Google Public Alerts For Taiwan Highlights Need For Open Source Data About Disasters

Taiwan is bracing for Typhoon Soulik, which is scheduled to hit the island country late Friday. The arrival of the storm–now classified as a super typhoon–coincides with Google’s launch of Public Alerts for Taiwan yesterday. Severe weather alerts for typhoons and floods, and evacuation instructions if necessary, will appear on the page as well as on Google Search, Google Maps and Google Now on smartphones.

Google.org engineering director Eric Chu says the launch of Google Public Alerts for Taiwan just days before the anticipated arrival of Typhoon Soulik was a coincidence, as the company’s goal had been to make it available in time for typhoon season from mid-summer to early fall. Google.org’s goal is to encourage governments to adopt international standards of Web data such as the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) for publishing and sharing alerts and the Keyhole Markup Language (KML) for geographic data.