RE: Introductions

Hello Eric,

Thanks for your introduction. I joined the group to observe conversations and hoping to learn from it. I am afraid that I will not be making any concrete contributions to the group.  I personally have very minimal experience in the area. I teach information systems courses at the University of North Florida. For senior project capstone course, I obtain projects from local non-profit organizations for my students. As most of the non-profit organizations are in the realm of human services, this group peaked my interest. I am looking forward to learning from the group on the problems in human services area and potential solutions that can be adopted.

Regards,
Karthik
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Karthikeyan Umapathy
Associate Professor
School of Computing
University of North Florida
3214 Mathews Building (15)
1 UNF Drive
Jacksonville, FL-32224
Call me at 904-620-1329
Visit me at http://www.karthikeyan.umapathy.com


From: eric@ejahn.net [mailto:eric@ejahn.net] On Behalf Of Eric Jahn
Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2014 1:08 PM
To: public-humanservices@w3.org
Subject: 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<http://alexandriaconsulting.com>