Is there any world-wide real time catastrophe information system?

Question

Disasters happens, in this situations information is everything.

Is there any information system that works worldwide and would:

Notify the possible victims that the something is coming (in cases it is possible to figure out before)
Provide useful information during/after the catastrophe:
- water sources in case of fire/lack of water
- missing person reports
- damaged area information
- where to get help, what help is on the way
- etc...

Are you looking for something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Alerting_Protocol — fgregg, May 09 '13 at 08:22
This is an interesting project from US, but I do not want to limit to their ideas — RSFalcon7, May 09 '13 at 08:44
Google's people finder might be something you'd be interested in. — John, May 09 '13 at 10:55
@johnthexiii yup... it is actually some of the things that I have in mind when I asked the question, but I choose to wait for the community answers because you guys could have better answers them mine, and I just know had some ideas not a decent answer — RSFalcon7, May 09 '13 at 11:15

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited May 09 '13 at 09:18

6

As far as I know there is no system in use that would alert people before the disaster.

To all the other questions, quite a lot of countries have adopted Sahana Eden, that does all the tasks related to the Management of the Disaster, including all the information you have putted there and a lot more...

It has been deployed in large disaster scenarios and it is "as good as it gets", also it complies with UN Standards!

edited May 09 '13 at 09:18

RSFalcon7

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answered May 09 '13 at 08:08

Antonio Cunha Santos

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Could you please add more information about the Sahana Eden project as well as a link? Sounds interesting! – Patrick Hoefler May 09 '13 at 09:02
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I'm not sure it is correct to say that you can't alert before a disaster. In Japan they have warning systems for earthquakes. Since an these take a matter of seconds to propagate across the country, they are able to make a message appear immediately on everyone's mobile phones allowing them to get under a table or out of a building. In addition, their bullet trains to stop dead. – D Read May 10 '13 at 11:31

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered May 09 '13 at 09:29

The two most promising open source solutions for disaster management seem to be Sahana Eden and Ushahidi. To quote from their respective websites:

Sahana Eden:

Sahana Eden is an Open Source Humanitarian Platform which can be used to provide solutions for Disaster Management, Development, and Environmental Management sectors.

Ushahidi Platform:

You can use the Ushahidi Platform for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.

According to this overview article on Sahana Eden, the two tools can even be integrated:

Sahana Eden is also able to integrate with other solutions and can provide a management/ticketing interface around crowd-sourced data - such as that collected in the Ushahidi incident mapping application.

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 23 '13 at 05:14

The Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System should address the alert part.

GDACS is a cooperation framework between the United Nations, the European Commission and disaster managers worldwide to improve alerts, information exchange and coordination in the first phase after major sudden-onset disasters.

As for the coordination of relief etc, I don't think there's a worldwide system for that. The closest I can think of would be the UN OCHA humanitarian response sites.

Is there any world-wide real time catastrophe information system?

3 Answers3