#opengeosms

After the efforts that contributed by OGC, ITU, and GeoThings staff, we finally make Open GeoSMS to be adopted by ITU and officially printed as ITU publication. We would like to introduce you, ITU Q.3615!

[Please click on the photo to launch the Youtube video for more details]

The Fifth Element a cool sci-fiction on humanity sustainablilty in 1997. Last month, I had a discussion with @ilya on disaster management operatons, he suggested that “hey, it sounds like you have four clear modules on your platform, and THEY could be The Fifth Element!” I liked this metaphor and how he described it. I used it in a talk last weekend to address how ICT (Information and Communication Technology) not just could entertain, but help people.

The First Element is Open Street Map.

Open Street Map is Wiki-style Map resource service provider. We are confortable to what Google Maps has already provided to us in urban or sub-urban area. However, any disaster might happen in the middle of nowhere that even Google Street View vehicles have never been there before. This open platform allows the humanitarian support forces and volunteers to “map” the trail, POIs, and so on. You can even save the map resource on offline mode and that’s really really helpful for disaster response and management.

The Second Element is Ushahidi

Ushahidi is an open source platform, not only for server site; but also for mobile application on iPhone, iPad, and Android phone. Ushahidi has gained its reputation for its ease-of-deployment and openness. Ushahidi is also an crowdsourcing platform which allows people feedback and contribute what they see on-site. It then shows those events with map-based visualization, filtered with categories, and provides RESTful interface for other services or applications to retrive its database. 

The Third Element is Sahana

Sahana  is also an open source platform for disaster management. The power of Sahana is dealing with resource registration and match the needs and resources automatically. Sahana is so powerful that even few system administrators sometimes get a little confused and not able to fully utilize it. In the Resource Mapping System practice of Red Cross, we see Sahana Eden has successfully transformed its looking with a more user-friendly interface. We would further add the mobile app for Sahana so the Stand-by Task Force team could tackle right on what they are concerned with their own smart mobile in the emergency situations.

The Fourth Element is Open GeoSMS

Open GeoSMS is an open standard for encoding location information into SMS. It’s a made-in-Taiwan standard and now adopted in various scenarios from commercial LBS to disaster management. Open GeoSMS enables people to communicate location information on different apps, event different mobile platforms via SMS. We mashup Open Street Map, Ushahidi, Sahana, and Open GeoSMS to be an integrated platform with its mobile app. This allows the volunteers from all over the world can submit report with coordinates to server via Open GeoSMS (without the access to mobile internet), it also allows server to dispatch task to volunteers via Open GeoSMS for specifying where to meet up or where the resources should be moved to. It’s handy while the data access is not available.

The Fifth Element is Tzu-Chi

The Video that linked with the picture above is about how Tzu-Chi Foundation worked and helped in Japan for 311 tsunami. Tzu-Chi was one of the dozen relief NGO that got accepted to enter Japan when the disaster happened.Tzu-Chi is a humanitarian organization based in Taiwan and has over one million volunteers all over the world. Strong task force team for disaster response can be quickly established by Tzu-Chi. The necessities could be soon sent to the the area in need. Most of the volunteers from outside don’t have data access to internet on their smart device, that’s why we propose our integrated solution and hope this tool can help Tzu-Chi on any following disaster response and management events. Tool itself can’t work, that’s why we talked to Tzu-Chi and make the humanitarian logistics channel the fifth element of this system. Tzu-Chi agrees that with those integrated open platforms, mobile applications, offline maps, and the location SMS, it will be very helpful for them to perform the disaster response abroad. This feedbacks really encourages us, we do GeoThings, and we are more than happy to do the GeoThings that has a lot to do with humanitarian support :-)

Here's the power point slides of the talk we gave on May 16th, 2012, in NCDR conference about this five elements idea