Discovery and federation for humanitarian data
- Phases
- understand define deliver sustain
- Modality
- Clinic
- Status
- Complete
Architecture and strategic advisory for the Humanitarian Data Exchange, supporting its shift from a centralised hosting platform into a federated catalogue and entry point for data shared across the UN humanitarian system.
This is a technical advisory engagement with OCHA's Centre for Humanitarian Data, the team that runs the Humanitarian Data Exchange. The work supported envisioning a strategic transformation of HDX from a centralised archive into a data discoverability layer, serving as the main entry point for data shared across the UN humanitarian system. In that future state, authoritative data would continue to live with source organisations that produce it, while HDX provides the connective tissue: a unified catalogue, shared metadata standards, and routing to the right systems and APIs.
The advisory work spanned architecture and strategy. On the technical side it explored what it means for HDX to become thinly cached, federated, source-agnostic, composable, and schema-governed, capable of generating outputs on demand, and of integrating multiple access patterns such as tabular APIs, cloud-native geospatial standards like STAC and GeoParquet, or MCP servers for AI-assisted access.
The methodology blended architecture and product strategy with stakeholder interviews, document synthesis, and engagement around diverse visions for what HDX could become. Deliverables to date include a structured vision document, presentation materials, and architecture diagrams.