On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 5:59 PM, Greg Bloom greg.bloom@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

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