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UN OCHA aims to make it easier for responders to share critical operational data during humanitarian crises. The Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) initiative has two components: community agreement on data standards, and a technical infrastructure for automating simple peer-to-peer data exchange.
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WHAT IS THE HUMANITARIAN NEED?
Current data for planning and decision support is hard to find during a crisis.
Data becomes fragmented and isolated in individual partners’ systems.
Prior attempts that focused on building centralised databases or standardised forms have had limited success.
WHAT IS THE INNOVATIVE SOLUTION?
This is primarily a process innovation for relief coordination and support services, involving a new, decentralised, consensus-based approach for collecting and sharing data across a network of humanitarian partners.
Innovation Phases Description:
Form a working group to lead the standards effort, with broader outreach to all members of the humanitarian community through mailing lists and other collaboration channels.
Deploy a technical team to prototype and implement the agreed standards and technical infrastructure in up to two small-scale field pilots.
Coordinate these groups (working group, technical team and broader community) as they work iteratively towards a consensus version 1.0 release of the HXL standards and recommendations.
WHAT ARE THE EXPECTED OUTCOMES?
Make better data available to support crisis-response planning and action.
Improve efficiency by reducing the manual work of collecting crisis data.
Allow each organisation to remain a custodian of its own data.
Build a long-lasting open data ecosystem that bridges the disaster-management and development cycles.
Open up humanitarian data to a wider group of actors, tapping into the potential of the crowd to support humanitarian response.
The HXL Working Group is proud to announce the alpha release of theHumanitarian Exchange Language (HXL). Inspired by social-media hashtags, HXL is a simple standard that adds hashtags to spreadsheet headers to make it easier to share and compare humanitarian data.
The members of the HXL Working Group have focused on stripping layer after layer of complexity from the proposed Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) standard, until we finally asked ourselves whether labelling information in shared data could be as simple as tagging topics is in social media posts.
Starting Work on the Humanitarian Exchange Language Initiative
10 Mar 2014
Thanks to support from the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, we have started building standards for sharing data among the groups involved in crisis response.
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