the ACCESS sponsors and pilot project partners. Parts of the report are descriptive and analytical but other parts are necessarily theoretical and technical in nature. We make no apology for this. Part of the reason that in 2003 the world does not yet have a reporting standard for social actors is that the theory and technique have not been mastered. For those with a strong orientation toward strategy and action, however, these aspects are presented as well

Technology for Good: Innovative Use of Technology by Charities

Technology for Good identifies ten technologies being used by charitable organizations in innovative ways. The report briefly introduces each technology and provides examples of how those technologies are being used.Examples are drawn from a broad spectrum of organizations working on widely varied issues around the globe. This makes Technology for Good a unique repository of inspiration for the public and private sectors, funders, and other change makers who support the creation and use of technology for social good

Census 2020: Making Western New York Count

Although climate change requires an international response and will require national policies and actions, local geographies have to be involved because it that is where the harms are felt. But how can local and regional areas respond to the climate crisis? This article offers a story of the emergence of a climate justice movement in Buffalo and Western New York as an example of how one community is addressing climate change and its unequal impacts

Open budget data: mapping the landscape

This report offers analysis of the emerging issue of open budget data, which has begun to gain traction amongst advocates and practitioners of financial transparency. Issues and initiatives associated with the emerging issue of open budget data are charted in different forms of digital media. The objective is to enable practitioners – in particular civil society organisations, intergovernmental organisations, governments, multilaterals and funders – to navigate this developing field and to identify trends, gaps and opportunities for supporting it. How public money is collected and distributed is one of the most pressing political questions of our time, influencing the health, well-being and prospects of billions of people. Decisions about fiscal policy affect everyone - determining everything from the resourcing of essential public services, to the capacity of public institutions to take action on global challenges such as poverty, inequality or climate change. Digital technologies have the potential to transform the way that information about public money is organised, circulated and utilised in society, which in turn could shape the character of public debate, democratic engagement, governmental accountability and public participation in decision-making about public funds. Data could play a vital role in tackling the democratic deficit in fiscal policy and in supporting better outcomes for citizens

Representing and coding the knowledge embedded in texts of Health Science Web published articles

Despite the fact that electronic publishing is a common activity to scholars electronic journals are still based in the print model and do not take full advantage of the facilities offered by the Semantic Web environment. This is a report of the results of a research project with the aim of investigating the possibilities of electronic publishing journal articles both as text for human reading and in machine readable format recording the new knowledge contained in the article. This knowledge is identified with the scientific methodology elements such as problem, methodology, hypothesis, results, and conclusions. A model integrating all those elements is proposed which makes explicit and records the knowledge embedded in the text of scientific articles as an ontology. Knowledge thus represented enables its processing by intelligent software agents The proposed model aims to take advantage of these facilities enabling semantic retrieval and validation of the knowledge contained in articles. To validate and enhance the model a set of electronic journal articles were analyzed