Citizen-Owned Knowledge: Poderopedia

Yesterday, on a brief search for "Web 3.0" resources at the PBS web site, I found an article about Poderopedia, Chile's own citizen owned public database of information about governmental, economic, and civic organizations and their relations and activities. Granted, I myself am not a long-studied student of the Spanish language. Some features available in the Google Chrome web browser serve to make it easier to browse those pages, with Google Translate's own machine translation into the English language. Shortly after reading the article at PBS.org, I cloned the Git repository of the project, denoted in the article.

The Poderopedia project was lent some start-up assistance in a grant by the Knight Foundation. It's one of the 10 recommended tools for journalists, denoted in an article at the Knight blog. Characteristically, Poderopedia is a unique Web 3.0 resource. In the information model of the project. as apparent in the schema ontology within the PoderVocabulary repository, Poderopedia extends FOAF and BIO with more detailed types of relation as well as some bibliographical information classes, in the model.

The Poderopedia web site extends an invitation for starting up a national Poderopedia chapter outside of Chile. Unfortunately, the form that the web site presents for the matter was not functioning correctly, earlier this morning.

There exists an opportunity to begin a Poderopedia chapter in the US. I propose that the work for that chapter can begin simply in developing a US edition of the Poderopedia ontology. That edition may call on public, governmental information resources such as available via LoC Thomas and other public information resources from the US federal government, as well as state information resources, and county and city resources. As with Poderopedia, the ontology would be developed as to provide structure to a citizen-owned database of public information about governmental, economic, and civic organizations, their relations, and their activities. Also as with Poderopedia, the database must be maintained with a clear legal disclaimer and an extensive privacy model - considering that it would be a citizen edited database, as well as citizen owned, and that the rights and responsibilities of the users of the system, as well as of any organization sponsoring the system, should both be well protected, in legal codes and in the information system itself.

On the farthest extent, I can imagine that the US Poderopedia chapter may even go so far as to develop a decentralized information system model, perhaps structured on technologies such as defined in CORBA, such that could then be implemented on mobile devices using (in instances of iOS mobile) a system such as AdORB or ]JacORB on Android. I recall that CORBA 2 presents some features for support for structured authentication protocols within the ORB protocol stack, and that it would present the opportunity for adding SSH into the system, also - moreover, that it would allow for transport over HTTP, the constantly popular hypertext transfer protocol from Web 1.0

As far as decentralized information systems models, there's LDAP for precedent - c.f Apache DS, in Java, and OpenLDAP not in Java - overall, providing perhaps something of a precedent, in regards to data replication, c.f pOpenLDAP's slurpd](http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin23/replication.html). One may note, also, the OpenLDAP Fortress framework, which provides a role-based access control (RBAC) model to the stack.

So, it would seem that the idea of developing and implementing a US edition of the Poderopedia ontologies, and related, public information resources online, that the project itself may pose something of a daunting challenge to any involved parties. Not to digress onto a tangent about maintenance of democratic principles. via facts-based citizen journalism - whether or not in light of oligarchical media ownership models - simply, if it may be a worthwhile project, "The proof is in the pudding," the pudding mix is on the shelf, and the chef is not too much for seeking attention to the bare details of pudding. Cheers!