About Pangia
Pangia will provide a repository and discovery environment focused on the loss of our human and natural heritage resulting from the climate crisis. Currently in an exploratory phase of development, Pangia will initially focus on the following aspects of climate change: essential scientific data, anticipated cultural impacts, and expected social impacts that result from climate-related relocation or migration. When viewed through the lens of Pangia, all entries will appear with the global whole, providing an unprecedented ecosystem for research, teaching, discovery, and the enrichment of human capacity.
The Name
Pangia is a play on the geological term Pangaea, an ancient supercontinent that included all present-day continents in a single landmass. The i in Pangia stands for information and signifies its capacity to reconnect our world digitally—of being able to walk from one end of the earth to the other, metaphorically, without impedance.
How Pangia is Different
Pangia will offer an integrated, open, and trusted database for information that is built to be more current, collaborative, and comprehensive than the current data environment. It will:
- Speed research by creating an openly accessible discovery tool to document, cross-search, and link to large quantities of material—reports, videos, standards, blogs, datasets, and other previously inaccessible items.
- Build informed discourse by providing unique identifiers so that uncatalogued items may be easily cited and made part of scholarly, student, and lay discourse.
- Preserve content by enabling faculty and other interested parties to upload content and suggest links for inclusion. Where rights allow, Pangia will save copies to ensure access.
- Enrich content by making it possible to extract tabular data, graphs, charts, and other items within documents for export into other systems so that they can be further analyzed. Pangia will tag items so that they are easier to find. This additional metadata is made available via an API for others to harvest, embed, and otherwise use.
- Build collaboration and engagement by pointing back to original items on source websites, where possible. Pangia users can upload, comment, tag or, otherwise annotate records for free. Third parties can harvest metadata and links to present it on their websites, potentially spreading the material across hundreds of sites. Content contributed to Pangia remains the responsibility of the country, region, or organization of origin.
- Present and shape opinion by enabling individuals to create micro websites and publications that use these items.