14.01.2016 - The United Nations holds an unmatched database of the world’s recent history.
In 2015, the Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) launched Unite Ideas (@UN_UniteIdeas), a crowdsourcing platform for open source technology solutions, to find new ways to turn this data into knowledge.
Through a series of data innovation challenges Unite Ideas invites academia, civil society, the private sector, and the public to develop solutions that will help the UN visualize new patterns in complex datasets. The challenges will provide help to UN personnel to automate the parsing of hundreds of pages of publications worldwide and to spot the latest research trends on sustainable development.
Ms. Atefeh Riazi, Chief Information Technology Officer, said of the Unite Ideas platform that it "invites the global community of data scientists to partner with the UN to harness the power of data analytics and visualization to uncover new knowledge about UN related topics."
The current #LinksSDGs challenge invites participants to use skills to build an automated tool that extracts from a set of UN publications all the messages that relate to the relationships between urban development (SDG 11), and all the other Sustainable Development Goals areas, and then visualize the results.
The deadline for this challenge is 20 January.
The winning solution will be announced on 15 February 2016. The best solution or solutions will be showcased on the UNDSD website and on the Unite Ideas website, and may be referenced in the 2016 Global Sustainable Development Report.
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UNRICs Related Links
The Brussels based United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe - UNRIC provides information on UN activities to the countries of the region. It also provides liaison with institutions of the European Union in the field of information. Its outreach activities extend to all segments of society and joint campaigns, projects and events are organized with partners including the EU, governments, the media, NGOs, schools and local authorities.
United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe (UNRIC Brussels)
Residence Palace, Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat 155, Block C2,7th and 8th floor, Brussels 1040, Belgium
Tel.: +32 2 788 8484 / Fax: 32 2 788 8485