The UK Environment Agency has selected IT services company SFW to implement a semantic-wiki-based knowledge management (KM) system to improve the flow of information about river restoration across Europe, according to a report from SearchDataManagement website.

The open source system will be completed in June and will belong to Restore, a partnership for river restoration in Europe comprising six fluvial organizations: the U.K. Environment Agency, River Restoration; Wetlands International and Dienst Landelijk Gebied in the Netherlands; the Finnish SYKE and Italian CIRF.

“The main problem the system will address is less the lack of river management knowledge as the lack of searchability,” said Antonia Scarr, the Restore project manager at the Environment Agency, quoted in the report. “Restore aims to help manage rivers so that we cope better with climate change.”

SFW is supplying a Web-based, semantic wiki system. Its imposition of structure through prescribed columns, its agile user-consultative development model, and transferability were the main factors behind the selection of SFW.

The knowledge management system is designed to compile and share information on around 500 river restoration projects throughout Europe. It will also be connecting project supporters and workers, including European government agencies, engineers, ecologists and planners, SearchDataManagement said.

The system is based on open source MediaWiki, running on a MySQL database. It will apply extensions which include Semantic MediaWiki, which is used to associate semantic data within the pages.

“This information can be queried allowing the wiki knowledge base to be properly exploited,” an SFW representative said. “The system also applies a Format Semantic MediaWiki extension for data entry and collaboration, and a Maps MediaWiki extension which permits geographic visualization.”

Recently, SFW announced that the company delivered the software to manage grant applications under Sport England's Inspired Facilities funding program.

The Inspired Facilities funding program distributes grants from a 50 million National Lottery fund to improve up to a thousand local sports clubs and facilities. The fund was launched in July by the Minister for Sport and the Olympics, Hugh Robertson MP.

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