Study and Construction of the Rock Engineering Data Exchange and Sharing Framework

Data exchange and sharing is a key issue in the current informatization of rock engineering, and its advancement is constrained by various factors, particularly distributed heterogeneous environment and the lack of uniform data exchange formats. To address this need this paper presents the Rock Engineering data Exchange and sharing Framework (REEF), which adopts service-oriented architecture (SOA) and uses the rock engineering markup language (REML) as the standard exchange language. This REEF framework covers the main functions of data exchange and sharing in its domain, which can be used as the universal solution to reduce the difficulty of the industrial integration of rock engineering, and it provides support to the standardization and digitization in the field.

Complexity and Usability of Voice-Enabled Alerting and Situational Reporting Decoupled Systems

Telephone calls are the predominant telecommunication mode in Sri Lanka (Zainudeen et al). Leveraging low cost voice-based applications for disaster communication would be acceptable and sustainable. The findings in this paper are from an experiment concerning interactive voice for connecting community-based emergency field operatives with their central emergency coordination hub. Challenge was in interchanging the Freedom Fone (FF) Interactive Voice Response (IVR) generated, Sinhala and Tamil language speech data with the text-based ’Sahana’ disaster management system for analysis and decision support. Human interactions with the two decoupled software systems to accomplish the sequence of tasks, point to instabilities. Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL), a XML-based, interoperable content standard was adopted for mediation between the two disparate systems. Low quality voice data resulting in incomplete information was a barrier to automating transformations between the FF IVR and Sahana. Replacing these processes with human procedures significantly degrades the reliability. This paper discusses the complexities, usability and utility shortcomings discovered through controlled-exercises, in Sri Lanka.