Open Tsunami Alert System
Monday, January 03, 2005
Introduction
In Bob Cringeley's column of 2004/12/30 Bob suggested the notion of a simple, non-governmental, open warning system for tsunamis. The advantages of doing this are many (read the column for Pete's sake) and the effort isn't really that great. This blog will serve as a central point for collecting information about a development effort for just such a system, called OTAS or the Open Tsunami Alerting System.
I will be writing more on this in a little while, so this is more or less a placeholder, but I want to lay down a few basic principles.
I will be writing more on this in a little while, so this is more or less a placeholder, but I want to lay down a few basic principles.
- OTAS will be platform independent and open source under the GNU Public LIcense (GPL). I'm no fanatic, so I'll listen happily to arguments for less restrictive licenses like the LGPL or BSD license, but at least right now a full GPL seems most appropriate.
- OTAS will be built so be simple, conservative, and correct. That is to say:
- simple --- the design wll be intentionally limited; rather than including complicated geophysical codes, we will concentrate on clarity and transparency.
- conservative --- if OTAS makes an error, we will design to fail safe and fail soft: we prefer issuing a false alert to failing to issue an alert.
- correct --- we will apply all available techniques to ensure that the released packages are as nearly error free as we can make them.
- OTAS will be decentralized. Geophysical or seismological data will be accepted from multiple sources (a later post will discuss some open sources of seismo data), and no notification site will be a "master". I currently am thinking about a peer-peer component of the architecture to provide for multiply redundant data paths.
posted by Charlie Martin # 10:52 AM 
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SEACOOS (seacoos.org), the Southeast Atlantic Coastal Ocean Observing System, is a model regional COOS node of the distributed Open IOOS (openioos.org). I am a contributor to the Data Management Coordinating Committee (DMCC) of SEACOOS. SEACOOS uses Iridium satellite communications from offshore platforms and hosts an information clearinghouse for Iridium applications. SEACOOS uses DODS (Java), PostGIS, MapServer, and Plone (Zope/Python) for physical oceanography applications. SEACOOS also collaborates with distributed OBIS nodes for biological data with whom we are involved with constructing ocean observing node toolkits in a transparent and open community. Please feel free to contact me at cbc at unc dot edu as I was pointed to your blog but will not be monitoring it.
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