Re: Welcome!

Renato Iannella wrote:
> As is usual in new groups, please also feel free to send an email 
> introducing yourself and what specific goals you have with this XG.

Thought I would start with a quick intro and my objective for joining 
this group:

I am the project lead of Sahana Free and Open Source Disaster Management 
System (http://www.sahana.lk). I am generally an advocate of open source 
and open standards especially in this domain (Humanitarian + Emergency 
Management).

Sahana strives to implement Open Interop Standards in our applications 
to enable holistic disaster management and coordination between 
heterogeneous systems. Such system to system integration enabled through 
standards can thus being a lot of efficiencies to the chaos of disaster 
management.

However in our exploration of standards we found there to be gaps in 
various needed standards for this domain. Either those gaps can be 
filled by tailoring existing standards to the domain or it might require 
a whole new standard. Of course we did not want to re-invent the wheel 
in our project in creating new standards and it makes no sense for 
standards to be created in isolation, thus the need for this group and 
the need for a diverse set of practitioners, academics and solution 
vendors to contribute to defining this framework.

We hope to apply whatever we accomplish here in terms of recommending 
standards to the Sahana project as Open Source libraries and make them 
available to other projects as well. This will also make such standards 
pervasive.

That's it from me for now.. Please do share you motivations as well.

thanks,

Chamindra de Silva,

Director and Project Lead, Sahana
http://chamindra.googlepages.com

Received on Tuesday, 5 February 2008 20:31:59 UTC