Disaster Information Task Force (DITF)

Mission

The DITF is a subgroup of the Web and TV Interest Group, whose goal is to discuss use cases and requirements that specifications would have to satisfy to realize smarter emergency information services on various kind of devices with the Web as its platform and with telecom and broadcasting as its infrastructure.

Background

Natural disasters—quakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados, floods, heavy snowfalls, landslides, volcanos, etc—and manmade disasters—like nuclear power plant accidents and Ground Zero—can wreck communities and natural resources - yet effective action of people prompted by emergency information can do much to mitigate catastrophic effects.

The combination of the Internet and broadcasting is a proven solution that ensure users to obtain emergency information in all areas including center of disasters where telecom infrastructures are severely damaged; the Internet autonomously purges the network of that area, and reconfigures its network topology to keep other area working while broadcasting keeps delivering information to the center area.

As for service layer, the Web seems to get started to take new social roles in such emergency situations especially with smart phones and slate devices. For example, social network services enable users to help each other effectively and efficiently. Researches on recent actual disaster responses show that new use cases based on the combination of SNS and traditional TV services are emerging rapidly in bottom-up style because the severe situation of affected areas made people use every tool available and develop new ideas on how to combine them to survive. So now is the good timing to gather, clarify and classify existing use cases and to develop better use cases from the viewpoint of smarter integration of Web and TV.

Emergency Management System

Disaster information services can be considered as a part of emergency management system that consist of four phases: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.

For details see Wikipedia:Emergency Management.

Basic Information of the Task Force's work

End Date: 31 January 2012
Confidentiality: Public (F2F & Telcos are Members Only)
Initial Moderator(s): Yosuke Funahashi (Tomo-Digi)
Meeting Schedule: weekly 1h telcos (TBD)

Scope

The goal of the DITF will be to identify use cases and requirements of emergency information services and devices for the response phase—including EWS and Emergency Warning System—and the recovery phases, and gaps in the existing technologies to address these use cases and requirements that specifications need to address in order to cover such gaps.

On the other hand, the DITF will not deal with the mitigation and preparedness phases.

Success Criteria

We have succeeded if we can provide a report and a requirement document that can be used by one (or more) WG for technical work on one or more specifications, or that can be used by one (or more) other IG to foster its (or their) activities.

Deliverables

The DITF will do the following:

Refine the use cases and requirements at:

http://www.w3.org/2011/webtv/wiki/Dessaster_Information_TF_Requirements

Identity clear gaps in the Open Web platform, and categorize important use cases/requirements into the following categories:

Ignore
It's resolved already
Liaison with others groups
New requirements for existing Working Group
Requires new working group
We know it needs to go into a W3C working group we just don't know where
We don't know where it goes and need more research

Propose WG or IG charter(s) to W3C Director for recommendation track work fulfilling some (or all) of those requirements.

Timeline

The DITF should deliver the above listed deliverables by the end date mentioned in this charter. Detailed timeline is available below:

~4 months for the TF. During this period the TF should debate and prepare a document presenting the deliverable mentioned above.
~1 month to present the result to the IG and reach consensus inside the IG.

Dependencies

The DITF will work with the eGov IG to identify possible requirements overlaps and cooperative way to deal with them.

Communication

This Task Force primarily conducts its technical work on the public mailing list at

public-web-and-tv@w3.org (archive).

TF emails should be labelled accordingly, by prefixing the email subject with the TF identifier "[DITF]". See W3C mailing list and archive usage guidelines.

There is also a member-only list to be used for administrative purposes at

member-web-and-tv@w3.org (archive).

The moderator maintains the Task Force page on the public Wiki, with the help of the Task Force participants if needed.

Participation

Participation in this Task Force's telephone conferences and f2f meetings is open to W3C Members and Invited Experts. However, all the public mailing list subscribers can participate in the Task Force discussion on the list.

To keep track of Task Force participation, all the participants should register his/her name and affiliation on the Task Force Wike at:

http://www.w3.org/2011/webtv/wiki/DITF_Participants

Note.

Even if you sent a statement of interest the public list, it would be appreciated if you could add your name/affiliation to the Task Force Wiki yourself. This is a way for us to confirm that the wiki is working as expected.
In order to be a Task Force participant (and to edit the wiki yourself), you need to be an official IG participant, as explained at: