HXL

HXL, also known as Humanitarian Exchange Language, is an open standard for sharing data related to humanitarian aid. It was developed to make it easier to aggregate, share, and use data from various sources in crisis situations. HXL aims to improve the coordination and effectiveness of humanitarian response by providing a common framework for data.

The core of HXL is a set of tags that can be added to spreadsheet columns to describe the data they contain. These tags, such as #country, #adm1 (first administrative division), #location, #date, #event, and #org, allow software to understand and process the data automatically. This standardization facilitates data aggregation, analysis, and visualization across different organizations and systems. For example, by tagging a column with #people, it clearly indicates that the numbers in that column represent population figures.

HXL is designed to be flexible and can be applied to a wide range of data, including population statistics, needs assessments, resource tracking, and damage assessments. By making data machine-readable and interoperable, HXL helps humanitarian actors to get a clearer picture of a crisis, identify gaps in assistance, and allocate resources more efficiently. It is supported by various humanitarian organizations and is increasingly being adopted to improve data management in the sector.