Sahana and me at ISCRAM 2007, Delft, Netherlands

My latest trip was to the wonderfully beautiful Netherlands. ISCRAM 2007, the conference on crisis response and management, was held in Delft, Netherlands from the 13th to 17th May, 2007. Thus I made my way cross country, to present my research paper “GIS integration in the Sahana disaster management system”, which was also co-authored by David Bitner and Ravindra de Silva.
ISCRAM consisted of the perfect audience for Disaster and Crisis Management. The participants included specialists, academics and practitioners in this space, and thus Sahana was welcome with open hands. This being my first time at ISCRAM, I was suprised and honored by the large community revolving around disaster management, crisis management, and related ontologies. There were many ongoing research projects, and many other implementations too, as solutions to various aspects in this space.
My presenatation, which was presented under the “Geographical Information Science for Crisis Management” Session, supposedly went well. I was honored to be congratulated on the outcome of it by many greats, including Dr. Eric Rasmussen and Prof. Ralph Morelly, amongst others. The audience was supportive, and the questions were great. There was also a comment that another group was going to use the same architecture that the Sahana GIS uses, to solve many real world problems that arise.
There was also supposedly a BOF discussion on ontology, which I with many others managed to miss However, I hope this would turn into a collaborative effort, with participants from many diverse communities chipping in. All in all, ISCRAM was a success, and a great gathering. Special thanks to the organizers and the participants for making this a raving success.