Minutes of call on September 25, 2013

Participants:

• Eva Blomqvist - Linköping Uni & CNR
• Joseph Pollack - IOS@ERCIS, Münster DE
• Thomas Vandieken - Fraunhofer IAO, Stuttgart GER
• Hemant Purohit - Kno.e.sis Center, US
• Renato Iannella - Semantic Identity, AU
• Carsten Kessler – Hunter College – CUNY, NYC
• Bart van Leeuwen - netage.nl ( 2nd hat Profesional Fire Fighter Amsterdam-Amstelland )
• Tomi Kauppinen – Aalto University, Finland
• Mark Prutsalis - Sahana Software Foundation, US

Agenda:

Formalities

• transcribing telcons in Google doc(s), copy over to group wiki after call
• Queuing Q/A
• Use chat to interrupt

How to get organizations on board?

• practitioners often don’t know what they want/need
• often don’t see that they have an interoperability problem, more interested in end products
• Bart will try to get some people from the Dutch community on board: bart, bert & Ilse ?
• Carsten: UN OCHA
• Other practitioner contacts to involve (each person tries to use their contacts):
  • Eva: companies in Sweden: VSL AB (crisis training company, also develops training software), and Saab (large software dev. company who does a lot in security and crisis management, e.g. this), I will also contact MSB (who has a current project on national crisis coordination in Sweden)
  • Joseph will leverage his contacts from France, Norway, and NL

What phases of the emergency do we focus on?

• Thomas: Several approaches exist to define a scope e.g. differentiate phases (relief, early recovery, reconstruction), focus on activities, specific decision makers or generic challenges like information fusion/integration, or how to judge the quality of an information from an external source?
• Bart: involve actors to learn where their information exchange problems are -> let this guide our focus
• Joseph: Collect such data that we already have from the group participants’ previous work.
• Bart: switch from a general fire to a disaster is difficult and nor clear, “grey area”; requires switch of tools, standards, etc.
• Think of general, small-scale incidents as special cases of large-scale disaster
• Joseph: review reports? -> political flavor, watered down
• Look for and share review papers of such reports
• Hemant: Focus on response phase?
• Bart: Look up work on existing standards, overlaps, conflicts, missing pieces; problems in day to day work are mostly based on inconsistent terminology
• Tomi: Look at existing datasets; Joseph: simulations? Datasets not so useful without the actual communication, which is often not included
• Carsten: when reviewing datasets, talk to the people who created them to figure out where the problems are

Brainstorm about existing standards (both SemWeb-based and other relevant to the field)

• Existing standards:
  • IEEE 802.11n
  • OASIS-CAP (Common Alerting Protocol)
  • OASIS-UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture)
  • WSDL and SOAP
  • W3C EIIF Review: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/eiif/wiki/EMInfoStdsReview
  • EDXL – Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) v1.1, an International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Recommendation x.1303 in 2007
  • Emergency Data eXchange Language (EDXL) – Distribution Element (DE) (2006)
  • EDXL – Resource Messaging (RM) (2009)
  • EDXL – Hospital Availability (HAVE) (2009)
  • EDXL – Situation Reporting (SitRep) work in progress
  • EDXL – Tracking of Emergency Patients (TEP), analysis phase
  • EDXL – Tracking of Emergency Clients (TEC), analysis phase
  • The CAP v1.2 Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) Profile v1.0 was approved as a Committee Specification in 2009. The Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency **Management Agency (FEMA) has decided to adopt an alerting protocol in line with CAP 1.1 as the standard for Public Alerts and Warning.
  • HXL - Humanitarian Exchange Language
  • Protection & Rescue Markup-Language (http://www.spider-federation.org/en/prml.html)
  • Management of a Crisis (http://observedchange.com/moac/ns/)
  • AMIGO http://www.hitech-projects.com/euprojects/amigo/index.htm, SOCRADES http://www.socrades.eu/Project/Presentation/default.html , SODIUM and HYDRA http://www.hydramiddleware.eu
  • AiDA XML (http://web.archive.org/web/20070724140917/home.bellanet.org/aida/schema_explained.htm)
  • CEFDA (Common Exchange Format for Development Activity information) (http://idmlinitiative.org/?page_id=87)
  • IATI Standard (http://iatistandard.org/)
  • http://www.firebrary.com Initiative to create a SKOS-XL representation of firedepartment related terminology based on the idea of: http://skybrary.areo ( Bart van Leeuwen )
  • Discussion doc from CrisisMappers community members to build R&D around identifying actionable info, extracting and organizing it-- useful here for modeling specific actionable information too
• Advances to the Standards:
  • Logistics?
  • Emergency Management simple terminology?
  • Social Media Inputs?
  • simple vocabularies ?

Brainstorm about use cases

Options for face to face meetings

• ICCM 2013 in Nairobi
• Organize a workshop at ISCRAM 2014
• Visual Analytics track at ISCRAM 2014
• http://iscram2014.ist.psu.edu/node/31
• Virtual seminar

Abstract for UNISDR 2015 Global Assessment Report

Action items

• Carsten: share this doc, send schedule for next calls
• All: talk to their local contacts (companies, other organizations) about joining the group