USGS.gov can serve the whole world in all languages, part of a global knowledge network
USGS.gov can serve the whole world in all languages, part of a global knowledge network.
I want to know how long and deep a fault area needs to be to generate a magnitude 9 earthquake. I know that the moment and power depend on the area, roughness, pressure, temperature, materials, and faults, depth and forces – but that is not easily found on your website. You are USGS (geological survey) and do lots of things.
Your site site:usgs.gov shows 1.9 Million pages, but that means millions of links and too many pages to manually navigate.
Where is the interface so that ChatGPT or an AI tool like some future Grok can query what you have and I can ask my AI not have to use your old software and partial solutions. Your site does not know me, it does not ask me who I am. It does not know my interests. I and USGS share many interests, but there is no community, and the knowledge just sits there.
There are 5.4 Billion Internet users and another 2.8 Billion with no access to the web. But every person the planet (about 8.2 Billion) might at some time want to know very critical things about earthquakes or the things you guys know, but that cannot be found or asked from your static stuff on your site, in your reports (locked in pdfs, you databases (locked behind clumsy and unfamiliar query languages you all made up).
I know that USGS does not stand alone but works with other agencies on cross cutting and systemic issues. And it works at global scale with all countries (or ought to) on systemic, global and international things. There are 2 Billion kids in the world from 4-24 learning things for the first time. There are hundreds of written languages, and many hundreds more where only spoken and listening is possible.
You have resources, skills, knowledge, methods, software, algorithms, data, instruments, data streams — that are scattered and un-assisted.
You can do more, you ought to do more — to make the knowledge useful and impactful for every human, not just a few who can read English and USGS topics from universities and specialized backgrounds. It is possible.
Filed as (USGS.gov can serve the whole world in all languages, part of a global knowledge network)
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
