OGC  Selects Planet Crust as Contributor to Disaster Pilot 2021

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), a major global location information and geospatial standards organization that aims to connect people, communities, and technology to solve global challenges and address everyday needs, has selected Planet Crust as a contributor to its Disaster Pilot 2021 project.

Disaster Pilot 2021, which follows on the success of Disaster Pilot 2019, aims to explore and test key state-of-the-art technologies in regard to end-to-end information flow related to all phases of disaster management, with an emphasis on first responders and other end users.

The Pilot’s goals are ambitious, especially in light of the complex and varied nature of disasters, which comprise both natural events such as flooding, landslides, tsunamis and pandemics, as well as human-made disasters such as chemical leaks, nuclear power station breaches and mass violence. To complicate things further, disasters often overlap with one another and increase the difficulty of response measures – for example, the recent flooding and increasing Covid infections in the US state of Louisiana.

The structure of Disaster Pilot 2021 is simple. It focuses on categorising data into Analysis Ready Data (ARD), Decision Ready Information (DRI) and Actionable Indicators. But that’s where the simplicity ends.

Analysis Ready Data can be accessed from thousands of satellite observation sources, resources in the air such as planes, helicopters and drones, first responders on the ground, census data, medical records, etc. Just cataloging what’s available globally in the first place is a large undertaking.  

In addition, local economic, political and social elements play a major role in determining the expertise available on the ground and the level of risk awareness and preparedness. Having access to data is one thing. Assessing the gaps in that data, the reliability of the data and knowing what to do with it is another. 

Planet Crust’s role in the Pilot is to help build a model of cataloging and search technology on its Corteza low-code platform. This involves using the Corteza Integration Gateway to connect with any data source and Corteza Discovery to search the data. It also involves using Corteza’s upcoming semantic web data standardization capabilities to publish structured data so that people can reliably find critical, and often life-saving, data on common search engines such as Google and Bing.

However, Planet Crust intends to go further than this and also explore how the Corteza platform and its federated cloud data sharing capabilities could be used to encourage collaboration between countries, while at the same time protecting individual nations’ digital and data sovereignty.

Corteza’s Disaster Pilot 2021 catalog technology will allow for self-hosted, searchable public and private data layers that can be federated at the sole discretion of the data owner. It will also be possible for a country’s disaster response administration to combine federated public data with sensitive national data, such as critical infrastructure or military data, without breaching data security protocols.

In addition, the fact that Corteza is 100% free and open-source will serve to give all countries and organizations across the globe access to the same quality data management tools they need to improve the quality and timeliness of the information available to their own and other disaster response teams around the world.

Planet Crust is the creator and driving force behind Corteza – a fully accessible, 100% open-source, 100% API-centric, entirely standards and best-practice oriented low-code platform. With Corteza, Planet Crust helps software providers, business enterprises, governments, NGOs and public sector organizations of all types across the world connect and transform their data and then use that data to build the applications they need to power their organizational processes.

Planet Crust is the creator and driving force behind Corteza, a 100% open-source low-code software platform that lets you import data from any source and use intuitive drag-and-drop tools to create custom applications for your unique needs.