Becoming Involved in SWED

We hope that a many environmental organizations and projects will join the prototype SWED directory by creating and publishing information about their organization or/and project(s) and helping in other ways.

What Does it Mean to Be Involved?

There are three main ways that your organisation and/or project(s) might wish to be involved in the SWED project

  1. Adding your Information to the Directory: For most organisations and projects being involved simply means creating and publishing information (on their own web sites) about their organisation and/or project(s). The SWED portal system can then harvest the information and enter the information into the directory. Your organisation can, of course, remove the information at any time. Visit our Joining SWED pages to find out more.
  2. Helping Design and Improve the System: A smaller number of organisations who have a particular interest in the creation and maintenance of directory type information, may wish to become involved in helping to improve the system by helping evaluate and enhance the design of the Web site and working to create better thesauri for classifying the activities, topics and types of organisation etc. The Environment Council, the Natural History Museum in London, are already helping us in this way.
  3. Use the Software and Data Yourself: Some organisations and/or projects may wish to download the software itself and install it on their own Web servers and create their own specialist directories, by customising the system to meet their needs.

What Are the Benefits of Being Involved?

  • Adding your information to the directory:

    • Users of the SWED Webs site will be able to find information about your organisation or project. The rich system of indexing (categorisation) of the organisations means that users should be able to find your organisation or project more quickly and obtain detailed descriptions and contact details.

    This should 1) ensure that those that need to find your information can do so and 2) users are more likely to understand exactly what your organisation/project is about before they make contact.

  • You will be helping to create a UK wide environmental directory:

    • The directory information can be used by many different groups of people (including your own organisation or project) including schools, colleges and universities, researchers, other environmental organisations, local and national government, businesses, media, and not least members of the general pubic with environmental/wildlife interests. Imagine how useful it would be if all environmentally related organisations and projects self published data about themselves that could be automatically combined. Such a directory would be impractical using a centralised approach.

    Although the SWED project as a research project is focused on the UK, the system could be opened up more widely and there is already interest in the potential of an EU wide system.

  • Helping us develop a sustainable and open system for the whole community:

    • The SWED project (and indeed the Semantic Web philosophy as a whole) was conceived as a free (open source) and easily accessible resource for the whole community of people and organizations that are interested in environmental issues. By taking part you would be helping create that common resource.

  • Other information providers can harvest your information:

    • This means that instead of sending out the same data to different directories, you can point enquirers to the single information file. They can then harvest (even using a standard web browser) the information, thus reducing the overheads of keeping your information up to date in different directories or used by other information providers.

    The Web form that produces the RDF file for the directory can also produce a plain text file that can be put up alongside the RDF file so that directories that do not have the ability to make use of the RDF can still access the information.

  • Your organisational and project information will also be available as part of the Semantic Web:

    • Not only directory publishers but anyone who is developing Semantic Web applications can harvest your information and use it to enhance and ensure that their information is up to date. For example, an academic or educational content provider might maintain a set of links to projects related to a topic.

    Another likely application is that of making it easy for existing information services to join and maintain data more easily. A specific example might be that projects such as those creating indices and networks of biodiversity data could use the SWED data to automatically maintain their contact details for the organisations holding the data sets - once again the Semantic Web approach provides a means to use the single source of definitive information (i.e. organisational contact details) in format that can be 'understood' and used by computers.

  • Making information about environmental organisations and projects more accessible and transparent:

    • One major problem for many people new to environmentally related issues or simply to area of it with which they are unfamiliar is understanding what organisations and projects are relevant to what and in what capacity - this might be individuals seeking to develop their personal interests or a small businesses trying to understand their environmental responsibilities or a school or university student researching a particular topic or an NGO officer tying to understand the workings of governmental organisations.

    A key goal of the SWED project is to explore how to make the information more accessible and transparent. This is the reason for the very rich system of classifications of organisations and projects (what they do, their type of organisation, the topics they are interested in, their geographic range, etc.). We have also included the means for organisations and projects to describe their inter-relationships e.g. that a project is an initiative of an organisation or that an organisation is part of a larger organisation, etc. this will enable the system to provide not only text but graphical visualisations of these relationships - helping users to understand the often complex relationships.

  • Your organisation or project can use the system itself:

    • Environmental organisations themselves are likely to be major users of SWED type directory(ies). It is often the case that environmental organisations require information and/or assistance from other bodies e.g. specialist advice, species specialists, regulatory bodies, etc... the directory could provide a short cut to identifying the most appropriate organisation and/or projects.

  • Ensuring the future of a SWED type National directory:

    We plan to make sure that the directory continues to be maintained when the SWAD-Europe research project ends. By being involved and helping us create a genuinely effective and easy to use system, you will be helping to make sure that SWED (and the other directories and information services that use it) does not go the way of other directories in the past.

Further Information

The FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page offers answers to a number of common questions that organisations have. If you have any questions not answered by the FAQ visit our contacts page to find out who to contact for your particular inquiry.