Knowledge brokers collaboration: Automated tagging tool to make finding climate compatible information easier

In an explosively growing online world, it is critical to make large independent databases more searchable. Tagging the information in individual documents is an excellent way to make them more accessible. But the actual process of tagging documents is both time-consuming and inconsistent when done manually. And there is often no consistent set of tags to cover a given field such as clean energy and climate compatible development.

The Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) and reegle, a unique clean energy information portal, are working with three partners (weADAPT, Eldis and OpenEI) on a project that aims to drastically improve the efficiency of tagging and categorizing clean energy documents with a new user interface.

Using reegle’s existing renewable energy, energy efficiency and climate compatible development thesaurus, the new application programming interface (API) will allow other portals, websites and individuals to submit documents and automatically obtain appropriate tags. In addition to recognizing individual words, the API can ‘understand’ the relationships between different concepts. The result is more meaningful tags that can be extracted from papers, articles and blogs at a click.

The other three parties, weADAPT, Eldis and OpenEI, will prepare their websites and community platforms to integrate this API, which will then be used to more effectively tag and categorize their online resources.

The project’s goals are to increase the efficiency, searchability, standardisation and consistency of web searches in the partners’ databases, and potentially other websites. It also aims to link research knowledge around climate change with online learning communities, and deepen the relationships between the four project partners in the hope of further collaboration. By catalysing the search process, decision-makers will be able to access more high-quality information on clean energy and climate compatible development. 

 Lead: Florian Bauer (REEEP/reegle, Vienna, Austria)

Project partners: weADAPT, Eldis, OpenEI