With the first release of the Vesuvius branch of Sahana Agasti, we’ve added some awesome new features. Vesuvius provides a sophisticated missing and found persons registry that interfaces with Google Person Finder but with a user interface that simplifies searching and filtering of records. Vesuvius also provides hooks for tying into a hospital administration and triage systems.

We’re particularly excited about this release’s value to the needs of local jurisdictions. Outside of local jurisdictions in the United States and developed world, international urban search and rescue teams will be interested in the capabilities of sending forward patient triage information to local health facilities and missing persons registries. We’re excited that we can offer this feature through Vesuvius, and we’re hoping for more community feedback about how this feature has been used and found valuable, and what can be improved.

You can take a look at Vesuvius on a live site to see a bit more about how it works, as the site includes several test data sets and the data we collected in our Haiti response is available as an historical archive. One important note: be careful when exploring data sets for Christchurch and Colubmia – this data is live as our responses to these disasters are ongoing. It may be better for you to kick the tires on test data, but we did want to make sure that folks can check out how Sahana is used in media res of disaster response.

We welcome your feedback on the release! Work on the next Agasti release, code named Mayon, is under way now, so your comments, lines of code or both are much appreciated.