Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 1
Basic requirements for installing Ushahidi and Sahana Eden
Ushahidi
Sahana Eden
PHP version 5.2.3 or greater
Python and java script
MySQL version 5.0 or greater
MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite
An HTTP server: e.g.
Apache, lighttpd, microsoft internet information
server, or nginx
Apache, other webservers like cherokee
can be used.
whereas Ushahidi requires access to a web server that supports PHP language and
a MySQL database. Basic requirements are listed in Table
1
.
Data acquisition: Christchurch earthquake data was downloaded from ANZAA
and imported into Sahana Eden and Ushahidi. Based on the capacity of each
platform, the categories of earthquake data including destroyed and collapsed
infrastructure, and hospitals and shelters data input to Sahana Eden may be dif-
ferent from that into Ushahidi platform. Data of incidents, organizations, human
resource, warehouses, hospitals, shelters, assets, and projects were designed and
imported to the Sahana Eden platform. Since Ushahidi is mainly designed to report
incidents in emergency, there was only incidents data among other data selected to
input into Ushahidi.
Evaluation and comparison: the comparison was based on five features: Data
input (the type of data format imported to these platforms; the way data to be input
to these platforms, online or directly imported), Geospatial analysis (e.g. buffer,
overlay, etc.), Data management (e.g. search or query or filter desirable records of
incidents),
Visualization (Interactive
map
or static map), and
overall user's
evaluation.
4 Results and Discussion
A group of ten volunteers at Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) campus,
Sweden was introduced to Ushahidi and Sahana Eden and experienced the plat-
forms' performances with the 2011 Christchurch earthquake data. At the first
glance, Ushahidi plays as a means for data collection and visualization, which also
provides few simple data filtering capabilities for users to visually assess the
information. On the other hand, Sahana Eden is a project management platform for
relief and emergency response management; it provides a number of different
modules such as organization registry, project tracking, human resource, inven-
tory, asset, assessment, map and shelter management and those are customizable.
In our study, the following modules were designed: incidents, organizations,
human resource, warehouses, hospitals, shelters, assets, and projects. Real inci-
dents including short descriptions of incidents from raw data were added to
Incident module. Each incident must be assigned accordingly to a specific category
such as buildings collapsed, bridges closed, people trapped, or other items in
