Re: Raising some points of concern

Hi Gav

thanks for your observations. I can give you my own personal feelings in
reply, briefly below

I do not share your worries, in the sense that nothing has formally taken
place, just informal
'chats' among early contributors who are giving their inputs and sharing
ideas
  nothing indicative of a particular trend or direction, that I can see.

Could you please point out what is causing your concerns below? Our
statement is clear about plurality of views etc....

Nevertheless..... I look forward to your ideas on how to avoid the problems
that you raise below


> 1. Focus on US & Katrina - there seems to be a strong focus on
> Hurricane Katrina and US response to disasters in general.


I have not seen anything on this list that shows we are going to focus on an
event or geography, rather I think the effort is being designed deliberately
to avoid that happening
(at least thats what I hope. and made that clear in our objectives). The
fact that people bring in their own experiences and example is due to the
fact perhaps that Us folks are used to work with mailing lists, lwhile , in
Asia where I live, people don't work with mailing lists so much

2. There seem to be a lot of people with an IT background and
> relatively few with an operational knowledge of how emergency
> management works. What plans are there to get more people with hands-
> on knowledge of emergency management involved to balance discussions?


I think we are waiting to hear from the w3 members before we can put
together a formal 'plan'    In organizinng 'global'  projects, the emphasis
is to involve stakeholders from different geographies, languages, sections
of the community, backgrounds etc etc. We need an initial statement, and to
make public announcement inviting people to take part, and possibly may have
to do some ad hoc proactive promotion - we may have to 'go and get them'
actively recruiting participants, which given our extensive connections
should not be a problem.
Some contributions we may have to elicit offline, using more conventional
survey methods, like meeting people face to face and asking them what they
think
 Do you have ideas, suggestions, a plan in place that you may want to put
forward to start with? How you think we can ensure a balanced participation?


3. I'm getting a vibe that quite a few on this list want to go
> entirely with a distributed, individualistic approach to designing
> this ontology - letting two individuals connect to match needs etc,
> without actually considering any interaction with either emergency
> services, government agencies or non-governmental organisations.


Again, I am not sure how you get that vibe from. Personally in creating
ontology the approach is scientific and aimed to create a shared, factual
viewpoint as the basis of  common understanding.  We specifically use
'ontology engineering methods' to ensure that.

When it comes to collaborative ontology building, such methods are still
experimental, so in a way, we are working with something relatively new.

A good ontology can be used by human, as well as by machine, and can connect
two, three or n- number of agents. (if I understand you right)

But please be specific if anything that is being done or said is bringing a
'bias' that may have a negative impact on our goal, to create a knowledge
base that can be used as a reference in future systems development, then
please do say so on a case by case basis!

Look forward
cheers

Paola