While a national disaster-proof communication network did not come out of the 2004 Tsunami in southern Thailand, one relative success story was that of OpenCare, a set of protocols and a data clearing house for disaster information coordination.

 

Seven years on, its founder, former Internet Thailand CEO and philanthropist Trin Tantsetthi, reflected on how far the project has come and how far it has yet to go to help in times of need.

 

OpenCare is the adoption of standards based Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) to help break down the silos inherent in government with plug-ins to translate data to and from the format required by all its users. It is not a center and the protocol means that there is no center for maximum redundancy.

 

A simple example is how the Interior Ministry will see a person, or a victim as name, address and ID number. An emergency responder will list name, blood group, details of trauma and hospital ward. This is how the project started, by correlating the injuries and deaths from the 2004 tsunami to provide clean, reliable information.

 

Later, it has been expanded to locations, be it for floods or earthquakes, that can be accessed in whatever format the partner organization wants. In other words, an XML schema for emergencies that allows information to be blended together. It is the integration of government from the fringes rather than a dictated, top-down approach that is doomed to failure.

 

A lot of the emphasis is on getting qualified, clean data into the system with much of the focus being on who and which organization offered the data.

 

Without such a network, the more agencies involved in disaster relief, the more channels of communication there will need to be and communications quickly gets overwhelmed and errors propagate through the network.