SELECTING SOURCES FOR ALERTS Emergency Alerting Policy Workshop 1-3 May, 2012 Montreal - Canada

Hello! I’m HEWSWEB! Humanitarian Early Warning Service Who we are: One stop shop for information about main natural hazards events Disseminate these information in a easy and understandable way mainly to users who want to know what’s ongoing Wannabe: Extent our audience to more technical people and decision makers. Become an hub that easily allows access to natural disaster information and share it using (web) standards.

HEWSWEB

HOW WE WORK Daily: We grab information from selected sources and technical partners We try to give to add to this information other related data in order to give an idea of the impact of the event. We prepare and store the information in a database We present and push the information on our website and social media (twitter, rss, CAP) Periodically: We prepare a short analysis about the natural disaster happened (when it involved under development countries) We prepare ad-hoc maps and infographics

EVERY DAY PROBLEMS Reliability of the information: Are the information that automatically we collect, reliable? Are the relationship within dataset valid? Technical issues: Are the systems that are serving this information, up and running? Are these systems using the data format they have used the day before?

HOW DO WE (TRY TO) AVOID PROBLEMS? Selecting reliable sources! (and when it is not possible, help valid sources to be more reliable!) A note: here we are supposing that a source agreed to share its information.

HOW DO WE SELECT SOURCES? A FORMULA (1 of 4) Content Parameters: C1) Is the source often updated? C2) Are the information detailed? (how much information from a source?) C3) Is the source used by media? (is it recognized as a valid source?) C4) Are data validated by the (local) governments? C5) What is past experience with this source? Technical Parameters: T1) Are available standard tools to share information (RSS, KML, XML, CAP, JSON) T2) If not, how easy is to grab information automatically from the website content? T3) How easy is to improve the data sharing? T4) Is the server downtime acceptable?

HOW DO WE SELECT SOURCES? A FORMULA (2 of 4) Content Parameters are more important than technical problems! As mentioned before, technical problem can be solved (in a way or another), while content MUST BE the best possible (following our parameters).

HOW DO WE SELECT SOURCES? A FORMULA (3 of 4) Each parameter (for both technical and content aspects) can get: 1 - bad 2 - good 3 - excellent

HOW DO WE SELECT SOURCES? A FORMULA (4 of 4) (3xC1 + 2xC2 + 3xC3 + 1xC4 + 1xC5)x6 + (3xT1 + 2xT2 + 2xT3 + 3xT4)x Very BadUnusableVery Good BadGood

SAMPLES USGS: Earthquake C1: 3 C2: 3 C3: 3 C4: 3 C5: 3 T1: 3 T2: 3 T3: 3 T4: 3 DARTMOUTH Observatory: Floods C1: 3 C2: 3 C3: 1 C4: 2 C5: 2 T1: 1 T2: 2 T3: 2 T4: TSR: Tropical Storms C1: 2 C2: 2 C3: 1 C4: 1 C5: 3 T1: 1 T2: 1 T3: 1 T4: Very BadUnusableVery Good BadGood