This great architecture image of the Sahana GIS (and its surroundings) framework was created by Diki an co., for the ToT F/OSS-GIS & SAHANA Workshop last year:

Sahana GIS Architecture - Tux version

Original Image Source: SahanaCentral.IOSN.Telehealth.ph

I had the privilege of contributing to TacticalTech’s recently released Maps for Advocacy: An Introduction to Geographical Mapping Techniques. This book is very informative and nicely edited, and gives an overview of mapping techniques to a new user. Good work TTC, for this wonderful piece of work. A must read for everyone.

The GIS component(s) of Sahana, coined as SahanaGIS for ease of use, were presented and showcased at FOSS4G 2008, the Free/Open Source Geospatial Conference, held in Cape Town, South Africa, from the 29th September to the 4th October 2008. The Sahana GIS team was represented by Fran Boon and Mifan Careem (yours truly ) . FOSS4G was the perfect platform to talk about the GIS work in Sahana - there was a lot of appreciation for SahanaGIS, and lots of valuable comments as well, from the Gurus of the FOSS GIS world. The SahanaGIS publicity was a 3-pronged attack - A general presentation titled “Integrating GIS into a FOSS Disaster Management System“, an academic research paper “SahanaGIS: a rapid deployment framework for humanitarian relief operations“, authored by David Bitner, Fran Boon, Mifan Careem and Gavin Threadgold, and a SahanaGIS demonstration. This was also the first time Sahana’s offline GIS capability was showcased, with the use of UMN/Mapserver and OpenLayers.

Google has released its revolutionary mapping client, Google Earth, for web-browsers, according to Google LatLong

Today, I’m happy to announce the release of the new Google Earth Browser Plug-in, which brings the full power of Google Earth to the web, embeddable within your own web site. Driven by an extensive JavaScript API, you can control the camera; create lines, markers, and polygons; import 3D models from the web and overlay them anywhere on the planet.

However, as is the case with many Google applications (including Google Earth for some time), us Linux users have to wait - again. The technology is currently available to Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 6/7 on MS Windows only. However, I guess this move will create a lot of interest - Google Maps API certainly did - add 3D ability to that now, and imagine the possibilities !

We used Google Maps API within Sahana as the primary plugin for GIS. We now concentrate on having OpenLayers as the main mapping client, allowing a host of services to be accessed through it, including the GoogleMaps API. So once the Linux/Mac ports are done, I wonder if and when OpenLayers support for GE would be on the roadmap..

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…

2006: Another research paper on Sahana, this time from the world of Sahana GIS. The paper was presented at ISCRAM, under the Geographic Information Science for Crisis Management session.

Title: GIS Integration in the Sahana Disaster Management System

Authors: M. Careem, D. Bitner, R.De Silva

Published at: ISCRAM

Presented at: ISCRAM, Delft, Netherlands, by Mifan Careem

Abstract:

Disaster Management often involves using Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to manage large amounts of data efficiently. Data during a disaster are often related to geographic features or spatial data, thus requiring special forms of data management software to utilize and manage them efficiently. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are specialized database systems with software that can analyze and display data using digitized maps and tables for decision making. Preparing and correctly formatting data for use in a GIS is nontrivial, and it is even more challenging during disasters because of tight time constraints and inherent unpredictability of many natural disasters. This paper describes the important role of a GIS in disaster management, and discusses the most common characteristics of GIS and their potential use in disaster response. We follow up with a detailed description of the GIS prototype in the Sahana Disaster Management System.