Family Reunification During and after a disaster, there are many web sites about family reunification E.g., Yahoo has a list of web sites after Katrina Web: http://news.yahoo.com/katrinahelp Cached: katrinahelp.htm E.g., American Red Cross also has a list of sites about “contacting loved ones” Web: http://www.katrinasafe.com/Main.aspx Cached: redcross-lovedones.html

Existing Services You can submit a request for the Red Cross to find a person, using a form on their web site  The Red Cross will: manually look for the person, manually let you know: if they find them, and the person agrees that you can be told that they found them.   Pull-based model, not push, as web sites put up by individuals. Received information is never broadcast

New Red Cross Safe and Well Service WASHINGTON, Saturday, July 01, 2006 — A month into the 2006 hurricane season that began on June 1, the American Red Cross is launching the Safe and Well Website to provide families with a tool to exchange welfare information with loved ones and friends in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Web: http://www.redcross.org/pressrelease/0,1077,0_314_5469,00.html Cached: redcross-new-welfare.html Web site: https://disastersafe.redcross.org/

Heterogeneities

KatrinaSafe http://www.katrinasafe.com/Main.aspx

Yahoo! Katrina Message Boards http://boards.news.yahoo.com/boards/

Nola.com: Missing Persons http://www.nola.com/forums/searching/

Family Messages http://familymessages.org/

Public People Locator http://www.publicpeoplelocator.com/

MissingKids.com http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PageServlet?LanguageCountry=en_US&PageId=2077 Excel sheet: http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/katrina.xls Cached: katrina.xls

Conclusions Portal really necessary IT techniques (data integration, access web forms, data files, etc.) are really needed

Subscrption Interface System Architecture Search Interface Subscrption Interface Query Engine Centralized DB Data feed Wrapper to query DB behind forms Crawler to retrieve data from web site Module to take message postings Web sites with search forms Users who want to provide data Web sites with crawlable contents