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Humanity Road, Inc.'
Proposed by: Humanity Road, Inc.
Contact (Catherine Graham, Webmaster@humanityroad.org):
Best way and times to contact during RHoK 2.0 Dec 4/5 2010: email
We need a tool that would allow us to extract from Wikipedia into a Google Doc - the population centers for a defined area - such as City, District, Country. This would improve our speed of response on emerging events. (Don't forget Wikitravel and of course CrisisWiki for structured location data. SpikeUK)
Large magnitude disasters affecting broad geography: Pakistan Floods, Haiti Earthquake, Chile Earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Ike.
There is a need during any disaster to quickly identify the population centers most affected. In our disaster response online we are using many Google tools. We use Google maps, Google resource finder, Google Documents, Google Search. In the onset of a disaster, my team turns first to Wikipedia to identify and understand the local area impacted.
After the earthquake there were population centers that were isolated from communicating their need for help. Identifying concentrations of population in order to determine whether absence of data is due to communications outages or due to absence of population in the impacted area is a critical first step in search and rescue.
During the flooding in Pakistan, volunteers were inputting reports into the Ushahidi platform and needed to identify the District of a particular report when only the city name was provided. This resulted in many manual repeated actions to look up the city and district and enter it on a spreasheet to so that others would not need to look up the same information. Having this information pulled into a spreadsheet through an automated tool will reduce manual rework.
What else do they need to know? What constraints
Fields to pull into the Google doc need to be identified: Country, District, City, Population, GPS Coordinates are some fields. Description and Constraints (Wikipedia search) Query: Choose one: GPS, City Range: xxx Miles, from center Results: returned into a google doc spreadsheet: City name Population Geo Coordinates Languages Spoken Compartment name (ie. state, district, parish) Closest Airport Website
Extra Credit (Google map or yahoo map etc query)
Query tool that would allow us to return relevant GPS coordinates and other relevant information for a specific destination type, such as hospital, school, airport etc) and returns the results into an google doc spreadsheet Example: Query: Choose One GPS or City Search specific: (enter map component, i.e. airport college, school, hospital etc) Range: X Mile Radius from center Example Results: Known local Hospitals Returned results: Google doc Fields: GPS Location Hospital Name hospital street address Public Phone # Services: (i.e. Heliport)
Links to similar projects, background reading, research, designs, existing work, data standards etc.
The data will be reviewed, researched, verfied and edited but it needs to be stored in a format suitable for exportability into Sahana Eden Database or Google Resource finder.
How will this work be taken to real users, or further developed? Will this be an ongoing team? Is there a NGO/group that's sponsoring it as an ongoing project? Who/how/when? Humanity Road would use this tool in our event responses to improve our speed of response and increase our accuracy.
We are working in concert with Google and Sahana on this project to improve the speed, reliability and accuracy of hospital information during an emerging event. Sahana has a partner project submitted for this RHok Event to improve the interoperability of the data. Humanity Road is a 501c3 NGO whose core mission includes identifying this information in an emerging event. We will continue to work with Sahana, Google, Crisis mappers, Crisiscommons, Ushahidi and others in supporting and identifying ways to improve response times, and reduce duplication of effort in data management.
Seattle's input:
Blog update on January 15, 2011 http://textontechs.com/2011/01/rhok-follow-up-population-centers-in-disaster/
Data will reside within Sahana Eden, and be exported (Google Fusion Doc) for directed use by Humanity Road. Google Fusion Doc may have data limit parameters. The tool will help non-super users volunteering for Resource Management. Final product will reside on the Sahana database accompanied by the capability to extract specific hospital datasets.
The project needs presentation tools to help spontaneous volunteers work with the data. This includes criteria for data updates, to include the notes on impacts of infrastructure, operational impacts (damage, flood etc) of the hospitals query, developing the functional query for the populations center, and determining server space, and file formats for storing the data in open source format for all to access and use.
How you can Help: 1. Server space 2. DB specialist/developer to create query:finds objects (populations, host) within latitude and longitude radius. A query that finds “x” within radius of lat and long within the database 3. Support for a radius query to Sahana Eden
Our current project status:
1. Colin: talked with his Toronto – OSM folks about doing a OSM location hospital query 2. Heather/Cat/Pat: write a blog post and being outreach program 3. Terrance/Pat: will work on Sahana Eden component 4. Cat: will identify primary data fields 5. Colin/Pat/Terrance: share script 6. Pat: will start investigating the Final product- Sahana db, but with capability to have a hospital db can be pulled for a specifics. 7. Willow: Seattle team is on stand-by for the next steps.
We welcome any help you can provide