PositionPaper

From FOAF

EMERGENCY AND POVERTY RELIEF EXPERTFINDER

Abstract Emergency Relief Coordination Efforts are increasingly Internet based. In addition to systemic,structural, cultural, political and policy obstacles that inhibit the effective and seamless coordination ofemergency relief operations, there are some practical, technical limitations to the information andcommunication models that need to be overcome. In this introductory paper, we acknowledge suchproblems, but limit the discussion and scope of work to the technical domain, concentrating on thedevelopment of an embedded semantic framework that can be woven into the net and used by teams ofvolunteers to coordinate help and synch up with each other.

Assumption: Properly developed andapplied technology can increase transparency of information and improve information flow andcommunication, therefore, can have an impact on social behaviours, It is believed that once reliable andtrustworthy tools become available and people start to adopt them, new relationships based on trust andsharing of goals and resources will be facilitated. In this paper we propose that there are several ways that Expert-finder can be developed and appliedsuccessfully to foster communication and coordination among different, distributed teams duringemergency relief operations, irrespective of their affiliation and denomination, and take this firstworkshop call for papers as an opportunity to invite interested parties in the humanitarian technologycommunity to take part and collaborate in future effort to harmonise conceptual and semantic references as astep towards resolution of conflicts and imperfect communication flow.

Background In the last couple of years there have been world scale natural disasters of epic proportions. The tsunami of December 2005, hurricane Katrina, a massive earthquake in Pakistan, and the most recent Java Indonesiahumanitarian crisis, are some examples, but ongoing poverty and lack of access to economic resources areendemic, widespread and plague large sections of the world population. In recent years the emergence ofInternet based technology and telecommunication infrastructure has been welcomed by the humanitarianoperations community as a promise that the distribution of resource allocation and increase the speed andefficiency of operations could be facilitated by supporting the real time exchange of information ofemergency and poverty alleviation programmes In practice, however, the Internet is still largely used by themedia businesses to broadcast 'one way' communication (news and pictures) which ultimately promote theconcentration of donations and resources in the political hands of a few highly bureaucratic organisations,The web is not yet leveraged in its full potential as network to can provide transparency, informationverification and real time data support to help the coordination and optimization of emergency andpoverty relief operations by heterogeneous agents and on a distributed basis. It is believed that there are sufficient efforts and programs already in place at global level to help addressmany imbalances and inefficiencies in the flow of resources, but the lack of an efficient information andcommunication model is preventing optimization, accountability and ultimately 'efficiency' to take place andresult in effective synergy among all the resource providers..

1) What current research or applications relevant to the ExpertFinder idea are you pursuing? Given the launch of the ExpertFinder, which main aim is about defining vocabulary extensions andbest practices to annotate online resources with adequate semantic metadata to find experts onparticular topics, we see the initiative, properly developed and adapted to the HumanitarianOperations domain, to be a great opportunity highly suitable to be applied in the emergency andpoverty relief fields, by creating semantic structures that can enable organisations involved inthe humanitarian activities, to leverage the benefits delivered by Social Networking and SemanticWeb technologies. Some efforts have already started in that direction, with a few examples listed atthe end of this paper, but the lack of cohesion of purpose within the humanitarian community, as wellas the lack of a cohesive information model and ontology of reference for the field, is inhibiting newtechnology adoption in the sector, therefore it is preventing the reaping of the benefits from theadoption of new technologies, namely more accurate, transparent and efficient information in support of relief operations.

2) What future plans or vision do you share with ExpertFinder? In order to support the automation and harmonization of information of humanitarian field,it is necessary to overcome the semantic and conceptual gaps that distort and inhibitinformation flow, therefore create obstacles to communication among workers in the field. Itis believed that participation of the emergency relief community in the ExpertFinder initiativeis a step towards starting harmonization. Expertfinder initiative has the potential to beapplied very usefully in helping to harness the huge potential of the Internet as unlimitedpool of resources for humanitarian projects, by automating the aggregation and matchingof relief information thanks to the combined use of 'tagging' and matching functionality Byembedding tags of code into online resources, either ad hoc during emergencies and or asstandard components of humanitarian organizations' information infrastructures (dedicatedpages of online websites), humanitarian data indexes can be created and update in real time,and made available as information for operations management.

3) What practical obstacles or research challenges are to be overcome to make ExpertFinder visioncome real? There are innumerable problems that need to be addressed to achieve the vision of theInternet as an optimal medium for conveying disaster and emergency information. Although the root of theproblem is of political nature, against which mere technologists are powerless, a sound, open andtransparent information infrastructure can help boost human solidarity and promote a culture oftrust and collaboration at humanitarian level. Among the main challenges we identify: • The lack of an agreed 'universal' semantic standard for data exchange, sufficiently robust and flexibleto support different levels and degrees of adoption and customization by different agents withoutimpacting its validity and efficacy • Assuming an optimal data exchange format can be formalized, the difficulty in promoting acceptanceof innovation among the more conservative large organizations which effectively still hold controlover large portions of international resources. • Limitations in the ability to support data exchange while protecting privacy. • Need to create a validation and disclosure authorization mechanisms for the gathered data andinformationOnline Projects in support of emergency crises have recently adopted FOAF based protocols (seePFIF/SFIF below) yet it is believed that FOAF itself may not be suitable to support privacy and otherperson data in situations of emergency, and may require some modifications.

Current Scope

The purpose at this stage of our current project is therefore 1) evaluate the suitability of FOAF as a displaced person finding scheme during emergency, and provideFOAF modifications accordingly (or alternative schema) 2) evaluate the suitability of FOAF as a relief and emergency expert finder scheme

At this present, initial stage, the project scope is: evaluating the suitability of Expert-findermodel/schema to be used as part of an information protocol to be included in peer 2 peer networkarchitectures deployed in support of emergency and poverty relief operations, aimed to automate theidentification, communication, coordination, interlinking and harmonization of individuals, organisationsand public institutions via the use of online agents (humans and machines). Our working prototype that weintend to test the schema on is already in beta version, On www.p2paid.org Long term contribution: Ontology for Emergency In the long term, this work will contribute to theemergence of a public ontology for emergency and relief. Different organisations already adopt internallyagreed conceptual frameworks to define their ontology, but being these 'walled' representations of realities,fail to validate the first criteria for internet based, open and web based applications: They do not adhere toopen standards, as they are designed to work only as a function of a closed system. There challengestowards developing an open ontology for emergency and relief are enormous and of complex nature, and thelong term scope of our project intends to make a contribution and start an active community towards it.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Several open source initiatives have already been started over recent years thateither leverage the principles of semantic network above, or have identified the need for a semantic layer toensure robustness over open distributed networks such as the Internet.

PFIF/SFIF (people finder and shelter finder information schema)During Hurricane Katrina an RDF schema to match and export people data in xml format PFIF (seewww.zesty.ca/pfif ) was started. One of the authors, Peter Mika, thinks that although the initial schemaswere inadequate knowledge representations, given that they were created without planning and in a shorttime frame (2 hours), given proper planning FOAF can be modified successfully to meet people (andhumanitarian experts) finding needs, facilitating the reuse of existing components, e.g. social network orgeographic visualizations, smushers etc. and making such links available to humanitarian networks. Petersays ‘During Katrina Since the PFIF schema was given however (the data was already in PFIF), I firsttranslated the XML Schema to RDF with some minor cleanup in the process (getting rid of the most uglythings). This was done with XSLT. I then provided a bridge-vocabulary to FOAF. Basically, how certain PFIFproperties correspond to FOAF properties. http://prauw.cs.vu.nl:8080 /pfif/

’SAHANA.LKSahana open source team has developed different modules (2005) handling different situations ofemergency, and is releasing them free to download on the internet. Given the bazaar nature ofdevelopment, the highly distributed nature of the teams, and limited familiarity with semantic andknowledge engineering fields of the developers to date, little attention has been paid to semanticconsistency, causing system design flaws that pose a high risk in life critical situations and prevent thesystem from being optimized for data exchange. The developer teams have recently accepted theimportance of metadata, data import export, xml schemas and have finally accepted that Ontology isrelevant and important to ensure the robustness of Sahana modules. Semantic layer for Sahana has beenstarted by the author of this paper in August 2006 with various contributions to the discussion group andwiki (see Sahana wiki) and is currently being included in future stages of development and future releasesof the Sahana platform. www.sahana.lk

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