Person finder
Encyclopedia
Google Person Finder is an open source
web application
that provides a registry and message board for survivors, family, and loved ones affected by a natural disaster
to post and search for information about each other's status and whereabouts. It was created by volunteer Google
engineers in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake
.
Google Person Finder is written in Python
and hosted on Google App Engine
. Its database and application programming interface
are based on the People Finder Interchange Format
(PFIF) developed in 2005 for the Katrina PeopleFinder Project
.
, Google product manager Prem Ramaswami asked a supervisor about his company's response, and was encouraged to gather engineers from the company to develop software. Google engineer Ka-Ping Yee led a team of Google volunteers to build a registry of missing persons for Haiti, based on the design of the September 11 survivor registry and on the PFIF
data standard. Google also worked with the United States Department of State
to create a gadget version of Google Person Finder, which was embedded on the State Department's website and other websites. Google Person Finder launched in English, French, and Haitian Creole on January 15, less than three days after the earthquake.
As with previous response efforts to the September 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina
, many different organizations created sites with lists of missing persons, leading to a concern that information would be scattered across incompatible information silo
s. Using PFIF
, Google Person Finder aggregated the data from many of these sites, including registries run by CNN
and by the New York Times.
Three weeks after the earthquake, Ramaswami and other engineers visited Haiti to learn more about crisis response and asked company founders Sergey Brin
and Larry Page
to authorize a permanent Google Crisis Response
team.
, Google also set up a Picasa
account to allow people to submit photos of the name lists posted in emergency shelters, to be manually transcribed and entered into Google Person Finder.
Noteworthy deployments of Google Person Finder include:
The system was tracking 202,400 names as of March 15, 2011 and more than 600,000 as of April 4, 2011.
; sites such as blogs and narrative accounts that are not compatible are reviewed by volunteers who key missing person information in PFIF format. The software widget
used for directly entering information has two buttons, "I'm looking for someone" and "I have information about someone", and can be embedded directly onto other web pages.
In 2011 there were several reports of malicious false death reports on the system.
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
web application
Web application
A web application is an application that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is coded in a browser-supported language and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.Web applications are...
that provides a registry and message board for survivors, family, and loved ones affected by a natural disaster
Natural disaster
A natural disaster is the effect of a natural hazard . It leads to financial, environmental or human losses...
to post and search for information about each other's status and whereabouts. It was created by volunteer Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
engineers in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake
2010 Haiti earthquake
The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake, with an epicentre near the town of Léogâne, approximately west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. The earthquake occurred at 16:53 local time on Tuesday, 12 January 2010.By 24 January, at least 52 aftershocks...
.
Google Person Finder is written in Python
Python (programming language)
Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
and hosted on Google App Engine
Google App Engine
Google App Engine is a platform as a service cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. It virtualizes applications across multiple servers,...
. Its database and application programming interface
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
are based on the People Finder Interchange Format
People Finder Interchange Format
People Finder Interchange Format is a widely used open data standard for information about missing or displaced people. PFIF was designed to enable information sharing among governments, relief organizations, and other survivor registries to help people find and contact their family and friends...
(PFIF) developed in 2005 for the Katrina PeopleFinder Project
Katrina PeopleFinder Project
The Katrina PeopleFinder Project was set up in early September, 2005 in response to the dozens of groups collecting "lost and safe" lists for people affected by Hurricane Katrina....
.
History
Immediately after the 2010 Haiti earthquake2010 Haiti earthquake
The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake, with an epicentre near the town of Léogâne, approximately west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. The earthquake occurred at 16:53 local time on Tuesday, 12 January 2010.By 24 January, at least 52 aftershocks...
, Google product manager Prem Ramaswami asked a supervisor about his company's response, and was encouraged to gather engineers from the company to develop software. Google engineer Ka-Ping Yee led a team of Google volunteers to build a registry of missing persons for Haiti, based on the design of the September 11 survivor registry and on the PFIF
People Finder Interchange Format
People Finder Interchange Format is a widely used open data standard for information about missing or displaced people. PFIF was designed to enable information sharing among governments, relief organizations, and other survivor registries to help people find and contact their family and friends...
data standard. Google also worked with the United States Department of State
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State , is the United States federal executive department responsible for international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries...
to create a gadget version of Google Person Finder, which was embedded on the State Department's website and other websites. Google Person Finder launched in English, French, and Haitian Creole on January 15, less than three days after the earthquake.
As with previous response efforts to the September 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...
, many different organizations created sites with lists of missing persons, leading to a concern that information would be scattered across incompatible information silo
Information silo
An information silo is a management system incapable of reciprocal operation with other, related management systems. A bank's management system, for example, is considered a silo if it cannot exchange information with other related systems within its own organization, or with the management systems...
s. Using PFIF
People Finder Interchange Format
People Finder Interchange Format is a widely used open data standard for information about missing or displaced people. PFIF was designed to enable information sharing among governments, relief organizations, and other survivor registries to help people find and contact their family and friends...
, Google Person Finder aggregated the data from many of these sites, including registries run by CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...
and by the New York Times.
Three weeks after the earthquake, Ramaswami and other engineers visited Haiti to learn more about crisis response and asked company founders Sergey Brin
Sergey Brin
Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin is a Russian-born American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who, with Larry Page, co-founded Google, one of the largest internet companies. , his personal wealth is estimated to be $16.7 billion....
and Larry Page
Larry Page
Lawrence "Larry" Page is an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who, with Sergey Brin, is best known as the co-founder of Google. As of April 4, 2011, he is also the chief executive of Google, as announced on January 20, 2011...
to authorize a permanent Google Crisis Response
Google Crisis Response
Google Crisis Response is a team within Google.org that "seeks to make critical information more accessible around natural disasters and humanitarian crises"...
team.
Deployment
Google Person Finder is typically embedded in a multilingual Crisis Response page on Google's site, which also contains various other disaster tools such as satellite photographs, shelter locations, road conditions, and power outage information. For the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami
The 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tohoku, also known as the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, or the Great East Japan Earthquake, was a magnitude 9.0 undersea megathrust earthquake off the coast of Japan that occurred at 14:46 JST on Friday, 11 March 2011, with the epicenter approximately east...
, Google also set up a Picasa
Picasa
Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by Idealab in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my...
account to allow people to submit photos of the name lists posted in emergency shelters, to be manually transcribed and entered into Google Person Finder.
Noteworthy deployments of Google Person Finder include:
- January 2010, 2010 Haiti earthquake2010 Haiti earthquakeThe 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake, with an epicentre near the town of Léogâne, approximately west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. The earthquake occurred at 16:53 local time on Tuesday, 12 January 2010.By 24 January, at least 52 aftershocks...
(complete within 72 hours) - February 2010, 2010 Chile earthquake2010 Chile earthquakeThe 2010 Chile earthquake occurred off the coast of central Chile on Saturday, 27 February 2010, at 03:34 local time , having a magnitude of 8.8 on the moment magnitude scale, with intense shaking lasting for about three minutes. It ranks as the sixth largest earthquake ever to be recorded by a...
(live within one day) - July 2010, 2010 Pakistan floods2010 Pakistan floodsThe 2010 Pakistan floods began in late July 2010, resulting from heavy monsoon rains in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan regions of Pakistan and affected the Indus River basin. Approximately one-fifth of Pakistan's total land area was underwater, approximately...
(considered a failure because people in the affected area did not have Internet access) - February 2011, February 2011 Christchurch earthquake (live within 3 hours)
- March 2011, 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunamiThe 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tohoku, also known as the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, or the Great East Japan Earthquake, was a magnitude 9.0 undersea megathrust earthquake off the coast of Japan that occurred at 14:46 JST on Friday, 11 March 2011, with the epicenter approximately east...
(live within 1 hour) - October 2011, 2011 Van earthquake2011 Van earthquakeThe Van earthquake was a destructive magnitude 7.1 Mw earthquake that struck eastern Turkey near the city of Van on Sunday, 23 October 2011 at 13.41 local time. It occurred at a shallow depth of 20 km , causing heavy shaking across much of eastern Turkey and lighter tremors across neighboring parts...
(live within 1 hour)
The system was tracking 202,400 names as of March 15, 2011 and more than 600,000 as of April 4, 2011.
Details
Sites that adopt PFIF may interconnect with each other by exporting and transmitting data or allowing their site to be scrapedWeb scraping
Web scraping is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites...
; sites such as blogs and narrative accounts that are not compatible are reviewed by volunteers who key missing person information in PFIF format. The software widget
Software widget
A software widget is a generic type of software application comprising portable code intended for one or more different software platforms. The term often implies that either the application, user interface, or both, are light, meaning relatively simple and easy to use, as exemplified by a desk...
used for directly entering information has two buttons, "I'm looking for someone" and "I have information about someone", and can be embedded directly onto other web pages.
In 2011 there were several reports of malicious false death reports on the system.
External links
- Open source project site, Google Person Finder
- haiticrisis.appspot.com, Google Person Finder, 2010 Haiti earthquake2010 Haiti earthquakeThe 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake, with an epicentre near the town of Léogâne, approximately west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. The earthquake occurred at 16:53 local time on Tuesday, 12 January 2010.By 24 January, at least 52 aftershocks...
- chilepersonfinder.appspot.com, Google Person Finder, 2010 Chile earthquake2010 Chile earthquakeThe 2010 Chile earthquake occurred off the coast of central Chile on Saturday, 27 February 2010, at 03:34 local time , having a magnitude of 8.8 on the moment magnitude scale, with intense shaking lasting for about three minutes. It ranks as the sixth largest earthquake ever to be recorded by a...
- japan.person-finder.appspot.com, Google Person Finder, 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami
- turkey-2011.googlepersonfinder.appspot.com, Google Person Finder, 2011 Turkey earthquake