In collaboration with NFPA, Netage B.V. organised a two day CRR Activity Data Model Development Meeting in Salt Lake City. We brought community risk reduction (CRR) subject matter experts together to share and document the existing landscape of various species of CRR activity data for the purposes of developing a comprehensive, flexible and extensible data model. The meeting was organized as workshop where all participants were encouraged to collaborate and share their ideas and inputs on the data model.
The first workshop day started with an extensive explanation from the CEO and Data Expert from Netage B.V., Bart van Leeuwen, about how the legacy of data modeling influences our decisions, the importance of taxonomies and how graph models can overcome these issues. The hands-on part of the workshop started where the 47 people of the group split up and started to create there own graph models. There was some hesitation in the beginning, but by doing it more and more people became enthusiast and started to understand the principles. The workshop day ended with an improvement iteration of the first attempt, Bart helped the groups with hints and tips to make the model more mature.
The second workshop day started with working on more data models with greater detail where the groups were challenged to share the narrative the graphs entailed to the rest of the group. The feedback from the group indicated that everybody was convinced that the graph model would be the right solution for the broad CRR Data Model domain. The workshop ended the day with a ‘What is needed to form a community?’ brainstorm.
The workshop clearly emphasized that collaboratively working on a knowledge model not only improved the quality of the model, but also improved sharing knowledge among the participants. Using the graph model to express knowledge and relations between various subjects around CRR has proven to be viable solution to the participants. Now it is on Netage B.V. to take the inputs of the workshop and work on the Core CRR Data model.