Update: Missing Persons Data
There have been many heroic efforts ongoing around Haiti. One of them is the work being done by Tim Schwartz of HaitianQuake.com, Chen Li and the UC Irvine team, Andy Carvin and the PersonFinder group, and Google (among many others) to aggregate this data and put it in a standardized (PFIF) format for use by multiple organizations. Due to their work, there are now 17,000 more entries this morning in the correct format.
The aggregator is being run by Google at: http://haiticrisis.appspot.com
Most groups are collaborating on this, including the New York Times who quickly started a process to integrate their data in the right format.
Some groups are still not sharing their data (CNN iReport and the Red Cross at ICRC). This means a lot of manual labor has been needed to collect and integrate it into the system. For instance, Brian Zimmer has created a system for volunteers to go through CNN iReport data (parsed by Chen’s group) and put the data into Google by hand.
(Still waiting on information about the Miami Herald and Facebook missing persons data.)
Erik Hersman 12:57 pm on January 17, 2010 Permalink |
IF anyone has info on Facebook or Miami Herald data, please update.
Erik Hersman 1:57 pm on January 17, 2010 Permalink |
Good to see this Tweet:
@nytimes: We got our Haiti missing people data to Google yesterday. (thanks @jacqui) We can’t silo this info. CNN? http://nyti.ms/4KctdP
Erik Hersman 6:37 pm on January 17, 2010 Permalink |
Update: CNN’s iReport is currently standardizing data for sharing with Google