CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2015/oss S1501 OA

S1501: Integrating OCR

This page explains about the project to integrate the optical character recognition (OCR) in Sahana Eden, which enables the Eden to detect and identify the type-written data on the forms and store it in the database.

Introduction to Sahana

The Sahana Software Foundation was established as a non-profit organization in 2009. Sahana is dedicated to saving lives by providing information management solutions which can enable organizations to prepare and respond better to disasters. It was originally developed by Sri Lankan based IT Community who wanted to apply their talent towards helping their country recover from the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and Tsunami. It grew into a global open source project which is now supported by hundreds of volunteer contributions from different parts of the world. The community evolved and emerged to become the present Sahana Software Foundation.

Eden
Sahana Emergency Development Environment (EDEN) is a flexible humanitarian platform which can be deployed for critical humanitarian needs management either prior to or during a crisis. This is specifically built for the disaster management. The mission of Sahana Eden is “ To help alleviate human suffering by giving emergency managers, disaster response professionals and communities access to the information that they need to better prepare for and respond to disasters through the development and promotion of free and open source software and open standards. ” Eden has a rich feature set and be rapidly customized to adapt to existing processes and can also be integrated with existing systems. It can be accessed from the web or locally from a flash drive which allows it to be used even in areas with poor internet connectivity. Sahana Eden contains a number of modules which can be configured to provide a wide range of functionality. Some of its main capabilities are : 1. Organization Registry 2. Shelter 3. Project Tracking. 4. Inventory 5. Assets 6. Assessments 7. Scenarios & Events 8. Mapping 9. Messaging

Eden is easy to install and maintain. Probably this is the main reason it has been successfully deployed during many disasters and have been of great help to the disaster management authorities.