Managing disaster

The South African National Disaster Management Centre (SANDMC) claims to be able to provide its worldwide users with a single, integrated view of all potential natural disaster hazards, vulnerabilities and risks, thanks, in large part, to the computational ability of Mathematica.

Mathematica is a numeric and symbolic programming language that gives users cross-sector computational abilities and is used by users from engineering and science through to design and education. webMathematica is an integration technology that allows Mathematica users to publish customized applications and functions to the Internet using java servlets, called mathlets. webMathematica is built around open standards, allowing for integration of Mathematica applications into existing Web sites, where users can gain access using any standard Java-capable browser.

The Disaster Management Centre, housed in the original Y2K management center at the National Department of Provincial and Local Government in Pretoria, draws together a range of natural phenomena data and publishes these to the Internet. Using webMathematica publishing tools, the SANDMC is able to provide on-the-fly analysis of the data directly to the Web interface at http://sandmc.pwv.gov.za/atlas/.

Heading the SANDMC project is system integrator and coordinator Dusan Sakulski. Sakulski has built up the monitoring systems of the center over a number of years and today operates what is claimed to be one of the most ICT-integrated disaster management centers in the world. "It is not that we manage more data than any other centers," says Sakulski, "but we offer more tightly integrated tools to manage potential hazards, vulnerability and risks - everything from floods and droughts, to offshore storms."

Sakulski says that the SANDMC plays an important role in early warning and assisting government and civil society organizations to plan and prepare for possible natural disasters. "The center is not here to replace individual services such as the SA Weather Service, but rather to play an overarching role in drawing together a range of information and drawing structure from the data that may be of use to other users.

"Mother nature is a very complex thing to understand and it takes enormous calculation power to begin to understand it. With webMathematica the task is greatly simplified," he says. Sakulski offers an example, saying that some of the drought analysis available on the site, for example, could take up to an hour to do by hand.

"With Mathematica the same analysis can be done in just a few seconds, and, because it is available via the Web, anyone can access these results or run their own computations." The system set-up also allows users to build simple indicators of very complex problems, making the information available to a much wider audience.

Integrates

"To produce this level of information and analysis you need a complex and powerful mathematical language and Mathematica is exactly that," continues Sakulski. He claims that the fact that Mathematica integrates both numeric and symbolic mathematics into a single tool makes the language very flexible and powerful.

SANDMC accesses data from around the country and internationally that includes analysis and data on rainfall patterns and catchment areas, radar images, as well as monitoring of offshore weather conditions for possible storms that are likely to hit the SA coast. The center is also the southern African distributor of NASA's satellite images.

"There has been a perception that Mathematica is simply a tool for mathematicians. This could not be further from the truth," says Clemens Dempers of Blue Stallion Technologies, SA reseller of the Mathematica range.

"The Disaster Management Centre is just one of many examples in which Mathematica is playing a pivotal part in a real-world analysis system that does a lot more than simply add up numbers. With webMathematica, SANDMC is able to provide a wide audience with easy access to complex data and graphical representations," he says.

But perhaps the center's most powerful tool is its ability to publish its collated data to the Internet, making it available to all agencies and people who require the information. Using webMathematica, Sakulski is able to publish the analysis functions he has developed directly to the Internet. So, for example, given the rainfall data collected over the past 80 years, the SANDMC site is able to calculate and graph patterns of rainfall by individual catchment area. Users are able to input their own requirements and webMathematica takes care of preparing the data into usable and manageable form.

"No-one else in the world has been able to perform on-the-fly live data analysis when it comes to disaster management," says Sakulski. "With Mathematica and webMathematica we are the first to be able to do this."