HXL Status Update

[CJ Hendrix]

I wanted to provide a brief update on the status of the HXL project.  

Carsten Kessler has rejoined us on the project, and we are currently recruiting an additional web developer to assist as we move into the second phase of the project (I'll post the TOR separately).

In the first phase, we developed some draft versions of various components of the standard (some are draftier than others).  Those can be seen at http://hxl.humanitarianresponse.info.  We have spoken to many partners (primarily cluster leads) about the goals of the project and received a lot of input to and support for the idea. 

However, in trying to evaluate the standards for a given cluster, we have increasingly felt the need to have some sort of demonstration of how HXL solves the problem it is trying to address.  So for the second phase of the project, we have decided to focus on getting and end-to-end prototype of all system elements focused on a single information domain: the Humanitarian Profile (essentially data about the locations, origins, and status of affected people in a crisis).  

The shiny new system sketch (below and uploaded to the document repository), shows the basic elements of the system and who will use them.  This is what we plan to prototype over the next few months.  In the end, we should have a set of tools that shows how we can ingest a spreadsheet of unknown structure and use that to drive, in real time, various visualizations of humanitarian data (limited to humanitarian profile data for this prototype). 

I'm also happy to report that work has begun on one of the key elements of the system: two prototypes of the HXL translator, called the HXLator, was developed by a team of volunteers at a NASA-sponsored hackathon in April.  I'm not going to share the link here because it's very much a prototype at this point, but represents a clever new approach to how we can translate from the myriad spreadsheets in a crisis that have data which must be shared to complete the common operational picture.  The volunteer coders that worked on the project are still involved and we hope to move the tool forward quickly.  Many thanks to our volunteers and to colleagues at UNHCR and IFRC for providing us with test datasets to use during the hackathon.