Link: Introducing HXL hashtags for humanitarian data

In my 16 years working with data standards, I’ve found that standards almost always ask for too much and end up getting little or nothing. If we asked for less, might we get more? Do data standards have to be tightly-managed and dirigiste, or could we learn from the success of hashtags and other simple, collaborative approaches?

The blog post linked above describes the approach we’re taking in the multi-agency Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) initiative to help improve data-sharing during humanitarian crises — please take a look and let us know what you think. You can also visit our HXL Showcase site to see interactive examples of how you can analyse and visualise examples of real humanitarian datasets with HXL tags added (the public-domain source code is available on GitHub).