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Upload Tool for Person Finder

Submitted by Alice Bonhomme-Biais on May 26, 2011 - 12:24
Revision #29ForkRecommend a Solution

  • What is Person Finder?
  • Suggested Problem to solve: Some organizations may have list of missing people in basic format such as spreadsheet. These organizations may not have the tech resources to write a tool themselves to upload these names to PF. So having a simple tool they can download, maybe change a few parameters in a config file, and then run to upload their data to PF, would be very useful.

Recommended Solutions: 
Batch Uploader for People Finder
PersonFinder Upload tool (stand alone)
Example: 
An organization has a list of missing people they want to post on Person Finder, the list is too big to be entered manually, but they do not have a person to write a script to call the Person API. They could benefit from a tool which will read their CSV and send it to PersonFinder API.
Constraints: 
  • User of this tool will have to Request an API Key to be able to use the tool.
  • This API Key should be protected in the tool to make sure it is not visible to other users
  • A Key is linked to a PersonFinder instance and a domain name (which is used as a prefix of the record key sent to Person Finder), so the tool should take these arguments as a parameter or config file.
Extra Credit: 
  1. Before adding a record to Person Finder, the tool could use the search API to return any existing record with the same name and ask user if this is the same person.

    • If this is not the same person, then add this record to Person Finder 
    • If this is the same person, add a note instead of a Record 
Similar Projects and Resources: 
  • Person Finder API documentaton: http://code.google.com/p/googlepersonfinder/wiki/DataAPI 
  • For questions:
  • Test Person Finder instance for Rhok: http://rhok.googlepersonfinder.appspot.com/
  • This instance does not require key for the search or read API.
  • API keys:
    • we created 4 API keys to use on the Rhok instance.
    • All keys have read/search/write access. 
    • Each key is associated to a domain name in order to send some Write operations to PF API. For example, if key K is associated to domain rhok1.com, then all records sent to PF with this key will have to contain an ID starting with rhok1.com. For example <pfif:person_record_id>rhok1.com/person.4040</pfif:person_record_id>
    • Below are the 4 keys and their associated domain
    1. punsOMMYMAI27tkr (rhok1.com)
    2. bG9b17sbMo3DK9LU (rhok2.com)
    3. 6rETQHFF7DDUMyXW (rhok3.com)
    4. soNQ67BhLRP0tIvP (rhok4.com)    
Next Steps and Sustainability: 
  • Open Source Tool
  • Good Documentation for user to use it

Comments

I am happy to help people use the PF API, but I will not be able to lead the project, so if someone wants to step up and lead the effort, it would be great.

I will be on IRC channel #personfinder to provide guidance and support for PersonFinder.


If several locations work on this, this is fine: they can have different approach to this tool.

Just make sure each location uses a different API key, that will be easier for testing!


Alice Bonhomme-Biais Jun 03, 2011

We will be starting on this from Hartford rhok. What are you guys up to?
Nyi Htet Jun 04, 2011

Great! the best is to join the IRC channel #personfinder where some participants are discussing what they do.
Alice Bonhomme-Biais Jun 04, 2011

People Finder is an excellent idea to take "roll call" within a community that experienced a natural disaster. It would be great to count people or even the injured without to many issues. I wanted to comment on who would be actually tracking and updating the names of people who live in the community: the county, city/town/village, country, chamber of commerce in an area, library, police stations, etc. This system would create jobs and benefit every community.   

julie_malone Nov 01, 2011

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