A Brief History Vesuvius and Other Agasti Products

Particularly the Trunk and People Locator, and mentioning Kilauea and Mayon

July, 2013. This page is under development. Starting with a copy of content from the Vesuvius Trunk page, both pages are being differentiated and revised.

Vesuvius continues a lineage from Krakatoa, and is being developed further primarily by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). This effort is mainly concerned with improving family reunification and administrative capabilities, developing a robust code base, and exploring mobile technologies.

Created in response to the 2004 tsunami, Sahana built its first web site using the PHP programming language.

Capabilities were expanded during “Phase 1” releases, 0.1 to 0.5.

NLM's involvement with Sahana began in 2008, through one of a group of projects for the Bethesda Hospitals Emergency Preparedness Partnership (BHEPP). Increasingly, NLM took over development of the PHP codebase, as previous Sahana developers migrated to the Eden project. The “Phase 1” releases were superseded by “Phase 2”, as 0.6.x.

By 2009, Phase 2 was bifurcated into a “stable” branch and a more-experimental trunk branch, which eventually was known as 0.9.x.

October, 2009, saw the first alpha pilot by NLM/BHEPP during the CMAX 2009 exercise. The initial deployment focused on US-hospital triage needs, including reporting from a Windows laptop with camera at the triage station, and display and interrogation of those records by family reunification counselors.

• Phase 2.

The Haitian earthquake of 2010 established a second focus, on international events, with ingest of missing-person records from Google Person Finder an important thrust.

In mid-2010, a new nomenclature was adopted. Active branches of “Agasti”, the part of Sahana based on PHP web technology, were given the names of well-known volcanoes. The “stable-0.6” branch was recast as “Krakatoa”. New development subsequently took two largely independent forms:

• at NLM, “Vesuvius” continued the major evolution of selected parts of the 0.9.x trunk branch (moving towards 1.0). It introduced database referential integrity and more object-oriented code libraries. It became available to developers in unpackaged (and later packaged) form from the repository. The web site was tested in October during CMAX 2011.
• at NYC OEM/CUNY, “Mayon” (designated 2.x) restructured Sahana functionality, based on the Symphony PHP framework. This is described elsewhere.

In January, 2011, NLM slimmed down Vesuvius, and made it of more-focused functionality, by removing from the trunk inherited modules that now lacked support. Remaining modules generally are new, or represent a substantially re-engineering of earlier work.

During the Google Summer of Code 2010, Vesuvius was used as a testbed for prototypes of a Module Manager and Sahana App Store.

For More About the Deprecated Modules

• List of Deprecated Modules.
• Deprecated as not supported by NLM, and removed from the trunk into an external branch.
• The code for these is still available elsewhere, if someone wishes to revive them for a special project.

Check out this February, 2013 diagram of the "Genealogy of Vesuvius" during 2010-12, and some ideas for its further evolution in 2013. It covers People Locator (the successor to the Haitian web site) and Kilauea.

A group of PHP developers in Sri Lanka is now assuming responsibility for the Trunk, while NLM focuses on People Locator.

Currently, most Vesuvius 0.9.x beta development goes on in-house at NLM. The code has been pushed to Launchpad/Vesuvius, where it is appropriately spread amongst the various Bazaar branches therein. See the preliminary checklist for accessing the codebase and working with Bazaar.

Packaged releases with an installer are anticipated during 2012; some final work must first be completed on the last few remaining bugs in the installer. A preliminary page for Vesuvius installation information has been created.

Developments in this project are reported to the sahana-agasti listserv, and through periodic postings to the unofficial Lost Person Finder blog, among other places. The freenode IRC channel #sahana-agasti facilitates cross-fertilization between Vesuvius and Mayon.

Main Developer Contacts:

• Greg Miernicki - miernickig <at> mail <dot> nih <dot> gov - Lead module & web services developer/database architect; Agasti PMC
• Leif Neve - lneve <at> mail <dot> nih <dot> gov - Dev for PFIF module; MySQL DBA
• Glenn Pearson - Glenn_Pearson <at> nlm <dot> nih <dot> gov - LPF Project co-lead; Agasti PMC, Standards PMC
• Full LPF project group - NLMLHCCEBLPF <at> nlm <dot> nih <dot> gov

LPF Project Management, Non-Sahana:

• Michael Gill - Federal oversight; network engineering.
• Sameer Antani - Image R&D; ReUnite
• George Thoma - Chief, Communications Engineering Branch, LHNCBC/NLM/HHS

Other Current PL/Vesuvius Developers:

• Lan Le - Statistics and charting module
• Joseph Chow - database, HIPAA issues
• Mike Chung - graphic designs

Developers of NLM-Created Tools and Peripheral Software:

• Glenn Pearson - Lead dev for Windows app “TriagePic”
• Byte Phichaphop - Dev for iPhone app “ReUnite” 3.0
• Eugene Borovikow, Girish Lingappa - Image R&D
• Tehseen Sabir - QA, Notification tools

Other current and past contributors are listed further below.

Vesuvius Installation Instructions

Sahana has been selected as one of the mentoring organizations for Google Code-in (GCI) 2012. GCI is an annual competition hosted by Google to involve pre-university students from around the world with reputed Open Source communities.

• GCI + Sahana Home Page: Sahana Google Code-In Program
• Sahana Vesuvius Task Ideas page for GCI 2012: Ideas for Google Code-in 2012

For US citizens and permanent residents, there are competitive paid internship opportunities for local high school, undergrad, graduate, and post-docs on-site at NLM. Volunteer positions are also possible. We are looking particularly for folks with programming experience. Besides the Lost Person Finder project, our branches of NLM (Communications Engineering Branch and Computer Sciences Branch) have a number of other projects; those with coursework or experience in image processing, document understanding, and natural language understanding are particularly invited to consider us.

Summer student positions at NIH are applied for in January/February of each year. We at NLM will review applicants but only after they have submitted their NIH application.

• The Modules of Vesuvius

• Owen Royall-Kanih worked with an NLM instance of Google's open-source Person Finder, as a testbed for PFIF import/export, plus developed new-event alerting code, contributed back to Google.
• Michael Bulgakov developed missing/found-person artificial-data generators.
• Returning student Chase Bonifant created system diagrams and documentation, improved NLM's internal project website and wiki, and (during winter break of 2011/12) organized a draft continuity of operations plan.
• Joy Frazier documented the triage process, and investigated applicability of social media/crowd-sourcing tools.

• Ramindu Deshapriya worked on Pootle Re-integration and Multilingual Support
• W. A. Chinthaka Rukshan Weerakkody developed a Shared Installer (jointly with Mayon)

• Kusum Madarasu developed a Module Manager for Vesuvius. Kusum was mentored by Greg Miernicki, Glenn Pearson, and Chamindra de Silva.
• See also: the related Sahana App Store concept, that Kusum experimented with.

Volunteer Developers working with TriagePic:

• Emad Ibrahim integrated a Webcam View/Image Capture window.
• Jeff Bobish added a picture viewer to the Outbox.

Volunteer Developers working with ReUnite:

• Vicky & Ryan Somma rapid-prototyped an Android version.

Also helping with concepts and contacts: Kumar Rangasamy & Ari Kaliannan

• Chase Bonifant developed large-format system and workflow diagrams.
• Hyen Guan prototyped image duplication and face detection software.
• Bathiya Senevirathna created and improved the “Found in Haiti” iPhone app, later called “ReUnite”.

• Merwan Rodriguez - PL Graphical user interface, Ajax (particularly filters, results popups), SOLR search engine and MySQL search through September, 2011;
• Anantha Bangalore - Bluetooth R&D, Haiti earthquake meta-search, through July, 2010.
• Ajay Kanduru - Haiti earthquake screenscrape from CNN iReports, initial SOLR integration

Source code for the Vesuvius modules is available on Launchpad. Additional experimental or student modules, not integrated into the trunk at this time, can be found in other repository branches. Some NLM work under active development has not yet been pushed to the trunk.

Bug reports are also handled on Launchpad.