Missing? Persons Registry
Some thoughts about maintaining “Missing Person” registries in disasters:
Sahana maintains a list of missing persons, and therein treats “missing” as attribute of a person entity, meaning, a missing report always creates or updates a person entry with status “missing” and additional information to support the search, while finding that person updates their record as “found”. That’s the usual way of maintaining missing person lists, but I feel this is wrong:
First of all – there is no such thing like a “missing person” – instead there are:
- Persons
- Reports that someone is missing a person (missing report)
- Reports that someone has found a person (find report)
Sounds the same? It isn’t!
“Missing” and “Found” are presence conditions that are completely independent, and can even co-exist. A person can be missing by their family, while being very present to aid personnel or the medical examiner at the same time. Or there may be persons that are actually “found”, but not reported “missing” – however, the question is – can the “found” person be identified?
If yes – then you simply update the person’s presence log and thus inform the database (and other users) where the person actually is. Let’s therefore assume that – like in VITA – for every found person – whether identified or not – there is a presence log in the database which documents where the person currently is and under which condition.
Let’s assume further, that missing reports are filed on identified persons only, whilst find reports are filed on unidentifyable persons and bodies only.
So the actual problem is to match:
- Identified Persons against Unidentified Persons/Bodies
This turns the “Missing Person” issue around – is a completely different workflow. Now you have to maintain a registry of “found”, but unidentified persons/bodies – while the “Missing Reports” are rather a helpful resource for identification.
Some people say this is discussing half-full vs. half-empty. But I’d say it’s a question of which audience you’re targeting.
