On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 5:59 PM, Greg Bloom <greg.bloom(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi folks -
As an introduction: I'm working with local non-profits that service
low-income people in the District of Columbia, and one of the common
problems (which we seem to share with communities everywhere) is the lack of
a comprehensive directory for what resources (food pantries, public housing,
health care, etc) are available in the community. (We've written up a brief
about this problem here.)
Later this month, I'll try to tackle this project as part of a research
residency. We have access to at least three large databases of social
services that we can try to merge together and make usable and
peer-productive, so to speak. I can assemble a team of social workers,
software developers, data geeks, and regular users.
I wonder if the Wikidata project could be what our effort needs -- whether
our developers could experiment with your technology to try to merge and
open up these community resource data sets. If so, how would I go about
exploring that opportunity? If however the time is not yet ripe, you may
have other valuable insights for us as we undertake this experiment.
Thanks for any help you can offer!
Hi Greg,
That sounds like a great project. It'll be a bit too soon for Wikidata
to be helpful I fear. Depending on the specifics of your project maybe
Semantic MediaWiki is a better fit though. I recommend you have a look
at it as well.
Cheers
Lydia
--
Lydia Pintscher -
http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Community Communications for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
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