The conference report of the 2005 CMI/USIP conference recommending the establishment and launch of the Safety Information and Reporting Service is now available. The full report is in .pdf format, and an executive summary is provided in the full story.

The People Finder Interchange Format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PFIF) developed to aggregate information about people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, is in the process of being revised by a working group convened at the meeting that launched SIRS in Ste. Paul de Vence.

A discussion paper by Firoz Verjee, Research Associate, Institute for Crisis, Disaster & Risk Management, The George Washington University
fverjee@gwu.edu

July 31, 2005

"It is prudent to begin this paper by first answering the question, “Why does the world need a data model for humanitarian assistance applications of GIS?” As explained later in Section 2, GIS data models provide a template to reduce the barriers to using, and sharing, geospatial information. The proposed initiative to create a Humanitarian Data Model (or “HDM”) is intended to promote more effective GIS usage, data sharing, and system interoperability by organizations which provide humanitarian assistance – United Nations agencies, donor agencies, research institutes, consultants and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are all potential beneficiaries. The HDM, at a minimum, would provide a starting point for these organizations to build their internal GIS applications using a geodatabase design that “really works” and an application framework that allows those organizations to quickly become productive."

The OASIS standards body is contemplating adopting an XML schema called EDXL that we might want to investigate: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/17227/EDXL-DE_Spec_v1....