LEARN ABOUT CREATURES
(IN OUR OWN NEIGHBORHOODS)
this project is called LOCAL BIOLOGY (until we think of something better)
© 2009 Local Biology, a social business
A social business is owned by the people who directly benefit, and need its existence. We all benefit from the earth, and knowing about the earth, therefore, the earth owns Local Biology and we are simply noticing her, and how she created us.
It is by being a social business today that we can reach out to all people who want to understand the world they live in - the science, the spirit, the changing planet. We can reach around walls built by schools and other educational institutions, television, media, science, religion, language and country.
We know that we love and care about our Earth and in this we unite as this 'social business,' the business being that we are all working together to bring this knowledge together on this website and to other real projects in our towns — working with our own communities and, especially, friends.
Local Biology by Local Biology is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.localbiology.org.
More about Local Biology attribution
Spire (semantic prototypes -- information -- ecology -- the acronym is something related to these concepts)
This is a 'sticker' you can put on your observations in your comments. The little owl, if you click it, you will see that it takes you to a scary ugly code page. That stuff is 'RDF' -- it's a special markup language for saying, to computers that 'you' 'saw' 'something' 'here' 'on this day' -- turning internet information into sentences.
Semantic markup has great power (and great responsibility), but semantic eco-tagging seems beneficial for collecting citizen observations of invasive species as well as changing climatic conditions.
Observations show up on this
map
Spotter is a firefox plugin (tools > add-ons) which gives people who observe species the ability to create a semantically correct tag in comments and on web pages.
It's pretty easy to install it -- just add the plugin, and set up your location (tools > spotter options) -- they help you look up the scientific name related to your organism.
For Local Biology, I used my own user profile for my address.