Internet Thailand (Inet) has launched the Open Exchange for Collaborative Activities in Response to Emergencies (OpenCARE), a network facilitating information sharing and collaboration among relief agencies.
According to Inet president Trin Tantsetthi, OpenCARE was started after analyzing the incident handling capabilities of various agencies following the tsunami that struck the Andaman coastline three years ago.
OpenCARE has been applied to different disaster domains to better suit other types of alerts, such as "missing person/I am alive" applications, recovery situations, matching pledges and pleas for help, providing food and shelter, coping with terrorist attacks in multiple areas, traffic jams, area blockages such as chemical/industrial explosions or severe weather warnings.
Inet will treat OpenCARE as a not-for-profit project and will push OpenCARE towards becoming an international non-governmental organization (NGO), said Trin, adding that OpenCARE is a gift from the Thai people to the world community.
OpenCARE is an information exchange platform that facilitates information sharing and collaboration among relief organizations. These organizations can be government agencies, NGOs or individual volunteers. All are provided with the latest information so that effective relief decisions can made during crucial times.
As message-oriented middleware, OpenCARE accepts input from multiple sources and translates the information into a format that each recipient understands and can make use of immediately, be it data for existing applications or for Web access.
Initially, OpenCARE services will be available via the Internet (as a Web portal), instant messaging service, and via amateur radio communications.
OpenCARE talks to each system in its native format. Once data is retrieved, OpenCARE translates it into EDXL (Emergency Data Exchange Language), a worldwide information structure for handling emergencies. For output, OpenCARE translates EDXL back into a format suitable for each recipient. In this way, incompatible systems can share their information with other relief agencies without the need to modify their application or retrain relief staff.
"Should mobile operators join in, we can provide disaster alerts to them for free for redistribution to their subscribers. OpenCARE also gives public information to radio and TV stations, the print media as well as to the public at large so that the public is informed of the latest development as the situation goes," he said.
At the moment, Inet is testing the service with five relief agencies in Thailand. More participants will be added to further test OpenCARE in preparation for real emergency situations, according to Trin.
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