Review Comment:
The paper provides an excellent comprehensive, objective and fair overview/report of the technical and application realms of semantic web to a concrete, high-impact, urgent and humanitarian need, thus showing the potential of semantic web to real-life issues that need to be addressed urgently. The paper is technically fair recognizing voids and the lack of further feedback for the fine-tuning of the vocabulary and recognizing limitations.
Thus the paper fits very well within the requirements of the journal. The technology that the paper describes indirectly benefits the principal beneficiaries (i.e. the “all”) thus fitting very well within the goals of the special issue as well. Additionally, the authors provide an excellent approach in offering a solution through the “requirements specification” approach, thus giving the paper an appropriate framework for this section. However, there are a few minor changes that must be done in order to have an even better piece of work and be suitable for publication in the journal. These changes suggested are in light of the multidisciplinary nature of the paper and the amount of space that the authors dedicated to non-technical issues. Thus I recommend the following changes to be made:
1. While it is well understood how the introduction of a vocabulary and tools will help administratively, the authors need to explain a little bit and provide an explicit connection to the ultimate beneficiary, the aid recipient. This could be done through an explicit example in a paragraph; i.e. what does a better “long term humanitarian operations” mean for the aid recipient? While this might seem obvious for the authors and some public, it is important to make it explicit in order for the article to be even more relevant for the special issue and its focus to the “all”. The authors have put an example on short-time issues (i.e. an ambulance that needs to find quickly a nearby hospital); I urge to provide an example of “long term humanitarian operations” in the context of the “all”. Alternatively, the authors could explicitly put an example on how this technology might have helped in something that “failed” in the absence of like technology.
2. While I’m sure the authors know otherwise, the paper seems to assume that the rise of a new technology itself is a sufficient condition for its success on its application to a real-life issue; however, as the authors have mentioned, various initiatives were not successful. There are social, cultural, human, and organizational factors that will determine the degree at which the technological tool gets accepted and utilized in the field and at higher spaces. The authors have briefly touched this area, however, given the interdisciplinary focus of the paper, it would be appropriate to briefly explain (a) the reasons why other technologies (explicitly stated by the authors) were not successful OR (b) what makes HXL better than other approaches (i.e. why the UN along its partner organizations would have better prospects to have a successful implementation/adoption). This would provide the semantic web community valuable insights on important issues that need to be considered in the adoption of semantic web in the daily operation of humanitarian and other institutions.
3. The paper touches on issues of lack of connectivity, a key necessary condition for the proposed technology; however, it does not touch on issues of limited bandwidth nor touches on issues on how semantic web (i.e. text files) would benefit the otherwise transfer of heavy formats. Nor the paper informs on how technologies such as Ajax would put burden on a limited bandwidth (i.e. frequent server requests). The authors mention offline work but they fail to elaborate further on this key issue.
4. The paper states: “This paper presents a case study on this initiative, which is set to significantly improve information exchange in the humanitarian domain. We introduce the HXL vocabulary, which provides a formal definition of the terminology used in this domain, and an initial se”. In this context, is the paper itself a case study? Otherwise identify with appropriate titles or indications where the “case study” is.
5. The paper states: “The goal of HXL is to automate many of these processes” maybe this expression needs to be corrected to, for example, “The goal of HXL is to help/contribute to the automatization of many of these processes” or “to be the basis for the automatization of …”
6. The paper stages: “It is extremely unlikely, though, that all involved organizations can be convinced to use a common information system, due to the differences both in size and topical focus.” The authors need to make it clear OCHA’s relationship with the 5500 organizations; does OCHA fund them? In this case, would there be better probabilities for adoption?
7. The authors make use of abbreviations; however the reader does not know what they mean (i.e. OGC, etc). There are also instances of duplicated words and misspellings.
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