The #semantic climate community: making open-source software for knowledge liberation

Abstract

#semantic Climate is an international open research community led by young Indian scientists who use Open Notebook Science to transform information into structured filtered and actionable knowledge. The key project mission is to liberate scientific climate data, making it equitable and freely accessible to everyone. The #semantic Climate community achieves this through two central activities, namely collaborative open notebook science, and citizen engagement. The first activity is research oriented and involves creation of a proof-of-concept software toolkit that uses AI over NLP to transform locked literature (such as PDF documents) into semantic, hypermedia form. This is a non-trivial task, that has haunted developers for over three decades, and the #semantic Toolkit makes complex climate reports not just easily accessible, but also processable by machines, embedded in the Global Knowledge Graph and thereby connected to multilingual resources. The second activity is where the #semantic Climate community engages citizens in climate action and awareness through interactive hackathons, open and transparent working practices, and using Git versioning. From a citizen science perspective, this includes designing community outreach activities (games), giving attribution to all participants, and engaging the wider public in the culture and practices of science (verifiable knowledge, review, data science, modern infrastructure use, etc). This article is an overview of the #semantic Climate community building efforts, and how the project employs strategies, techniques, and ideas from the fields of Open Notebook Science. The open-source software culture and projects follow UNESCO Open Science values, and knowledge justice for the Global South, towards addressing knowledge neo-colonisation.