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As we reported<\/a> last week, groups of hackers from all around the world got together this weekend to find ways to help Haiti and to create tools that can be used in future disasters. One of these groups, in collaboration with Project EPIC, developed a new syntax<\/a> to make it easier for computers to read tweets from areas that are affected by a disaster. If adopted widely, this new hashtag based syntax will make it easier to automatically extract data about locations or that status of a road or person.<\/p>\nSponsor<\/em> A vast number of status updates from Haiti were posted on Twitter in the last few days. As Chris Messina pointed out<\/a> in a discussion on the Activity Streams mailing list earlier today, the lack of standardized metadata means that we currently have little choice but to use stopgap mechanisms like this new hashtag-based syntax to syndicate this kind of information in a computer-readable form.<\/p>\n The new syntax is pretty easy to learn. Every tweet should contain at least one main tag like #need<\/em> [explain need], #offering<\/em> or #injured<\/em> [name]. You can find a full list of main tags here<\/a>. In addition, tweets can also have data tags like #name<\/em> [name], #loc<\/em> [location] or #contact<\/em> [email, phone etc.]. These tweets can also contain often used keywords that don’t need the hashtag sign like food<\/em>, supplies<\/em>, road<\/em>, hospital<\/em> or help<\/em>.<\/p>\n Here are some real-world examples of this new syntax being used<\/a> in Haiti:<\/p>\n We aren’t aware of any tools that read these tweets yet, but it’s easy to imagine a Google Maps mashup that can show the locations of where people need help.<\/p>\n If you would like to help the Project EPIC and Crisis Camp teams out, have a look at the group’s website<\/a>, which lists a number of ways to get involved in this project, ranging from translating tweets into the new hashtag format to building applications that can collect the data from these tweets.<\/p>\n Discuss<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
Main Tags<\/h2>\n
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How Does it Work<\/h2>\n
Examples<\/h2>\n
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