Comments on: Proposal: New standards and tools for distributed online reporting

By: Robert Niles

Robert Niles — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 22:21:02 +0000

That’s an intersting effort, certainly, but more along a narrative model than the data-driven incident reporting process I’m talking about. But two models could, and should, work together.

By: Joe Pandolfo

Joe Pandolfo — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 21:31:16 +0000

The Independent Media Center website network <"http://www.indymedia.org/en/index.shtml"> has been fastgrowing (since inception at the renowned Seattle WTO protests), but in a structured way. Good model.

By: Brian Humphrey

Brian Humphrey — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 14:51:53 +0000

Robert, I applaud your grassroots effort to develop the tools necessary to gather and coordinate such information. I thought you might be interested in a parallel if not similar effort taking place among those of us in the public safety and service realm. Among the most promising tools for both senders and recipients of "emergency incident" information is the seminal Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), a data interchange standard for alerting and event notification applications. Some of our nation's best and brightest are working on this concept in earnest, and the Los Angeles Fire Department is but one of several noteworthy agencies supporting the implementation of CAP. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) adopted CAP 1.1 as a standard on 10/1/2005, and their Technical Committee welcomes participation by stakeholders and members of the public concerned with disaster management and response. I'd encourage anyone interested in learning more about CAP to visit Art Botterell's ever popular CAP Cookbook. While CAP may not directly solve the conundrum you mention, I do think that at the very least, the process that brought forth CAP might be of interest. Respectfully Yours in Safety and Service, Brian Humphrey Firefighter/Paramedic Public Information Officer Los Angeles Fire Department

By: Vish Iyer

Vish Iyer — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 17:22:10 +0000

Hello Robert,
I find this project very interesting. We have launched a craigslist style classifieds posting site, based on community involvement(www.citiposts.com). We are an xml based website, and make the contents available in RSS, wireless and audio formats. All of this is done automatically, using our translation engine.
Once a bunch of sites agree on a simple (but functional) XML format that works for all the sites that exchange information, I think we might already have the code to make this happen.

Please contact me if you would like further discussions.

Thanks
Vish
(vish[at]21stsolutions[dot]com)