Submitted by Gavin Treadgold on Thu, 2006-08-31 07:59
Abstract
Sahana is Sinhalese for "relief". Sahana rose from the waves of the Boxing Day tsunami in Sri Lanka as a free and open source software (FOSS) solution for managing information before, during, and after a disaster. Commercial disaster management systems are often unsustainable for all but the wealthiest of countries - Sahana was created as a system that can be deployed in a sustainable fashion in any country on the bare minimum of computer hardware and communications. Many of the benefits provided by FOSS contribute directly to sustainability of this solution - increased flexibility, ease of customisation, deployment not restricted by licence agreements, and skills required to support Sahana can increasingly be found in local communities.
A core component of any disaster management solution is the geospatial information about the disaster and its impacts on affected populations. The Sahana development community is investigating various options for publishing spatial information that can be used in Digital Earth applications to ease the visualisation of the significant amounts of data that becomes available after a disaster. Restricted access to "fundamental" spatial information is one of the largest potential roadblocks to the development of sustainable digital earth solutions for disaster management.
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- Sahana - engineering a sustainable ICT solution for disaster management (paper, presentation, both pdfs)
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The Sahana paper and presentation are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.