GeoRSS & Geonames for Philanthropy: "

I heard about Kiva.ORG in a BusinessWeek podcast. After visiting its website, I think there are few places where GeoRSS (in the RDF/A syntax) and Geonames can be used to enhance the site’s functionality.

Kiva.ORG Background

It’s a microfinance website for people in the developing countries. Its business model is in the intersection between peer-to-peer financing and philanthropy. The goal is to help developing country businesses to borrow small loans from a large group of Web users, so that they can avoid paying high interests to the banks.

For example, a person in Uganda can request a $500 loan and use it for buying and selling more poultry. One or more lenders (anyone on the Web) may decide to grant loans to that person in increments as tiny as $25. After few years, that person will pay back the loans to the lenders.

How GeoRSS and Geonames Can Help

I went to the website and discovered the site has a relative weak search and browsing interface. In particular, there is no way to group loan requests based on geographical locations (e.g., countries, cities and regions).

Took a look at individual loan pages. Each page actually has standard ways to describe location information — e.g., Location: Mbale, Uganda.

It should be relative easy to add GeoRSS points (in the RDF/A syntax) to describe these location information (an alternative maybe using Microformat Geo or W3C Geo). Once the location information is annotated, one can imagine building a map mashup to display loan requests in a geospatial perspective. One can also build search engines to support spatial queries such as ‘find me all loans with from Mbale’.

Since Kiva.ORG webmasters may not be GIS experts, it will be nice if we can find ways to automatically geocode location information and describe that using GeoRSS. This automatic geocoding procedure can be developed using Geonames’s webservices. Take a string ‘Mbale’ or ‘Uganda’, and send to Geonames’s search service. The procedure will get back JSON or XML description of the location, which include latitude and longitude. This will then be used to annotate the location information in a Kiva loan page.

Can you think of other ways to help Kiva.ORG to become more ‘geospatially intelligent’?
You can learn more about Kiva.ORG at its website and listen to this podcast.

Grim Outlook for Africa's Future: "Africa accounts for only a tiny percentage of the fossil fuel emissions that contribute to global warming, but the continent's poverty leaves it hard-pressed to deal with the coming catastrophic effects of that warming."

(Via Wired News: Technology.)

As a Nigerian and African (obviously!) this article strikes very close to home; especially the reality expressed below:

But even if countries stop polluting today, researchers argue the effects will be felt for decades to come, posing what the African Development Bank has singled out as possibly the greatest long-term threat to poverty eradication efforts on the continent. Some 770 million Africans — 63 percent — live in rural areas, and about 40 percent survive on less than a dollar a day. Most are small-scale farmers. Wood is their major source of fuel, and medicinal plants their main defense against disease. Many are already subject to recurring droughts, floods and soil degradation that can wipe out their livelihoods. Any long term changes in temperatures and rainfall could fundamentally alter the landscape in which they live and the production potential on which they depend.

October the 1st is an emotional day for many Nigerians, especially those of us in the Diaspora. Our country remains a paradox as the excerpts below attest:

The more popular view of Nigerians as a result of the proliferation of 419 scams (the mangled by-product of misdirected intellectual prowess and the boundless depths of greed -- which applies to perpetrators and victims alike).

The Nigerian SCO Connection "I AM MR. DARL MCBRIDE CURRENTLY SERVING AS THE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE SCO GROUP ..." [via Be Blogging]

Funny! But many a truth is told in jest (I think that's how the quote goes); this one is pretty damned poignant.

Unbeknownst to many, there are other views of Nigeria (unfortunately these aren't the norm).

The call for optimism by our president (he doesn't support or condone the 419 nonsense):

 

President Olusegun Obasanjo urged Nigerians to change their ways and be optimistic about the future as Nigeria marks its 43rd Independence anniversary.  Read on

[via Odili.net � this site desperately needs RSS!]

 

There is an increasing pool of key high-tech players of Nigerian decent (and nationality) making constructive impact on the high-tech industry (making it less lonely for myself and other Nigerians in the high-tech arena):

 

Dare Obasanjo is a member of Microsoft's WebData team, which among other things develops the components within the System.Xml and System.Data namespace of the .NET Framework, Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML), and Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC). More of Dare's writings on XML can be found on his Extreme XML column on MSDN.

 

Uche Ogbuji is a consultant and co-founder of Fourthought Inc., a consulting firm specializing in XML solutions for enterprise knowledge management applications. Fourthought develops 4Suite, the open source platform for XML middleware. Mr. Ogbuji is a Computer Engineer and writer born in Nigeria, living and working in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
Website: http://www.fourthought.com/

 

Philip Emeagwali, a computer scientist, is one of the fathers of the Internet and a trailblazer in petroleum extraction," as quoted by CNN. 

 

Philip leaves all Nigerians with this important message on this special day (key excerpt below):

"Our investments in education and technology will be our legacy to our children. They are investments that will bring the best out of the next generation of Nigerians and enable us to reach our potential as individuals, as communities, as a nation."

Happy Birthday dear motherland!