Introductions

Welcome to the new W3C Human Services Community!  Before we dive into
creating a charter, I just wanted to introduce myself, and encourage the
rest of our currently small membership to introduce themselves as well.  So
here's mine:

I'm Eric, and I've been working since around 2002 to harmonize human
services standards, mainly within the United States agency systems.  Over
the years, I've been surveying human services models and exchange
specifications, talking with other practitioners in the human services data
modeling field, and assisting the convergence of identified subdomains of
human services.

I've worked with health exchanges (yes, I see healthcare as a subset of
human services), homeless assistance systems, disaster response, and
information and referral systems.   Modeling in a platform independent way
seems to be the only path to achieving any sort of harmonization of a world
quickly changing technologies and globally dispersed efforts.

Personally, I have an interest in Linked Data technologies, and how
vocabularies represented for this format can be translated from general
UML/ER diagrams.  I see Linked Data (Open or not) as a practical and simple
way to share information, yet still requiring to purity and freedom of
platform independent models, like UML.

I'm eager to learn from you all, but more importantly, to come to a basic
democratic consensus on a universal way to represent human services
constructs.  It doesn't have to be perfect, but over time, I feel this
process will lead to a better result than any national or niche focus can
provide.  Mainly, because we'll make fewer assumptions.

Okay, who's next?

-Eric


Eric Jahn
Data Architect/IT Director
Alexandria Consulting LLC
St. Petersburg, Florida
727.537.9474
alexandriaconsulting.com