Sahana Research & Action

Sahana Research & Action develops innovative, impact-based tools and implements cost effective solutions addressing disaster and humanitarian management challenges throughout the world. We use free and open source technologies as well as agile, iterative design approaches to turn insights and feedback generated by Sahana's community of software developers and disaster management professionals into useful, usable and economical tools for disaster risk reduction and disaster resource management.

Projects

Interplanetary Alert Network (IAN)

Alert aggregation without authentication going beyond national alerting authorities to include all manner of alerts including those received from Chains of IOTs.

Research

  • Work and research extends from GRAB.
  • Modeled alerting/warning using the Hyperledger block chain technology. Then realized that Interplanetary File System and a presentation layer of classified alerts would suffice.
    • Presentation layer is investigating NLP classification techniques, such as the use of Colab's Tensor Flows and Embedding for classifying CAP messages received into GRAB.
    • Next extend the classification to other non-structured or semi-structured data feeds

Sahana First Response

Simple solution for Incident management, ideal  for Emergency Operations Centers.

Research:

  • A prototype was developed based on the team's experience and exposure to first response [Dec. 2017].

Implementations:

  • Seychelles Department of Risk and Disaster Management  training and implementation, funded by the African Development Community [Sep. 2018 - Aug. 2019]

Globally Relayed Alerts and Bulletins (GRAB)

GRAB evolves from the Global CAP data feeds and it enhances SAMBRO to aggregate various Atom/RSS, Twitter, and Facebook alerts of interest.

Research:

  • Analyzing the feeds and data to determining the optimal parser and filters for indexing the data in the Sahana CAP and CMS tables. Periodically test the data to determine the reliability; especially in the CAP feeds. Findings were shared at the 2018 CAP Implementation Workshop Filtered Alerthub side event [Jan. 2018 - Jun. 2018].

Mobile Pictographs for Disaster Communication

Imagery for communicating disaster-related messages to the linguistically challenged (Concept).

Research:

Sahana Alert and Messaging Broker (SAMBRO)

Risk-based warning and situation-awareness system build using the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) international standard.

Research:

Implementations:

  • "CAP on a Map" project, to improve coastal resilience through a cross-agency situatioanal-awareness platform in Myanmar, Philippines, and Maldives (funded by UNESCAP) [January 2015 - October 2016]
  • ITU CAP Software and Training Module for the International Telecommunication Union Asia Pacific Regional Office to use in promoting the ITU-T X.1303 Common Alerting Protocol warning standard among member States (funded by ITU Bangkok Project Office). [April 2014 - July 2014]

Additional Areas of Interest

Our Team

Nuwan Waidyanatha, nuwan@sahanafoundation.org, Sahana Software Foundation
Lutz Frommberger, lutz@sahanafoundation.org, Sahana Software Foundation
Contact, info@sahanafoundation.org

News

Bhutan Evaluated Sahana Eden as a replacement and enhancement for their Disaster Information System

Bhutan Evaluated Sahana Eden as a replacement and enhancement for their Disaster Information System

Demonstration of Sahana tools for emergency response and crisis management to support data informed decision making ...
Cleanup your CAP: towards a decentralized, immutable, and trusted alert network

Cleanup your CAP: towards a decentralized, immutable, and trusted alert network

Picking up from the discussion on Alerthub, back in 2016 in Bangkok, we developed a hook to update our repository ...
Photo credits to Nuwan Waidyanatha

Inclusive Public Services for Linguistically Challenged presented @ CPRsouth2018

Smart Governments, as part of their Smart Cities programs, must include linguistically challenged in public information and services. Pictographs (pictograms ...
Building capacity on Common Alerting Protocol for Nepal

Building capacity on Common Alerting Protocol for Nepal

Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) Nepal is in the process of operationalizing the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) v 1.2 ...
Beyond text translations for the displaced and marginalized

Beyond text translations for the displaced and marginalized

Policy and Plans for Linguistically Challenged The European INTERACT project is part of a Migration Policy initiative. The project is ...