The Sahana Software Foundation has joined OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems) – a not for profit consortium that drives the development and advancement of open data standards.  In particular, OASIS is the home of the Emergency Data Exchange Language – or EDXL – suite of open data standards that includes the Common Alerting Protocol (or CAP), EDXL-HAVE (Hospital Availability Exchange) and EDXL-SITREP, which have all been part of current or past Sahana development or research efforts.

“Becoming an OASIS member will help the Sahana Software Foundation fulfill its mission of being a leader in the field of promoting the adoption of open standards for disaster response and management,” said SSF CEO Mark Prutsalis. “This is a great opportunity for Sahana to have a positive impact on the development of systems for saving lives.”

New Chair Nuwan Waidyanatha and the Sahana Standards and Interoperability Committee will coordinate SSF’s contributions to the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee.  Through a LIRNEasia project, Nuwan has been leading the incorporation of a CAP and EDXL-Sitrep within Sahana Eden, work which was highlighted in the report of the recent CAP meeting in Montreal.  There is a current Google Summer of Code™ project to complete the development of the CAP Broker this summer, following work done during the Google Code-In last winter.

Participation in OASIS will also allow the Sahana Software Foundation to have direct input into new standards to track emergency patients and more generally, emergency clients – the EDXL-TEP and EDXL-TEC standards, which ties directly into SSF’s systems to track missing and found persons and to register clients at shelters with our Vesuvius and Kilauea products.