Katrina's Missing Kids: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has established a database for missing children. The big question remains: how to search across all these databases. Google? MSN Search? Yahoo? We need your brains.
katrina, hurricane katrina katrinapeoplefinder
posted by Nancy White at 6:30 PM
6 Comments:
As a result of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of people within the United States and abroad have lost contact with their loved ones and want to find them. While we saw no less than 50 online solutions for the Katrina Recovery efforts.
The American Red Cross processes all the evacuees, and each evacuee’s information ends up in the ICRC Red Cross database which is used by federal, local and state authorities. This information *must* be centralized for the authorities to understand and account for who is and isn’t missing. Family News Network of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) administers and maintains the Hurricane Katrina database . It is in French, English and Spanish. We have heard from various reports it holds 75,000 names of the evacuees so far, and that number grows hourly. Missing people are also reported to the database.
Again, this information must be centralized so the officials, first responders, and federal agencies (HHS, Red Cross, FEMA, etc) have a clear understanding who is and is not missing. The first step is to find if the person you are trying to locate is in the database; the second step is if they’re not is to enter their information as you know it in the database so authorities can begin to locate that person.
We hope this helps you understand the absolute importance of the ICRC database to help find your person missing in this disaster.
It is linked right of Redcross.org
This will end up being THE database.
Anonymous, I agree, that at some point this ends up in a giant database. Some of the other efforts are working to "scrape" unstructured data out of other locations - people that may not be at Red Cross locations. The question that comes to me is how and when will these resources be searchable TOGETHER. And then how can the data be combined for the "mother of all DB's."
Lots of questions, and I wish I knew the answers.
Nancy:
What about this?
http://blog.social-source.com/2005/09/final-refugee-data-exchange-spec.html
Yup, Beth, that's the hope (that comes out of one of the projects I'm lending some energy towards.)
I think there is a short and long term question going forward.
1. How do we reconcile between different sources that already exist/don't use the format.
2. What do we do going forward so the next time we need this, it is ready to rock and roll?
There will never, hopefully, be a single place to post & search for the missing. Before thinking I'm insane, stop and think a minute ... there is a LOT of work placing thousands of data points into any central database. That time could be far better spent searching rather than combining.
I've spent over 4 hours just bookmarking the link sites; at least half of them have duplicate listings, but I don't want to *assume* anything, so I have a lot of sorting to do (but I've figured out a fairly quick way to do it, thankfully) before I can come up with a comphrehensive list of the sites available. I may be able to post them to my website, if I can get my ISP to remove the bandwidth limits that apply to all individual accounts. Otherwise I will have to simply attach a file to an e-mail for those volunteering to help search.
And search is what I plan to do, once I find out where/how to contact people. Most of those separated haven't much hope of doing a comprehensive search for those they're trying to find. Many of them aren't computer literate, even if they had unlimited access to the web and other nets. When I find where I can volunteer to do this search work, and exchange data back and forth, I'll try to post that info so maybe more people will be willing to volunteer. If 30,000 people volunteered to do one search per day, a whole buncha people would be found in a very short time.
Moi, thanks for your comment. Have you been in touch with the folks doing the search standards? You might want to hook up with them. It sounds like you have complementary ideas. (I tried to find your email on your blog to email this to you. Alas, could not find it!)
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