Feasibility of Information Interoperability in the Humanitarian Domain

Given the rise of humanitarian crises in the recent years, and adoption of multiple data sharing platforms in offline and online environments, it is increasingly challenging to collect, organize, clean, integrate, and analyze data in the humanitarian domain. On the other side, computer science has built efficient technologies to store, integrate and analyze structured data, however, their role in the humanitarian domain is yet to be shown. We present a case of how structured data technology, specifically Linked Open Data from the Semantic Web area, can be applied for information interoperability in the humanitarian domain. We present the domain-specific challenges, description of the technology adoption via an example of real world adoption of the Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) ontology, and describe the lessons from that to build the case of why, how and which components of technologies can be effective for information organization and interoperability in the humanitarian domain.