1. Crisis Interop. Workshop on
Missing Person Data
Chamindra de Silva
ISCRAM 2011
May 10th 2011, Portugal

2. Workshop Agenda
 Introduction to Interop Workshop – Chamindra de Silva
 The Importance of Missing Person data exchange - Tim Schwartz
 Brief Introduction to PFIF and interop test session - Ka-Ping Yee
 Brief intro to participating Systems
 National Library of Medicine People Locator - Greg
Miernicki/Glenn Pearson (National Library of Medicine)
 Sahana Eden - Dominic König (Sahana Eden/AidIQ)
 Google Person Finder - Ka-Ping Yee (Google Crisis Response)
 ICRC Family Links
 Interop testing for PFIF test case scenario 1 starts - Ka-Ping Yee
 PFIF standards discussion and feedback for next versions

3. Driving Problem
 Disaster by definition is that which exceeds the
capacity of local emergency services
 Multiple repositories of information arise rise
during disaster due to multiple reasons
 Unavailability of appropriate systems
 Trust and relationship with organization
 Capacity of organization to respond
 Spontaneously out of frustration on progress
 Essential systems inter-operate for holistic and
better response

4. Purpose of Interop Standards
 Objective in Crisis Response
 Bring about effective information exchange during
crisis to prevent siloed repositories that is of less
value to response
 Outcomes if done successfully

Better efficiency in finding missing people
especially in the critical 72 hours
 Less time wasted do data re-entry
 Better collaboration between relief agencies

5. Why we need crisis interop workshops?
 There are a lot of emerging standards in the
crisis response domain
 Even when mature, the implementations of the
standards can be immature
 Data exchange standards are not used
frequently and only during a crisis event
Interop workshops is a preparedness activity that
provide a readiness between systems for data
exchange during a crisis

6. Interop Workshops itself won't
 Resolve intro-organizational legal and
trust issues in sharing data
However it will
 Help better encourage relationships and
contact points between organizations
 Help develop and enhance standards
when gaps exist

7. Crisis Information Exchange Areas
Information exchange Standards
Problem Area
Person Data PFIF, vCARD, EDXL-
TEP/TEC, FOAF
Alerting CAP, TWML, CWML
Hospital Availability EDXL-HAVE
Geographic Information GeoRSS, KML, GML,
Systems WFS, WMS
Data Syncronization FeedSync, Tablecast,
S3XML

8. Interop Mechanisms
 Interop using Open Standard (OS)
 Interop using Proprietary Standard (PS)
 Interop through intermediary system
using standards (IS)
 Custom mutually agreed web service
(CWS)
 Database level data exchange (DB)

9. Approach
 Focus on one coordination problem
 Missing Person Data Exchange
 Decision on Standards to be tested
 PFIF
 Prioritized test cases are based on real crisis
response scenarios
 Testing and validation of data exchange
 Outcome
 Fixes/hacks to compatibility issues
 A interop compatibility report

10. This is the inaugural session...
 This session will probably have more
emphasis on the mechanisms for interop
testing crisis data
 We will be having more session to cover
the remaining areas of missing person and
other crisis data interop
 Thanks for your participation and support
of this goal!