All output documents can be downloaded from www.unjlc.org/mapcenter/unsdi.

This publication, consisting of data definitions, data collection standards and forms, and a template database to manage and store the data represents the culmination of over a year's work to determine information requirements from a wide variety of humanitarian logisticians and information management professionals. Most of you have contributed one way or another to that process and we are very grateful for your participation. Credit for the technical aspect of generating the schema goes to ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action) who have been of immense support over the last few months.

Though UNJLC is mandated to act as custodian of logistics data standards, ownership (and improvement) of these standards is of course a shared responsibility among the humanitarian community. We see today's publication as the beginning of a participative process to further refine them -all current and future UNJLC and partner field missions will implement the UNSDI-T standards and we hope you will do the same to the extent possible when planning logistics assessment and mapping projects. We were very encouraged to hear that a number of you have already done so with the 'draft' version 0. We will compile any constructive feedback you might have and continue integrating them into future versions. We fully expect that amendments will decrease in scope as we narrow down on an optimal structure over the next couple years -do bear with us over the first couple versions therefore! As our data standards converge on UNSDI-T we will more and more benefit from interoperable data, less data collection duplication and quicker turn-around time of ever more useful information products.

A number of UNSDI-T training modules have also been developed ranging from basic data collection methodology to more technical GIS SOPs for prospective UNJLC GIS staff, partners and any other interested parties. The basic modules will be integrated into up-coming training events and a GIS-specific programme is currently under discussion. More on this soon.

Finally, we would like to inform you that we are in the process of integrating logistics data in our possession into a UNSDI-T compliant repository and hope to offer a Web Mapping/Reporting and a data download service (WFS) in the near future. We would also welcome any discussion on how best to link this growing dataset with any pre-existing repository so as to quickly compile a seamless global coverage.

That's all for now. A few technical details and imminent development plans are appended to the end of this message, intended for those GIS and IM officers among you (or anyone with a penchant for data semantics).

Best regards to all-
UNJLC

**unless you have a general-audience comment for this mailing list, please send feedback to us at maps@unjlc.org**


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WHAT FOLLOWS IS INTENDED FOR GIS/IM OFFICERS OR ANYONE WITH TIME FOR THECHNICALITIES
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Technical comments and development plans

1. Assessment form development

The assessment forms on the website are intended for reference purpose and as a starting point. The permutations of possible fields to be included in emergency and non-emergency forms are endless and entirely context-specific. The aim was therefore to create a database structure with sufficient scope to accommodate the range of data collected. We are in discussion with a number of partners on the development of tools to speed up the generation of 'a la carte', UNSDI-T compliant assessment forms.

2. Data entry and management

At the other end of the data collection chain, a wizard-type data entry mask is in development to guide data input through the hierarchy of tables while automatically generating and carrying over any key values required for the RDBMS. This, to speed up the data integration process and improve integrity. You will find that all Feature Class tables and related Object tables reside below one Source table intended to store basic metadata records. The latter have a one-to-many relationship with features (ie: feature-level metadata). The hierarchical level at which some of the fields such as data quality should reside is still open for discussion and will become clearer with implementation experience.

3. Transport network modelling

The focus so far has been on capturing information requirements identified by logisticians as simply and comprehensively as possible. This process has revealed some interesting clues as to effective network modelling for more sophisticated information support tools in the humanitarian context. More to come on this and suggestions welcome as always.

4. Changes since V.0

The most significant change has been a switch from descriptive value domains to coded value domains. This was considered preferable in order to accommodate slight variations in semantics and eventually, translations to other languages. Any data that has been collected using v0 standards will therefore have to be reconverted. We apologise for the inconvenience but haven't found it too painful a process ourselves.

5. Open Source vs. Proprietary

As you will have noticed, our development has been ESRI-oriented. This is due to operational prerogatives and making sure that we had a deployable structure as quickly as possible. The database structure is however published as an XML schema which should allow for the generation of compatible databases on a number of platforms. Should this fail due to ESRI-specific standards lurking in the code, the schema has also been made available as simple Excel definition sheets (incidentally, generated by the X-Ray utility, developed by an ESRI employee and available on ESRI's downloadable scripts website!). The primary objective of this UNSDI-T is not to promote the adoption of any specific platform but to ensure that any implementation choice is at the very least semantically compatible with the wider community.