Survey of web 2.0 enabled climate data provision services: An analytic approach to content delivery.
Andrew Harding, GEC3
As with any other production process, a long and complex chain of relationships exists between the producers of climatological data, and the consumers of generalized or localized climate information. Means of dissemination are formalized and well organized within both the data production and the research communities, but there may be a disconnect with user communities (ref.) who stand to benefit from an increased understanding of climate change behaviour. Some organizations, such as Environment Canada, Ouranos and various universities aim to engage place-based communities or publics related to specific industries through involvement in the research process (ref.). However, it may be difficult to communicate with wider publics in the same inclusive manner. Although multiple tools and frameworks exist that provide such utility for other production chains within private or user-produced media (ref.), methods for interaction between the scientific climate community and wide or poorly-specified publics may be less successfully operationalized at present. There is scope, therefore, for a null hypothesis and attendant investigation:
- Engagement between the scientific climate change community and the general public is perfect,
- The tools used for that engagement are appropriate.
To assess this hypothesis, current practice must be surveyed for behaviour within three main arenas: community, information supply, and tools. Further, the organizations that we seek to assess must be defined. This study therefore concerns itself with those bodies that are centralized web-based data suppliers with an explicit mandate to engage user communities in addition to international or governmental bodies. Web-based bodies are chosen because of their ability to deliver information rapidly and to a broad base of users.
Community
At present the user communities in relationships with climate research institutions are often highly targeted (as above, ref.). Those that offer means of involvement for the general public are often limited in the services that they can provide (ref.). Barriers to large-scale interaction with multiple publics must therefore exist. In order to discover potential points of interaction for further publics, current ‘outreach’ initiatives should be investigated in terms of those groups that are currently involved, their scope for both breadth and depth of interaction, the degree of formalization evident within relationships, and the ‘soft’ mechanisms that allow for a flow of information and resources. In short, the degree of participation between research institutions and their public partners forms an essential part of the engagement process. It is important to note that participation is two sided, and that in an ideal scenario approaches should be in place both for the public to participate with climate research institutions in a meaningful fashion (as providers of useful services), and vice versa.
Tools
Although social links are required to form participation, the realization of those links, where they concern the dissemination of data and graphical information, also requires ‘hard’ tools and mechanisms. These tools may take the form of databases and delivery systems for the data themselves, feedback options, methods for building climate focused online networks for user-communities, or methods of direct interaction and manipulation with the data apart from an intermediary. Current approaches include one-way dissemination (i.e. downloaded data), tools closely associated with many-to-many interactivity and the internet (i.e., web 2.0 technologies), freely available model software (e.g., climateprediction.net), and a growing involvement in digital earths (ref.). Although work exists concerning the usability and form of tools designed for various web-based information systems (ref.), climate information presents novel technical challenges within all of these platforms (further detail required). The strengths and weaknesses of the tools deployed to deal with these issues and how they aid the relationships between creators of content, fully engaged users and less engaged casual users (i.e. technical facilitation) are the concern of this study.
Information supply
Ease of use issues are prevalent both within the method of dissemination of climate data and the data under consideration. Concerns related to the purpose of the information on offer, its context, and availability, are all relevant to the issue of engagement in addition to those regarding the content itself. Of particular interest to this analysis is the dichotomy between scientific rigour and transparency. The complexity of highly rigorous scientific work, where all assumptions are stated, publications are referenced, metrics are defined, data processing is specified, further meta-data may be available, and context is appropriately provided may act to counteract clear interaction for some communities, and aid it for others. It is evident that where the web based manifestation of the climate research community seeks to engage a wide range of publics of varying levels of technical aptitude a clear and easily navigable approach to information supply is required.
Notes on websites for analysis (first pass)
Realclimate
Probably the most well known and authoritative weblog attached to the climate sciences
Climateprediction.net
The first use of distributed computing power applied to global climate modelling. As mentioned during our meeting, may well have kick-started British public interest.
Wunderground
The weather site that weather scientists use for their holidays. No historical data, but substantial volumes of aggregated current information served to everyone. Thriving user community of weblogs / photos / webcams.
The Weather Network
By contrast with the above, a focus on more push, less pull.
Atmsophere
Ok, so the forum is broken at the moment, but the division between basic and 'more' in the encyclopedia section is an implementation of the varying levels of detail we talked about.
CCSN
The latest iteration of the Canadian Climate Scenarios Network, a website for distribution of climate data of all kinds specifically to other Canadian climate scientists. Interaction is provided (ish) by a comprehensive list of contact information for almost everyone involved. I'm only vaguely attached to it, and you can get to me after just one intermediary. Not very friendly to most publics, though.
IPCC
Data directly from the IPCC, fantastically useful if you've read the latest reports. Less so otherwise, but still contains some excellent user tools if you can find them, including: http://www.ipcc-data.org/java/time_series.html I'm sure you've seen it, but the rest of the IPCC site (ipcc.ch) provides everything you'd expect in terms of reports and documentation, and represents (that being the key term) an enormous community of scientists.
Grupos
A web interface for another project I'm involved with (downscaling, I'm afraid!), requires registration for use and possibly not open to non-participants, but there are some screenshots and a presentation that both show the state of the art for data-dissemination web-tools developed within and for the climate change community. You can get the idea, anyway. Uses a technology you may or may not be aware of called OpenDap (used to be DoDs). All the interaction for the project is internal though.
CDC at NOAA
The NOAA (larger scale, more complex) implementation of OpenDap. Allows for plotting, subsets, and download of a -vast- array of data. Not sure whether this or the above is more friendly (where 'more' is strictly a relative term). Feedback is desired, but involves an email link and the following text: "We would espeically [Sic] like feedback if you have found the data/pages useful for research, teaching or other uses. This will help us keep the data and webpages available."
Method
We plan to conduct a web content analysis of these and other climate change sites. We also plan to conduct a web content analysis of more traditional online mapping sites. See attached file for a preliminary analytic frame, created by Mc Gill undergraduate Zakir Jafry, for assessing climate change and web 2.0 sites.
Web Content Analysis References: An Annotated Bibliography
Zakir Jafry
Busch, Carol, Paul S. De Maret, Teresa Flynn, Rachel Kellum, Sheri Le, Brad Meyers, Matt Saunders, Robert White, and Mike Palmquist. (2005). Content Analysis. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University Department of English. Retrieved [August 6, 2008] from http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/research/content/.
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This site gives an overview of content analysis followed by a description of two types (Conceptual and Relational analysis). Conceptual being the occurance/frequency of keywords within a text and Relational, which analyzes the connection between certain words. The site also gives several examples of content analysis (a Bill Clinton Speech and some from literary text).
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These types of content analysis do not seem appropriate for this study.
"Content Analysis." U.S. Department of Energy: Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. 4 Nov. 2007. 7 Aug. 2008 http://www1.eere.energy.gov/communicationstandards/management/content_an...
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This is an example of a Content Analysis carried out for the U.S. Department of Energy EERE. It defines the purpose of a content analysis as a means to identify content problems and highlight content gaps, duplicate content, and other areas of improvement for the website.
Graham, Paul. "Web 2.0." PaulGraham.com. November, 2005. http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html
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web 2.0 = Ajax (web-applications work like desktop ones), democracy (people can change, create, add to something… like wikipedia).
Leise, Fred. "Content Analysis Heuristics." Boxes and Arrows. 12 Mar. 2007. 6 Aug. 2008 <http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/content-analysis>.
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this site deals with content analysis in website construction. The author talks about effective web design via “Content Analysis Heuristics”. There are 11 of them: collocation, differentiation, completeness, information scent, bounded horizons, accessibility, multiple access paths, appropriate structure, consistency, audience-relevance, and currency- each of which are described in detail on the website.
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This appears to be a more suitable list of criteria for the web content analysis in this study.
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Uses a 5 point scale.
"Online: Content Analysis." The State of the News Media. 2005. 7 Aug. 2008 <http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2005/narrative_online_contentanalysis.asp?cat=2&media=3>.
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This is an example of a content analysis in respect to news websites; it looks at 9 different news sources online and compares them based on originality, freshness, multimedia components, interactivity, and transparency.
O'Reilly, Tim. "What is Web 2.0." O'Reilly Media. September 30, 2005. http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/
news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
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in-depth explanation of web 2.0.
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(For purposes of a web content analysis) Comparison table of web 1.0 vs. 2.0.
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data ownership and the advantages of web 2.0 (ex. Mapquest first had online mapping capabilities, but GoogleMaps allows for user annotations, yielding it greater success).
Palmquist, Mike. Content Analysis. Colorado Stat University Department of English. Retrieved [August 6, 2008] from http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~palmquis/courses/content.html
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Another Content Analysis background information site. This one mentions advantages and disadvantages to content analysis.
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This type of content analysis does not seem appropriate for this study.
Spivack, Nova. "The Third-Generation Web is Coming." KurzweilAL.net. 17 Dec. 2006. 5 Aug. 2008 <http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0689.html?m%3d3>.
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Introduces the idea of web 3.0. The evolution from web 2.0 revolves around ‘the intelligent web’.
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data-mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence technologies (YOU ask for something, the website knows what you want and can provide it to you).
Strickland, Jonathan. "Is there a Web 1.0?." 28 January 2008. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/web-10.htm> 05 August 2008.
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This site offers a basic introductory to web 1.0 / web 2.0.
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Defines web 1.0 as static, not interactive, and web 1.0 applications are propriety (and therefore one can use the app. but cannot see how an app. works/change it). Web 2.0 programs are open source (source code freely available).
Weare, Christopher and Lin, Wan-Ying. Content Analysis of the World Wide Web. University of Southern California. Social Science Computer Review. Sage Publications 18:3, 2000.
- This article looks at Content Analysis as “a systematic, objective, and quantitative method for studying communication messages and developing inferences concerning the relationship between messages and their environment”. The author looks at common ways to carry out a content analysis and then suggests some methodological improvements. This type of content analysis does not seem appropriate for this study.
"Web Content Management: Content Analysis." University of British Colombia. 7 Aug. 2008 <http://www.cms.ubc.ca/support/selfhelptools/contentanalysis.html>.
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Describes the goal of a content analysis as depicting all the pages/files that make up a website in order to assess the state of the website, identify areas needing revisions, organize the content, and maintain it.
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This site provides a spreadsheet with for conducting a content analysis, as well as explains the process by which it should take place.
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It appears that the main function of this site is to index website, which will be time consuming and not very productive in this analysis.
