Vesuvius and People Locator

People Locator^® is the customized and branded version of Vesuvius being developed at 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. The project has been driven by international responses such as the Haitian earthquake of 2010 and later disasters, and US-hospital-focused triage needs.

Vesuvius and People Locator are oriented towards multiple disasters per database, rather than a fresh instance for each disaster. This reflects a preparedness orientation, and provides advantages for governments or organizations that have a laborious approval process for putting up new web sites or negotiating firewalls.

For More

• Agasti - Vesuvius Products and Projects provides an overview.
• A brief history of Vesuvius and other Agasti products gives a timeline, and credits many of the past student and volunteer contributors.

People Locator is developed in-house at NLM. See the preliminary checklist for accessing the codebase and working with Bazaar, which is primarily pertinent to NLM programmers. Jiri is used to report bugs and feature requests.

Developments in this project of interest to the Sahana community can be reported to the sahana-agasti or discuss listservs, and through periodic postings to the unofficial Lost Person Finder blog, among other places. The freenode IRC channels #sahana-meeting and #sahana-agasti are available to facilitate cross-fertilization.

For More (Relevant to Both the Trunk and People Locator)

• Vesuvius Installation Instructions
• The Modules of Vesuvius

Non-NLM developers will generally work with the Vesuvius Trunk. Periodically, there are selected code releases from PL to the Vesuvius Trunk; consequently, some NLM work under active development has not yet been pushed to the trunk.

Main Developers:

• 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; Products PMC [Vesuvius subcommittee], 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, SEO 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 past NLM contributors are listed in the brief history.

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.