Draft chater of EITF

From Web and TV IG

Emergency Information Task Force (EITF)

Mission

The Emergency Information Task Force (EITF) is a subgroup of the Web and TV Interest Group. It’s goal is to discuss the use cases and requirements that specifications would need to satisfy to realize smarter emergency information services delivered on a variety of devices, with the Web as its platform and telecom and broadcasting as its infrastructure.

Background

Natural disasters such as quakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados, floods, heavy snowfalls, landslides, volcanic eruptions, etc., and man-made disasters such as nuclear power plant accidents and terrorist attacks can devastate communities and severely limit access to essential resources. However, when prompted by emergency information, those in the affected areas can quickly and effectively take necessary steps to mitigate many of the catastrophic effects.

The combination of the Internet and broadcasting is a proven solution that ensures users can obtain pertinent emergency information in affected regions, including the center of the disaster where telecom infrastructures may be severely damaged. The Internet autonomously purges the network of that area, and reconfigures its network topology to keep other areas connected, while broadcasting continues delivering information to the affected areas.

As for the service layer, the Web has taken on new and important social roles in emergency situations, especially in regard to the use of the Web by smart phones and slate devices. Social network services, for example, accessed by these devices now enable users to help one another effectively and efficiently.

Research on recent disaster responses in Japan and other locations has shown that new use cases based on the combination of SNS and traditional TV services are rapidly emerging from the bottom up. To survive in affected areas, people have needed to employ every tool available, and as more and more people shared their experiences or offered solutions new and clever ideas on how to effectively combine these tools surfaced. Given the recent surge in natural and man-made disasters, we will gather, clarify and classify existing use cases and develop better use cases for a smarter integration of Web and TV.

Emergency Management System

Emergency information services can be considered as an important 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 EITF 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 EITF 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 EITF will do the following:

  • Refine the use cases and requirements at:
http://www.w3.org/2011/webtv/wiki/Emergency_Information_TF_Requirements
  • Identity clear gaps in the Open Web platform, and categorize important use cases/requirements into the following categories:
  1. Ignore
  2. It's resolved already
  3. Liaison with others groups
  4. New requirements for existing Working Group
  5. Requires new working group
  6. We know it needs to go into a W3C working group we just don't know where
  7. 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 EITF 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 EITF will work with HTML WG to identify gaps in the existing technologies to address these use cases and requirements that specifications need to address in order to cover such gaps.
  • The EITF 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 "[EITF]". 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/EITF_Participants


Note.

  1. 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.
  2. 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: