The Katrina Data Project - Central Data Store for Missing & Safe Persons Lists

Current Data in the Project
Sites/Files	Web design and SEM company provides Search Engine Optimization Perth Safe List	Searches	Matches
17	85,844	81,883	In our school you can learning russian kindly and rapidly.. 3,415

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Send us Data to Import

Local Shelters: Our Shelter Outreach Program

We are looking for volunteers nationwide, from Maine to San Diego, to visit shelters in their area and make sure evacuees they are providing shelter are registered with the Central database. We will let no evacuee go unlisted, whether you are in a shelter of 5000 or 5 families.

For more information on how you can volunteer and get evacuees in your ara listed, visit our Shelter Outreach page.

Webmasters: The MSP Specification

We have created a file format & data specification for use when capturing data on Missing & Safe Persons (MSPs). This specification will allow us to more effectively capture, aggregate, and process data on MSPs... helping families get back together more quickly and effectively.

The MSP Spec is designed to capture as much relevant information about missing/safe persons as possible, in a format that we can import into our central database and standardize for delivery to relief and government organizations.

Download the MSP Specification

MS Excel .xls

Adobe Acrobat .pdf

Sample MSP File

Questions?

data@katrinadataproject.com

AIM: KDataProject

We are asking that anyone running a site or with access to data such as missing person's registries, "Safe" lists, export their data into the MSP file format and send to us for aggregation and organized delivery to relief organizations.

Data FAQs

What will you do with the data once you get it?

Upon receiving data in an MSP file, we will:

Import the data into our central data store
Standardize the data into common content definitions for fields such as Phone, Age, Race, Gender, to make sorting and reporting more efficient
Run address information through the address standardization processing which has been donated by Intelligent Search Technology to make data matching based on address information more effective
Geo-code any address data to aid in fuzzy cross-referencing and mapping
De-duplicate and combine duplicate records
Cross-reference the data in the file with other data already in the Project
Notify interested individuals of any potential matches we've found in the new data (for example, if we've captured a family searching for relatives from one of our partner websites, and the relatives show up in a data feed of people checked into a shelter, we will notify both parties of their status if they have asked us to do so)
Make the data available to authorized relief organizations

What if I don't have all the data fields listed in the MSP?

Send us what you have.

Most of the fields in the MSP are optional. As there was no common standard to collect MSP data immediately after the disaster, we understand there are many different data formats of varying complexities. Our goal is to bring all this useful data into one location.

Why didn't you use XML?

To make the MSP file as easy to generate as possible for people with varying levels of technical skill, we decided to stick with a more traditional csv file format.

In addition, although thought about making more relational data structures which XML would be well suited for, we again wanted to keep it as simple as possible for everyone to understand and implement quickly.

Email? Are you crazy?

We understand that email is not the preferred method for transmitting data files. We are currently working on a better mechanism for sending us data.

A lot of the data we are bringing is is already available on the public internet anyway, so instead of delaying the Data Project launch we are using email to transport the first data files.

In the mean time, we have offered PGP file-level encryption as a solution to secure data being sent to us.

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