Sahana Standards

Welcome to the Sahana standards homepage. Here we build and agree on cross-Sahana project development and interop standards which increases the bar of the quality and flexibility of the Sahana projects towards our end goals. The evolution of these standards beyond the scope of just Sahana will be to the H-FOSS group and groups such as W3C and OASIS. We strive to support Open Standards as much as possible where we can.

New Standards

Interop Standards

Development Standards

Infrastructure Standards

Standards Supported by Sahana

What make a good Satandard?

Below are some of the considerations when looking at standards we should adopt as a group

  1. Adoption - How well is the standard adopted by systems and respected by practitioners forums
    • Deployment - is it a defacto standard that is in widespread use, and therefore needs support anyway? (a la .doc or ESRI shapefile). Are there existing implementations that we can either draw upon, or can we implement a library so that ourselves and others are able to ease deployment of the standard?
  2. A liberally licensed specification - Not all standards are free and some require royalties to obtain. Licenses should be aligned to the Free and Open Source principles.
    • Accessibility - the standard specification should be freely obtainable, and there must be no licensing or royalty costs associated with implementation or promotion.
  3. An Open Source implementation - This is not a must, but it certainly helps assure that the standard has been implemented transparently. It also help propagate the standard as any one can adopt these libraries into their products.
  4. An Open Community Process - Not all standards are defined and refined in an open community process. Some require exclusive memberships before you can participate
    • Representation - can anyone join? Does it cost to join? Can everyone comment? Can everyone vote? Is the breakdown of representation truly representative of end users? Does the body developing the standard have awareness and recognition of end users that are likely to adopt the standard?
    • Approval - is it a democratic vote using a formal process (e.g. OASIS or W3C) or is it a 'push' by a benevolent dictator (e.g. PFIF). We should encourage and support standards processes that use democratic and defined voting processes, and not those pushed by a benevolent dictator - and this could be either a well meaning person, or a corporation (a la Microsoft OOXML, and possibly less than benevolent). Note that the approval process is different from representation.

Sahana Interop Matrix

Standard Sahana-Agasti 0.6 stable Sahana-Agasti trunk Sahana-Eden trunk
Object/Resource exchange standards
RSS Y Y Y
EDXL-DE
EDXL-HAVE Y
EDXL-RM
Feedsync
XForms Y
Alerting Standards - MSG
CAP Y
TWML
CWML
People data exchange standard - MPR, PR, DVR
PFIF Y [Note 1] Y
FOAF
vCARD
EDXL-TEP/TEC [Note 2]
GIS data exchange standards - GIS, SM, CR
KML Y Y
TMS Y Y
WMS Y Y
XYZ Y
GPX Y
GML Y Y
GeoRSS Y Y
MGRS Y
EM/Humanitarian Domain Standards
NIEM

[Note 1] First implementation of PFIF 1.1, 1.2 concluding; expected completion of improved rewrite & modularization Summer 2010.

[Note 2] TEP has been submitted to OASIS for standardization 2nd Q 2010. TEC definition is just beginning. TEP in Sahana currently being discussed.

Standards Proposals

Standards Representation

  • Gavin Treadgold is an individual non-voting member of the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee.

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