Archive:Ceres

=CERES=

IT&GIS System for Disaster Management: Preparedness, Response, and Recovery

 * The challenge of disaster management is reducing the harm disasters cause to society, the economy, and the lives of individuals, communities and nations.


 * Preparedness: That task requires disaster managers to manage resources on a much larger scale and at a much faster time than are supported by conventional systems. IT&GIS systems provides capabilities that can help managers grasp the dynamic realities of a disaster and formulate better decisions more quickly in all phases of disaster management.


 * Response: Access to communication is critical in the early hours in any catastrophe scenario. Quickly relaying information to emergency personnel can reduce the time from disaster to response. When calamity strikes over a large area, information is crucial in the primary assessment of the scale of the problem, and in assigning resources to the most appropriate places.


 * Recovery: In recovery scenarios making good decisions and taking appropriate actions require having access to communication, data, and computacional resources that can be used to effectively coordinate a large number of geographically dispersed individuals and assets to exchange a variety of information, evaluate scenarios and formulating recovery action plans.

Introduction

 * In 2005 United States of America endured one of the worst natural disasters in its history, Hurricane Katrina. There were four major shortcomings which arose after Katrina: food, water, security, and communications. The total absence of a communications solution during this disaster appears to be the critical point.


 * In Peru, natural disasters are very often. The National System for Civil Defense (INDECI) donâ€™t have any resources for deal with disasters. When suddenly a disaster happens the government used to send a request for humanitarian assistance to International Cooperation Agencies, other governments and the donor community. There are total absence of prevention plans and systems for deal with and respond to disasters in the country.


 * The Ceres system will help to local authorities to deal with and respond to disasters and the project will be replicated in many places around the world.

System

 * Our project is a medium-sized system (from 10 to 50 users), generally, these systems will be deployed on one or two servers only.


 * The power supply for our system will play a vital role in the stability of the entire platform. Ceres is not a particularly power-hungry application. The power supplies will be connected to completely independent uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs).


 * The system will support various kinds of devices: Analog phones, IP phones, Softphones, GPSs, PDAs and Laptops.


 * The most important features of our system are Call Center, VoIP & IM, Geolocation & GIS Services and Data Monitoring from Remote Sensors Networks.


 * Other applications to be included in our system: broadcast, Video IP, text to speech, meta-contacts, etc

Design
Now we are working for design a new concept for an integrated IT & GIS system for disaster management and how to implement features to improve scalability, efficiency and usability. This task surely is not an easy one but we think it would be a great service to the community and we would really enjoy designing and implementing this. That is our motivation.

To achieve the goals mentioned, we propose:


 * Design new interface components following guidelines and recommendations for improve scalability, efficiency and usability. The design will integrate with the previous design and wonâ€™t be confusing or make things difficult.


 * The settings can be changed without a lot of downtime, easy to expand by means of add-ons and support options for improves scalability.


 * The recommendations here build on design aspects that have worked well in all systems, including systems based on PowerPC, Intel, AMD and UltraSparc.


 * Integration of an Meta-contacts library, enhanced VoIP & IM services, Geolocation, GIS service and Data Monitoring from Remote Sensors Network into the main system and the glue code to bring those things together.


 * Provides an accessible online help system with complete information and multi-language support.

We thought about implementing a full functionality system to be able to work in a real disaster scenario, with the possibility to extend and add new services and features in the future. We do not intend to write an entire new system but to reuse existing ones: CUWiN, OpenPBX, OpenGIS, Sahana, etc.