The Recovery 2.0 litmus test
Jeff Jarvis has been flogging an excellent idea for a couple of weeks: Recovery 2.0. Lots of people did lots of great things on the Net to help victims of Katrina. In fact, so many sites went up, particularly ones to help people find lost relatives, that there were too many places to look, which spurred a round of consolidation efforts. This is stuff the Web should be proud of. But Jeff’s point is that the distributed nature of the Web, so crucial to its strength, can also be a weakness. Recovery 2.0 — which is more a call to action than a plan of action — is his name for the need to better coordinate ahead of time.
How you think that coordination should happen says a lot about your view of the Web.
A Semantic Web approach would create an ontology of victims, relatives, disasters, relief efforts, locations, threats, supplies, routes, relief agencies, medical records, doctor appointment books, local bus schedules, and stock market data.
A Web 2.0 approach would create APIs among recovery services offered on the Web and wait for hackers to build something useful. Whatever the hackers create would include plotting something on Google Maps, a requirement for all Web 2.0 apps.
A microformats approach would spend a weekend coming up with a quick-and-dirty set of useful metadata, preferably modeled on Amazon.
The regulatory approach would ask the pharmaceutical, transportation and recording industries to come up with a set of guidelines for the distribution of relief supplies with the primary objective of making sure that they do not fall into the hands of terrorists.
(I kid but I think Recovery 2.0 is a terrific idea.) [Tags: recovery JeffJarvis semanticweb microformats]
Categories: Uncategorized dw
“A Semantic Web approach would create an ontology of …”
All of the approaches would create such an ontology–most of them would be proprietary to the systems developed, and implicit within those systems.
The Semantic Web approach might also include trying to express the ontology in an explicit, machine readable format that could be reused by different systems.
(OK, this is comment-try #3–see if your blog takes it this time.)
Social tagging + RSS feeds + the “Googles” of the world + (eventually) microformats. Ontologies and/or APIs at this scale are more like wishful thinking… But I wouldn’t discard the regulatory approach so fast – with the risk of sounding reactionary… :)
I actually blogged about usage of RFID tags for human capital recovery and mAnagement. An rfid tag for about 12 cents can be activated with all that info about a person !! Name! Address, blood type and what not. Thus making “connection” more purvasive. All we would need is a hive of pcs hooked up to a rfid reader via usb ports.
Jus give everyone who is scrambling out a braclet with a tag embedded. Deploy rfid intelligence s/w on laptops that a connectted thru wifi and then as one moves around the pc auto pings the rfid tag, picks up the signal, moves it across to a central db that via a wifi connection. Add on some sort of soa style interface web pages , then everyone (worldwide) one can see where their loved ones are !!
Online co-ordination strategies
I don’t usually repost from other blogs, but this was too funny to pass over. David Weinberger was talking about Recovery 2.0 and the ways to co-ordinate to help those involved in Hurricane Katrina. Here’s what he had to say: How you think that coordin…