Sunday, August 27, 2006

Testing Disaster Response This Is Only a Drill: In California, Testing Technology in a Disaster Response. In San Diego, technology companies, nongovernmental agencies, and the Pentagon held a five-day test of a new set of digital tools for responding to disaster. By JOHN MARKOFF. [NYT > Technology] The writer observed that competing companies worked side-by-side, and the valuable social networks were created. Social networks would be really helpful in a disaster. I would hope that the right people know resources to call for certain technologies. The NY Times article also observed that rivals Microsoft and Google worked together. Their drill started with emergency workers overwhelmed and "government agencies unable to cope. " In the State of California's case, in any disaster, one would hope the diverse departments would be sharing and working together. Specifically interesting, sharing digital satellite maps relied on a Microsft-designed system call Simple Sharing Extensions, about which they wrote:  "It has been built on industry standards, like the Web protocol known as Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, which was design to enable one-way data streams." Hooray! On another subject, this weekend some design time and thought I had involved being sure that data I'm gathering and developing would reside in sharable formats, be backed up, recoverable and be accessible for a period of time yet to be defined. 9:35:18 PM    comment []

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