Along with the recent surge in the Geographical Information System (GIS) development stuff of Sahana, I guess its high time I posted something on this:  The Sahana Disaster Management System’s geographical capability has been improving in recent times. The purpose of GIS development in Sahana (a.k.a SahanaGIS) is  not to create a fully functional GIS: there are enough and more brilliant solutions out there: rather, our focus is on allowing users to get the maximum geographical capabilty out of the system, by making use of existing systems and standards.

The SahanaGIS is built on a distributed architecture of small reusable components that serve each other. Each component is standard-compliant based on Open Standards, and makes use of existing F/OSS projects and services. This allows for standards based interoperability with existing systems, and existing F/OSS or proprietary GIS solutions can be used interchangeably with these components to achieve full GIS capability within Sahana through collaboration. At deployment, Sahana would probably contain a rich set of data regarding the disaster it is setup to manage: the ability to share this data integrated with spatial data of the region would mean a rich set of geographical data being served out to the GIS community in times of a disaster. This project also provides the ability to manage the Sahana data sources, feeds, files and mapping APIs via a GIS catalog module, allowing a wide variety of sources to be added and configured on the fly, which means that a fairly substantial GIS can be configured by someone with little or no experience of GIS.

SahanaGIS provides the flexibility for users to use tools of their preference: we do not intend to build a newer tool to replace existing tools that users are comfortable with. For instance, data served out of Sahana can be viewed using the inbuilt Sahana GIS client built uing OpenLayers. Alternatively, users can use the myriad of GIS clients out there: qGIS, uDig and the likes, to acheive the same. Similarly, mapping servers such as UMN/Mapserver can be setup to serve data to Sahana clients. Thus, Sahana can be used within existing GIS infrastructure, without distrupting the flow by requiring users to migrate to newer software: which is not practical during disasters, especially considering the level of expertise required in Geographical Science.
Well, that’s a start from me: definitely more stuff to come…