People Finder Interchange Format

Last updated
PFIF
(People Finder Interchange Format)
Initial release2005-09-04
Latest release
1.4
(2012-05-29)
Extended from XML
Standard PFIF 1.4
Open format?Yes

People Finder Interchange Format (PFIF) is a widely used open data standard for information about missing or displaced people. PFIF was designed to enable information sharing among governments, relief organizations, and other survivor registries to help people find and contact their family and friends after a disaster.

Contents

Overview

PFIF is extended from XML. It consists of person records, which contain identifying information about a person, and note records, which contain comments and updates on the status and location of a person. Each note is attached to one person. PFIF defines the set of fields in these records and an XML-based format to store or transfer them. PFIF XML records can be embedded in Atom feeds or RSS feeds.

PFIF allows different repositories of missing person data to exchange and aggregate their records. Every record has a unique identifier, which indicates the domain name of the original repository where the record was created. The unique record identifier is preserved as the record is copied from one repository to another. For example, any repository that receives a copy of a given person can publish a note attached to that person, and even as the note and person are copied to other repositories, they remain traceable to their respective original sources.

History

Within three days after the 2001 September 11 attacks, people were using over 25 different online forums and survivor registries to report and check on their family and friends. [1] One of the first and largest of these was the survivor registry at safe.millennium.berkeley.edu, which was created by graduate students Ka-Ping Yee and Miriam Walker and hosted on the Millennium computer cluster at UC Berkeley. [2] [3] To reduce the confusion caused by the proliferation of different websites, the Berkeley survivor registry began collecting data from several of the other major sites into one searchable database. [4] Because the information was formatted differently from site to site, each site required manual effort and custom programming to download and incorporate its data.

After Hurricane Katrina displaced hundreds of thousands of people in 2005, online survivor registries again appeared on many different websites. A large volunteer effort called the Katrina PeopleFinder Project worked to gather and manually re-enter this information into one searchable database provided by Salesforce.com. An organizer of the project, David Geilhufe, put out a call for technical help to create a data standard that would enable survivor registries to aggregate and share information with each other via automated means. [5] Working with Katrina volunteers Kieran Lal and Jonathan Plax and the CiviCRM team, Yee drafted the first specification for People Finder Interchange Format, [6] which was released on September 4, 2005 as PFIF 1.0. [7] PFIF 1.1, with some small corrections, was released on September 5. [8] The Salesforce.com database added support for PFIF; Yahoo! [9] and Google [10] also launched searchable databases of Katrina survivors that exchanged information using PFIF.

The next major use of PFIF occurred after the 2010 Haiti earthquake when Google launched Google Person Finder, which used a data model based on PFIF and exchanged data with CNN, the New York Times, the National Library of Medicine, and other survivor registries using PFIF. However, PFIF 1.1 had made US-specific assumptions that were not applicable to Haiti. Released on January 26, 2010, PFIF 1.2 added fields for a person's home country and international postal code, and fields for sex, age, date of birth, status, and links between duplicate records for the same person. [11]

PFIF 1.3, released in March 2011, addressed the privacy of personal information by adding a field to specify an expiry date on each person record and setting out requirements for data deletion. PFIF 1.3 also moved away from the US-specific assumption of a first and last name by adding one field for a person's full name. [12]

PFIF 1.4, released in May 2012, renamed the name fields to "given_name" and "last_name", added a field for alternate names, added a field for linking to personal profiles on other websites, and added support for multiple photos per person. [13]

Implementations

The following websites and software projects implement PFIF:

Related Research Articles

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a nonprofit consortium that works on the development, convergence, and adoption of open standards for cybersecurity, blockchain, Internet of things (IoT), emergency management, cloud computing, legal data exchange, energy, content technologies, and other areas.

GEDCOM is an open de facto specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogy software. GEDCOM was developed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an aid to genealogical research.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core, but may also support additional representations.

XBRL Exchange format for business information

XBRL is a freely available and global framework for exchanging business information. XBRL allows the expression of semantic meaning commonly required in business reporting. The language is XML-based and uses the XML syntax and related XML technologies such as XML Schema, XLink, XPath, and Namespaces. One use of XBRL is to define and exchange financial information, such as a financial statement. The XBRL Specification is developed and published by XBRL International, Inc. (XII).

A metadata registry is a central location in an organization where metadata definitions are stored and maintained in a controlled method.

A representation term is a word, or a combination of words, that semantically represent the data type of a data element. A representation term is commonly referred to as a class word by those familiar with data dictionaries. ISO/IEC 11179-5:2005 defines representation term as a designation of an instance of a representation class As used in ISO/IEC 11179, the representation term is that part of a data element name that provides a semantic pointer to the underlying data type. A Representation class is a class of representations. This representation class provides a way to classify or group data elements.

In metadata, a data element definition is a human readable phrase or sentence associated with a data element within a data dictionary that describes the meaning or semantics of a data element.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project was set up in early September, 2005 in response to the dozens of groups collecting "lost and safe" lists for people affected by Hurricane Katrina. It provided a virtual messaging center using skype as well as creating "a uniform standard for collecting, compiling, data-entering", and "searching information on people affected by Hurricane Katrina".

Content Repository API for Java (JCR) is a specification for a Java platform application programming interface (API) to access content repositories in a uniform manner. The content repositories are used in content management systems to keep the content data and also the metadata used in content management systems (CMS) such as versioning metadata. The specification was developed under the Java Community Process as JSR-170, and as JSR-283. The main Java package is javax.jcr.

WHOIS is a query and response protocol that is widely used for querying databases that store the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block or an autonomous system, but is also used for a wider range of other information. The protocol stores and delivers database content in a human-readable format. The current iteration of the WHOIS protocol was drafted by the Internet Society, and is documented in RFC 3912.

Geospatial metadata is a type of metadata applicable to geographic data and information. Such objects may be stored in a geographic information system (GIS) or may simply be documents, data-sets, images or other objects, services, or related items that exist in some other native environment but whose features may be appropriate to describe in a (geographic) metadata catalog.

David Webber

David R.R. Webber is an Information technologist specializing in applications of XML, ebXML and EDI to standards-based information exchanges. He is a senior member of the ACM since 2007. David Webber is one of the originators of the ebXML initiative for global electronic business via the internet. He is holder of two U.S. Patents for electronic information exchange transformation and those patents are now cited widely by 37 other patents. David Webber has implemented several unique groundbreaking computer solutions in his career including the world's first airport gate scheduling system , the SeeMail email client for MCIMail written in Prolog, the patented GoXML system for XMLGlobal, the ShroudIt obfuscation system for LNK Corp, and the VisualScript tool for Smartdraw Inc.

Metadata Data about data

Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:

A survivor registry is a list of survivors of a disaster. This assists families and acquaintances in re-establishing contact, after they have been separated by the disruption caused by the disaster.

Plazi is a Swiss-based international non-profit association supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital bio-taxonomic literature. Plazi is cofounder of the Biodiversity Literature Repository and is maintaining this digital taxonomic literature repository at Zenodo to provide access to FAIR data converted from taxonomic publications using the TreatmentBank service, enhances submitted taxonomic treatments by creating a version in the XML format Taxpub, and educates about the importance of maintaining open access to scientific discourse and data. It is a contributor to the evolving e-taxonomy in the field of Biodiversity Informatics.

Google Person Finder Open source registry and message board

Google Person Finder is an open source web application that provides a registry and message board for survivors, family, and loved ones affected by a natural disaster to post and search for information about each other's status and whereabouts. It was created by volunteer Google engineers in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

Data Format Description Language, published as an Open Grid Forum Proposed Recommendation in January 2011, is a modeling language for describing general text and binary data in a standard way. A DFDL model or schema allows any text or binary data to be read from its native format and to be presented as an instance of an information set.. The same DFDL schema also allows data to be taken from an instance of an information set and written out to its native format.

Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language, commonly known as e-business XML, or ebXML as it is typically referred to, is a family of XML based standards sponsored by OASIS and UN/CEFACT whose mission is to provide an open, XML-based infrastructure that enables the global use of electronic business information in an interoperable, secure, and consistent manner by all trading partners.

ISO/IEC 19788Information technology – Learning, education and training – Metadata for learning resources is a multi-part standard prepared by subcommittee SC36 of the Joint Technical Committee ISO/IEC JTC1, Information Technology for Learning, Education and Training. This committee was created to deal with the consequences of substantial overlap in areas of standardization done at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission.

References

  1. ↑ "safe.millennium.berkeley.edu, archived on September 14, 2001 at 22:05:53". September 11 Web Archive Collection. Library of Congress. Archived from the original on 2001-09-14.
  2. ↑ Robert Sanders (September 12, 2001). "UC Berkeley professor, students, create Web site to help public know if loved ones are safe following today's terrorist attacks" (Press release). Berkeley, California: University of California, Berkeley.
  3. ↑ Lisa Harrington, ed. (October 2001), "eGrad Electronic Newsletter: Volume I, Number 2 (October 2001)" (PDF), EGrad Electronic Newsletter, University of California, Berkeley, Graduate Division Publications Office, I (2), archived from the original (PDF) on July 20, 2011, retrieved May 15, 2011.
  4. ↑ "safe.millennium.berkeley.edu/stats.php, archived on September 15, 2001 at 20:56:15". September 11 Web Archive Collection. Library of Congress. Archived from the original on 2001-09-15.
  5. ↑ David Geilhufe (October 1, 2005). "Personal history of the Katrina PeopleFinder Project PART I".
  6. ↑ Kieran Lal. "A personal history of the effort to find the survivors of Hurricane Katrina". Archived from the original on October 9, 2006.
  7. ↑ Ka-Ping Yee; Kieran Lal; Jonathan Plax (September 4, 2005). "PFIF 1.0 Specification" . Retrieved May 15, 2011.
  8. ↑ Ka-Ping Yee; Kieran Lal; Jonathan Plax (September 5, 2005). "PFIF 1.1 Specification" . Retrieved May 15, 2011.
  9. ↑ "Yahoo! Katrina People Finder". Lifehacker. September 7, 2005. Retrieved May 15, 2011.
  10. ↑ Bret Taylor (September 12, 2005). "Two new Katrina search tools" . Retrieved May 15, 2011.
  11. ↑ Ka-Ping Yee (January 26, 2010). "PFIF 1.2 Specification" . Retrieved May 15, 2011.
  12. ↑ Ka-Ping Yee (March 7, 2011). "PFIF 1.3 Specification" . Retrieved May 15, 2011.
  13. ↑ Ka-Ping Yee (May 29, 2012). "PFIF 1.4 Specification" . Retrieved June 29, 2012.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.