Standards and Interoperability Committee Report at the Sahana Software Foundation 2011 Annual Meeting

1. Sahana Standards PMC
Chamindra de Silva
Sahana 2011 Annual Meeting
May 7th 2011, Portugal

2. Why do we need a Standards PMC?
 The moment Sahana became more than
one autonomous project it was necessary
to set a bar on what defines a
“Sahana project”
 Examples
 “Apache Foundation Project”
 “Ubuntu Maintained Package”
 “Apple product”

3. “A Sahana Project”
 We want this phrase synonymous with
 A mature H-FOSS community project
 NIIMS and ICS compliant project
 A project that is easy to install and use
 A dependable security, load and
functionality tested project codebase
 A project that is easy to integrate with others
 A project where due diligence on IP is handled
 A project that empowers relief agencies

4. The Standards PMC Composition
Sahana Eden Sahana Agasti
 Francis Boon  Chad Heuschober
 Praneeth Bodduluri  Glenn Pearson
Community Dev  Mifan Careem
 David Bitner  Nilushan Silva
 Gavin Threadgold  Nuwan Waidyantha
Board
 Mark Prutsalis
 Louiqa Raschid

5. What defines a Sahana project now?
Right now, just that:
 An Open Source
 Works in the area of disaster management
Areas to increase the “Sahana” bar next
 NIMS and ICS compliance
 Support for Open Interop Standards

Packing and Publishing Standards
 Quality Assurance Standards

6. Interop Standards
 Objective
 Bring about effective information exchange
during crisis to prevent siloed repositories that
is of less value to response
 Mechanisms
 Agreements on Ontology
 Agreements on Open Standards
 Agreements on Consistent User Experience
 Preparedness: Interop Workshops
 Test Cases and validate exchange

7. Interop Standards Supported so Far
Standard Sahana- Sahana- Sahana-
Agasti Agasti Eden
Krakatoa Vesuvius trunk
(0.6 stable (trunk
branch) branch)
RSS Y Y Y
EDXL-HAVE Y
XForms Y
CAP Y
PFIF Y [Note 1] Y
EDXL-TEP/TEC [Note 2]
KML Y Y
TMS Y Y
WMS Y Y
GPX Y
GML Y Y
GeoRSS Y Y
MGRS Y

8. Packing and Publishing Standards
 Objective:
 Improve user experience and ease on
download, installation and configuration of
Sahana software
 Mechanism (consistency!)
 Installation software and packages
 Consistently supported OSs / VMs
 Website hosting of packages
 Installation, user and configuration guide

9. Quality Assurance
 Risks of a life saving system
 Data corruption/integrity, performance issues,
security vulnerabilities, stability/fault tolerance
 Mechanisms
 Scenario/Functionality Test Cases
 Performance testing
 Vulnerability testing

10. Domain Compliance
 Objective
 Improve acceptance by Emergency managers
for adoption and integration of Sahana
 Mechanims
 Identify ICS/NIIMS compliance measures
 Certify systems for compliance

11. Standards created so far

12. Challenge
 Commitment to Standards Implementation
 Example: WIKI Standards
 Root cause
 Volunteer time
 Standards are not the favorite thing to spend
your spare time on
 Need the support of the projects for
 Enforcement and standards development

13. Next Steps
 Establish Interop Standards WG
 Ontology, User Experience, Data Interop
Agreements
 Interop Workshops
 PFIF
 EDXL-HAVE
 Establish NIIMS/ICS compliance WG
 Participation in ISCRAM, OASIS, W3C

14. Next Event:ISCRAM Interop Workshop

http://www.humanitarian-ict.org/wiki/crisis-interop