Collaboration to aid disaster management

Internet Thailand (INET)'s first president and chief executive Trin Tantsetthi

After twelve years of working toward helping people and businesses get efficient Internet access, Internet Thailand (INET)'s first president and chief executive Trin Tantsetthi made a life-transforming choice when he decided to quit the coveted post and volunteered to work full-time at the OpenCARE Foundation.

OpenCARE stands for Open exchange for Collaborative Activities in Response to Emergency. The foundation is being set up. Its role is to provide technology infrastructure, solutions and software to facilitate the operations of emergency-response organisations, not only in Thailand but across the world, to be able to work with each other effectively.

The concept of OpenCARE, formed by 48-year-old Trin, was incubated by INET since 2004 when the tsunami hit Thailand. At that time, Trin was inspired to develop tools to help facilitate sharing of information between emergency organisations, despite working with different formats and platforms, in order to help people get access to the right information in a timely fashion.

OpenCARE is a scalable information infrastructure that aims at providing better coordination for disaster management. It can be also used in less turbulent times to disseminate information among various incompatible systems and desktop clients.

It ties together systems that use different information structures by means of plug-in implementations that bi-directionally translate each piece of information into a worldwide emergency-alert standard called Oasis EDXL. Consequently, systems that could never talk to each other are able to share information and work together. Alerts can be from various applications, such as lists of disaster victims, hospital patients, camp or shelter rosters, severe weather warnings and maps of risky areas.

"This is a new step for the country in using high-end technology for public safety and saving a lot of money by developing our own technology," Trin said.

Trin has turned a basic idea into a functional system, which is operated by INET. One of the objectives of the project is to establish a central information database server hosted at INET's Internet data centre. Another objective is to develop a software tool called Emergency Data eXchange Language (EDXL), which is a suite of specific message standards that are designed for Internet Protocol-based data communications between emergency-response organisations. EDXL is compatible with most existing and planned networks as well as data systems at all emergency-response organisations.

EDXL will accomplish this goal by focusing on the standardisation of specific messaging interfaces to facilitate emergency communication and coordination.

The OpenCARE network was officially launched on December 19 last year to be able to coordinate emergency response on a non-profit basis.

The project received research funding support from the National Electronic and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) and is capable of effective communication and full-scale coordination.

OpenCARE's operational costs will be supported by the National Telecommunication Commission for the next three years.