GeoBliki

Link: GeoBliki

GeoBliki enables a form of Open Source Disaster Recovery, through a combination of wiki, blogging, geospatial sensor-data network connectivity, and social network analysis/trust metrics. The whole system is built on Ruby on Rails technology.

This is an ambitious project, that ties together a network of data from satellites from NASA’s Earth Observing System. This live data is overlaid onto geospatial data that was scraped from United States Geological Survey, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a few NASA Goddard online sources. This was then fed into data nodes, and users subscribe to GeoRSS /Atom1.0 feeds.

Users can then look at the data in chronological “weblog” display (built with the Typo blogging engine). Or, users can look at data through a “GeoWiki” view. This groups data along areas of interest, then displays data overlayed on a map (built on Hieraki2). Feedback and discussion is possible on the GeoWiki pages.

A forum system is employed using the Ruby Opinion forum engine. This is intended to be a persistent feedback record, and a space for the different communities that use the system to communicate. An IM system is also employed via Wildfire.

Access to the system is RBAC (Role Based Access Control). Permissions are inherited when users login based upon assigned roles (although a GeoBliki system could be recreated that does not employ RBAC). They use the Yadis protocol and the OpenID 1.1, and plan to also FOAF for social network analysis capability.

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