When we designed the first secure collaboration platform for Sri Lankan peace stakeholders during the CFA using Groove Virtual Office (as part of the One Text process) a significant problem faced was searching for and indexing information. GVO didn’t have tags, so the taxonomy we determined had to work for everyone. This worked better for those experienced in searching for information online as opposed to those who were new to PCs.
During the course of operations, we used a single alpha version of a tool designed to make sense out of information, the Semantic Navigator by ISX Corporation. It never really got off the ground – for starters, it was massively power and memory hungry, ruling it out for anything other than machines with the highest spec.
Peacebuilding lends itself to a semantic database. It is in theory and praxis interlinked with a range of issues, actors, processes and places. The traditional keyword based search is incredibly frustrating to manage information related to a peace process, simply because keyword based search engines, including Google, cannot and do not understand the nature of the information they index.
If you aren’t familiar with the concept of semantic search, it is, in a nutshell, the exploration and harnessing of the meaning of words to provide more effective search results. There is a growing perception that current keyword- and link-based technologies used by most of the large and even not-so-large search companies like Google, Yahoo, and even Ask.com, have outgrown their usefulness because they don’t understand anything about the actual words used in a query. A word like “cold” could mean many things, from the physical state of an environment to having the sniffles.
Cognition’s technology is built on over 20 years of research into the semantics of the English language, and “understands” four million semantic contexts (word meanings that create the context for interpreting other related words), over 536,000 word senses (word and phrase meanings), 75,000 concept classes (or synonym classes of word meanings), 7,500 nodes in the technology’s ontology or classification scheme, and 506,000 word stems (roots of words) for the English language.
Cognition Semantics
Check out this video to see just how amazing Cognition’s capabilities are. The narration is stilted and goes for the heavy sell, but it’s easy to see the potential of this technology for complex, long-term, multi-stakeholder processes such as peacebuilding and conflict transformation.
After years of honing search skills using Boolean operators on Google, it’s strangely tremendously difficult at first to use natural language search operators. The results for questions like “What are the ethnic groups in Sri Lanka?” give you results from Wikipedia that keenly approximate a search operation using boolean operators on Google.
Another interesting demonstration of Cognition’s technology can be found in this (US) case law index.
The application of Cognition’s natural language processing technology to an online peace library would be astounding, with the one obvious limitation being that it would be limited to content in English. Still, this is the future of web search and indexing.
An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance.
I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002.
I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents.
Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs.
Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts.
I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.
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