We had a fantastic two weeks at Camp Roberts and accomplished a great deal for Sahana. This included the use of a $400 (two years ago price) eeePC/Netbook as our primary data collection server, pulling WMS layers from mosaiced and geo-referenced UAV and satellite imagery of the Camp Roberts experiment site, configured an SMS gateway running on a Windows-based server using Cygwin and SMSTools and a Nokia 3220 phone to send and receive SMS messages from Sahana, an Android application to send in structured SMS messages to Sahana with embedded GPS coordinates, exporting of a KML feed from Sahana to Google earth to name a few of the new functionality we added.
The new SMS capabilities which I worked on gives Sahana the ability to serve as an incredibly powerful crowdsourcing and disaster situation awareness application. New SMS functionality included:
- A new format for a structured SMS message to be sent from any cell phone to Sahana.
- The ability to register a user name to a cellphone number.
- The mapping of the SMS messages to a DHS symbolset of incident information based on feature class reported by the Android and SMS message.
- We developed the ability to poll the Sahana server and pull information about the last known location of a registered Sahana user
- Or the search of the last know report based on a keyword
You can find the full details and pictures on Mark's talksahana post here:
