Kevin Railsback

Kevin Railsback
Katrina People Finder - please help

As an IT guy in California, I thought there wasn't much that I could do other than donate money to help with the relief efforts. Reading BoingBoing today I learned about an excellent project where folks from anywhere who have a bit of technical knowhow can help out with the effort to help people find their missing loved ones.

The data in various sites where folks are posting to try to find their friends and relatives who were separated by Katrina is quite a mess. Since the data is so unstructured, doing meaningful searches and matchups is very difficult. I'm helping out with the Katrina PeopleFinder Project, which is taking these unstructured data sources and putting the various postings and info into a structured database to help folks find each other. Right now it's at the database building level - the public searchable interface is in the works but not completed yet. The most important thing is to get as many of the disparate sources of data consolidated into a well-structured database.

From Jon Lebkowsky:

Here's a project we're working on to gather Katrina data. Donated money? Please donate a little time. Join the Katrina PeopleFinder Project. It's easy. All you need is an internet connection and the ability to copy data into a form.

After Katrina, many friends and family members have been separated and left with no clear way to find each other. Hundreds of internet web sites are gathering hundreds, and probably thousands, of entries about missing persons or persons who want to let others know they're okay.

The problem is: the data on these sites has no particular form or structure. So it's almost impossible for people to search or match things up. Plus there are dozens of sites - making it hard for a person seeking lost loved ones to search them all.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project NEEDS YOUR HELP to enter data about missing and found people from various online sources. We're requesting as little as an hour of your time. All you need to do is help read unstructured posts about missing or found persons, and then add the relevant data to a database through a simple online form.