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| Humanitarian Exchange Language | |
|---|---|
| Name | Humanitarian Exchange Language |
| Abbreviation | HEL |
| Type | data interchange specification |
| Developer | OCHA |
| First published | 2003 |
| Latest release | 2018 |
| License | open |
Humanitarian Exchange Language is a standardized specification designed to facilitate information sharing among humanitarian actors during crises. It enables interoperable data exchange between United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, Médecins Sans Frontières, United Nations Children's Fund, and other World Food Programme partners to coordinate response, logistics, needs assessment, and situational awareness. The specification aligns with international protocols and is used by non-governmental organizations, United Nations agencies, regional organizations, and private-sector partners involved in disaster response.
Humanitarian Exchange Language provides a common structure for messages and datasets exchanged by organizations such as International Organization for Migration, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, National Disaster Management Authority (India), Federal Emergency Management Agency, and European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations. The format supports data types used by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, United Nations Development Programme, and International Committee of the Red Cross for needs assessment, beneficiary registration, and logistic tracking. It was developed to improve coordination among actors including Save the Children, Oxfam International, CARE International, Action Against Hunger, RedR UK, and Mercy Corps during responses to events like the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and the Syrian civil war.
The initiative emerged after large-scale responses such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 2003 Bam earthquake (Iran), when gaps in interoperability between United Nations agencies and NGOs became evident. Early pilots involved partnerships with European Commission Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations, United Kingdom Department for International Development, United States Agency for International Development, and the Global Logistics Cluster. The specification evolved through working groups convened by United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, with technical contributions from Open Data Institute, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, and academic partners including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Oxford, and Harvard University. Major revisions followed exercises such as Typhoon Haiyan response analyses and interoperability tests run alongside International Search and Rescue Advisory Group deployments.
The architecture borrows from established standards and aligns with specifications from World Wide Web Consortium, Internet Engineering Task Force, ISO 8601, and Dublin Core to ensure temporal, spatial, and metadata consistency. It defines schemas for entities used by Cluster Approach (humanitarian aid), such as shelter, water, sanitation, health, and food security, allowing integration with platforms maintained by Global Health Cluster, Logistics Cluster, and Protection Cluster. Data mapping relates to schemas from Common Operational Datasets, Humanitarian Data Exchange, and International Organization for Standardization standards, and accommodates geospatial references compatible with systems used by United Nations Satellite Centre and European Space Agency imagery products. Security and privacy considerations reference protocols supported by Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights guidance and interoperability profiles used by International Telecommunication Union.
Common applications include situation reports produced by United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, beneficiary registries maintained by International Rescue Committee, and supply chain tracking used by World Food Programme and International Committee of the Red Cross. It supports mapping workflows employed by Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and analysis pipelines used by UN Global Pulse and ACAPS for needs assessment. Other implementations integrate with health information systems like those of World Health Organization and vaccination campaign coordination managed by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Donor reporting formats used by European Commission and United States Agency for International Development recipients can be automated through HEL-compliant exchanges.
Governance is typically overseen by a steering group composed of representatives from United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, major NGOs such as Oxfam International and Save the Children, and donor agencies including United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and United States Agency for International Development. Adoption is encouraged by clusters coordinated by Global Logistics Cluster and policy units within United Nations humanitarian affairs. Certification initiatives and implementation guidelines have been produced in collaboration with Open Data Charter advocates and standards bodies like International Organization for Standardization and the World Wide Web Consortium.
Tooling ecosystem includes parsers, validators, and converters developed by ReliefWeb partners, engineers from Humanitarian Data Exchange, and open-source projects hosted by GitHub repositories maintained by organizations such as Field Ready, InfoAsAid, and Sahana Software Foundation. Implementations exist for platforms including DHIS2, KoBoToolbox, OpenStreetMap, and custom integrations with SAP-based logistics modules used by larger agencies. Testing harnesses and simulation exercises are run using cloud infrastructures like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform with continuous integration workflows implemented via Jenkins or Travis CI.
Critics point to uneven uptake among smaller NGOs and community-based organizations compared to large agencies like United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and World Food Programme, citing resource constraints similar to those encountered by Cluster Approach (humanitarian aid) initiatives. Interoperability challenges persist when mapping legacy systems from agencies such as Red Cross Society branches, and concerns about data privacy and protection reference incidents scrutinized by Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and watchdog reports from Human Rights Watch. Technical debt, competing standards advocated by groups like Open Geospatial Consortium, and the complexity of multi-stakeholder governance are recurrent themes in evaluations by International Rescue Committee and academic assessments from London School of Economics and Stanford University.
Category:Data interchange standards