RE: Introductions

Hi All,
I am very much looking forward to participating in this group. I am a social worker by training (MSSW ’84), and have focused on the implementation of information technology in the human services since my PhD in ’01. I worked in both the private and public sectors, small and large agencies, and my research continues to take place in those agencies. Specific to this project, I have worked on Homeless Management Information System and I&R implementations. Derek and I share many of the same interests as we both use systems methodologies to understand the “problem” and design solutions. This group is ideally targeted on one of the most vexing problems – data standardization and interoperability issues. As I discuss in some of my articles < http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wBhYzAoAAAAJ&hl=en >, knowledge derived from information is all dependent upon the underlying data. I believe too much of social science research has focused on knowledge generalization while ignoring the other two prerequisites.

To that end, not only would I like for us to develop some tools to address the data problem, I would also very much like to publish, publish, publish our work via white papers, blogs and journal articles.

Regards,
Dale
Editor in Chief, Journal of Technology in Human Services < http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/wths20/current#.U7QjJPldWuJ >
Board Secretary, husITa < http://www.husita.org/ >

Dale Fitch, PhD, MSSW
Assistant Professor
School of Social Work
University of Missouri
703 Clark Hall
Columbia, MO 65211-4470
fitchd@missouri.edu<mailto:fitchd@missouri.edu>
(573) 884-7405



From: eric@ejahn.net [mailto:eric@ejahn.net] On Behalf Of Eric Jahn
Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2014 12:08 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>