Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
responses. Open source platforms are the promising tools for disaster management
but these platforms have not yet been fully developed for geospatial services. We
found that limited geospatial analysis was provided in both platforms although
other input, management and visualization capability were reasonably sufficient.
Ushahidi has been developed mainly for information collection, visualization
and interactive mapping and those are well developed and utilized. The current
roadmap for development is more towards facilitating the ease of uses and data
mining. Integrating more GIS analysis functions seems not the priority (
https://
wiki.ushahidi.com/display/WIKI/Our+Products
)
. With rich capability as a project
management platform, Sahana Eden would be easily enhanced to be a suitable
platform for relief planning and management by adding more geospatial analysis
functions, one of which is the shortest route to a specific feature since logistic
management is critical in post-disaster and emergency responses. In addition,
Sahana Eden would be further improved its data input capability to accept more
common spatial data format like shapefile. GIS research is highlighted as one of
the future research directions of Sahana Eden (
http://wiki.sahanafoundation.org/
The growth of natural disaster in the last decade is alarming that in the near
future the world would deal with more natural disasters with extreme intensity and
at a large scale. Therefore, the role of geoinformation technologies should be
efficiently strengthened, developed, and improved to overcome the current
weaknesses in minimizing negative impacts and vulnerability resulted from natural
disasters. Due to time-constraints, the current research only explored the perfor-
mance of Ushahidi and Sahana Eden (end-user version) platforms with one spe-
cific earthquake case study. The comparison was carried out from only the
perspective of geospatial analysts. Further researches will come up with more
comprehensive investigations of geospatial capabilities of the platforms in dif-
ferent real case studies taking into account the requirements of disaster manage-
ment practitioners and emergency responders.
Acknowledgments This research was inspired by the continually significant contributions of
Ushahidi and Sahana Eden developers and users in development and deployment these great
platforms to assist the disaster relief efforts. The authors appreciate the useful comments by two
anonymous reviewers that help to improve the manuscript.
References
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Accessed 03 Feb 2012
Australian New Zealand American Association of Minnesota (ANZAA) (2011) Christchurch
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Accessed 25 March 2012
Cuny FC (1983) Disasters and development. Oxford University Press, Oxford
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http://homepages.uc.edu/*huffwd/Volcanic_
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