Free New Web Tool Tags Renewable Energy Content

Information is a key factor in making smart investment decisions regarding renewable energy. But accessing this information can be challenging. To help sort through the vast sea of data on renewable energy, a free new web tool is now available that gives website owners the ability to easily and accurately tag their online renewables-related content — in five different languages.

IRENA and the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) have collaborated to develop the ‘Renewables Tagger’, a sub-component of the existing Climate Tagger — overhauling the tool’s thesaurus content related to renewable energy concepts and terminologies, and adding a new technical feature allowing users to pre-select only the new tagging section of the thesaurus.

 A tool for purpose

“There is a real need for improving the way we find reliable and up-to-date renewable energy information. Technical solutions, such as search engine optimization and tagging software, have become essential in today’s world to push renewable energy knowledge to the next level,” says Henning Wuester, Director of IRENA’s Knowledge, Policy and Finance Centre. “IRENA’s knowledge platform, REsource, is the renewable energy gateway for experts around the world. Integrating the Renewables Tagger into REsource will present a huge benefit for users,” Wuester says.

The expert-vetted thesaurus is the “backbone” of the tagging tool and its most innovative feature. The Renewables Tagger is the only tagging tool that is tailored to the needs of users in the renewable energy sector, and is therefore much more precise in choosing relevant keywords compared to generic tagging tools. “The newly added renewable energy thesaurus, enhances the tool with over 2,700 sector specific definitions, synonyms and links,” explains Wuester.

“The biggest challenge of developing a tool such as the Renewables Tagger is that it cannot be done by just one organisation,” says Florian Bauer, Open Knowledge Director of REEEP. His team works with a group of 200 organisations to enhance the provision of high quality climate knowledge to different stakeholders, such as REN21, UNEP and the World Bank.

Further development

IRENA and REEEP aim to update and improve the thesaurus continuously and welcome experts and partners to join the initiative to further develop the tagger. The content pool’s functionality, which allows automatic linking to related content across a website, is one feature that is targeted for further development.

The flexibility of this open data and free tool, makes it useful for all kinds of different users. It has existing plugins for Wordpress, Drupal and other commonly used content management systems, allowing it to be easily adopted by knowledge providers. For more advanced users, the tagger has customisation options that are useful for bigger projects and organisations.

To learn more, download, or try a demo of the tagger, visit the Climate Tagger website.