Welcome to the Sahana Agasti Wiki

This is the “Agasti” group of projects and products, sharing a PHP-based code lineage, separate from Sahana Eden.

Projects and Products

Overview of Vesuvius, People Locator, and Kilauea

The capabilities of Vesuvius (as manifested in the Vesuvius Trunk, and the People Locator® instance derived from it) are mainly concerned with disaster preparedness and response in these areas:

  • contributing to family reunification by reporting and search
  • assisting with hospital triage, including photo capture
  • promoting data interchange.

Underpinning these areas are efforts to:

  • develop mobile apps
  • improve administrative capabilities
  • build a robust code base.

The Vesuvius codebase can be adopted for other purposes. In particular, the Kilauea project re-purposed it for shelter management as part of coastal flooding preparedness.

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Specific projects are treated further within these sections that follow:

  • The Vesuvius Trunk
  • Vesuvius and People Locator
  • Vesuvius and Kilauea
  • Vesuvius and Google Summer of Code 2013

The Vesuvius Trunk

Sahana’s Vesuvius trunk, as well as many other code branches, is available from the GitHub repository for Vesuvius. With a “Vesuvius” theme by default, Vesuvius trunk code will be of interest for organizations wanting to host and independently customize their own copy, as well as students and developers setting up private branches.

Of particular interest:

While the Vesuvius trunk and People Locator are not identical, there is substantial commonality. So wiki documentation about one can be helpful for the other.

Future Directions and Contacts

SSF Branch Manager of this distribution is Ramindu Deshapriya (with LinkedIn Profile). As of June, 2013, he is also the chair of the new Vesuvius subcommittee within the Sahana Projects PMC.

Starting in 2013, code contributions to the Vesuvius trunk are coming from Virtusa, Inc., in addition to the U.S. National Library of Medicine and to Google-funded SSF student awards. Many of the contributing developers are based in Sri Lanka, the birthplace of Sahana.

Google Summer of Code 2013 projects derived from the main trunk include the creation of a Portable App version and a Demo site. The latter will make it possible to see and manipulate Vesuvius features requiring privileges beyond that of simple registered users (e.g., administrative or hospital staff). It is anticipated that many of the student branches will be merged into the trunk at summer’s end.

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Vesuvius and People Locator

The US National Library of Medicine (NLM) led development of Vesuvius at its naming in 2010 and several years before and after. Under NLM auspices, Vesuvius developed the specific goals and functionalities summarized above.

People Locator® (https://pl.nlm.nih.gov) is a customization and extension of Vesuvius, with an instance hosted at NLM with its own branding. One can go there to explore those features accessible to anyone who registers.

Community-Based Disaster Events

PL was first deployed in an early form for the Haiti earthquake of 2010. In that case, missing/found person records were at first gathered from CNN iReports, and then later imported from Google's Person Finder. This served as an initial aggregation tool, and later as an alternative viewer of Google and other records, as well as links to other helpful earthquake-response resources. An iPhone person-reporting app was also first released.

Subsequently, a number of disaster events have been put up on PL, among them:

  • Earthquakes in Turkey, Japan, and New Zealand
  • Floods in the Philippines, Japan, and Europe
  • Typhoons, hurricanes, and severe tornadoes

Routinely, records are imported from Google, then may be searched and viewed on PL. One can also report (by the Google reporting widget in early cases, or directly to PL with propagation in later cases).

Hospital-Based Disaster Events

Within a neighborhood-of-NLM context, a consortium of hospitals in Bethesda, Maryland have joined with NLM to develop disaster preparedness software projects, of which this is one. A laptop application was developed to assist with photography of arriving disaster victims and association with ID number and initial triage status. This information is then privately reported to PL, to assist family-reunification councilors in the hospital.

Further Directions

Thus, the project is driven by international responses such as the Haitian earthquake, and US-hospital-focused triage needs. Recently, “community-based events” are seen as the dominant focus of NLM work going forward.

For organizations that would like NLM to provide support, as part of NLM's “People Locator” (PL) instance, please see the contact list in Vesuvius and People Locator

Want to contribute to Sahana Vesuvius?

Vesuvius and Kiluaea

Kilauea is a customization and restyling of circa-2010 Vesuvius to handle shelter registrations. This was an independent side project to the work on Mayon (mentioned below), both conducted at City University of New York (CUNY) under the leadership of New York City’s Office of Emergency Management (NYC OEM). It was successfully deployed and continues to be used by NYC OEM.

Future Directions and Contacts

For more about maintenance and future extensions, contact:

  • Professor Bon Sy, Queens College, CUNY

In addition, a GSoC 2013 project investigated the remerging of the Vesuvius trunk and forked Kiluaea codebase, under the mentorship of Ramindu Deshapriya.

Vesuvius and Google Summer of Code

We've mentioned a few of the summer projects above. Find out about all the projects and the students and mentors who worked on them at the pages below.

GSoC 2014

GSoC 2013

GSoC 2012

GSoC 2011

Vesuvius and Google Code-In

Vesuvius was involved in the Google Code-In programme in 2012. Tasks were assigned based on the NLM People Locator codebase. All tasks were completed successfully.

Google Code-In 2012

Google Code-In 2013

Other Related and Past Projects

Mayon

During 2009-11, New York City’s Office of Emergency Management funded this experimental project, at City University New York. This project is not currently active.

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Past Agasti Project - Krakatoa

Krakatoa, also known as “Stable-0.6”, was based on pre-2010 Sahana PHP development. It has received bug fixes through the end of 2010 (0.6.6), but regrettably, is no longer supported. It should now be of interest chiefly to software developers who might want to consider moving old modules to the different environments provided by Vesuvius or Mayon, or other initiatives. Krakatoa provides full source code visibility, and is available in a quick-start “portable” version.

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