About the HXL Proxy

The HXL Proxy is an online data engine for datasets tagged using the Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL). It performs the same tasks as the query engine in a relational database like Oracle or MySQL—transforming, sorting, aggregating, filtering, cleaning, joining, and validating data—except that instead of operating on internally-stored data tables, it lets you operate directly on HXL-hashtagged spreadsheets or other data files stored anywhere on the Web (including HDX, Dropbox, Google Drive, or your own web site).

Where's the documentation?

Detailed documentation is available online in the HXL Proxy wiki.

How do I report a problem or ask for a feature?

To report bugs or new-feature requests, please visit https://github.com/HXLStandard/hxl-proxy/issues.

Who uses it?

The HXL Proxy helps power several humanitarian data tools behind the scenes, including IFRC Go, the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), Quick Charts, and Data Check.

Since any humanitarian organisation is welcome to use the Proxy without pre-registration, there are likely other applications that we do not yet know about.

What about private data?

The free service at proxy.hxlstandard.org is intended only for non-sensitive, publicly-accessible humanitarian data.

If you are dealing with sensitive data, you have two options:

1. The HXL Proxy is mostly a wrapper around libhxl-python, a Python library for HXL data validation and transformation. You can install this Python package, and then use the built-in command-line tools in a shell script, or call out to the library directly from your own programmes.
2. You are welcome to install your own version of the HXL Proxy web application on your personal computer, or on an Intranet inside your organisation's firewall. There is a Docker image available for fast deployment.

What software does it use?

(For a complete list of requirements, see the source code.)