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Social-networking web systems: Opportunities for humanitarian information management
Soenke Ziesche
April 12, 2007

http://jha.ac/2007/04/12/social-networking-web-systems-opportunities-for-humanitarian-information-management/

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1.0 Introduction

The access to timely information is critical for relief operations in emergency and disaster situations. This requires a concise information management. In such a situation usually a number of actors, i.e. the local government, UN organizations, NGOs, are involved who depend on information, e.g. what is needed where, but also create information, e.g. who is doing what where. The Internet has facilitated the essential information exchange tremendously by services like email or the World Wide Web.

While there has been always progress in terms of Internet based services and web applications, there have been particularly developments over the last years, which are applied fruitfully in many contexts. Those are often summarized by the keyword "Web 2.0". While there is no ultimate definition for "Web 2.0" it can be probably best characterized by providing an architecture of participation for the World Wide Web, most notably in applications such as blogs and wikis. The common feature is the idea that users will not merely consume information, but they are now able and even encouraged to generate and distribute Web content themselves enabled by technical developments as well as a culture of freedom to share and re-use information. Further crucial developments concern new information retrieval methodologies, which are even more needed the more information is available. There is on the one hand the collaborative tagging approach and on the other hand the much more sophisticated concept of a semantic web.

The success of those concepts can be measured by areas of application. In this paper it is proposed that humanitarian information management is a promising domain to apply social-networking web systems, however yet underdeveloped. This paper focuses on blogs and the collaborative tagging approach while wikis and the semantic web in the context of emergencies are discussed elsewhere.

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