Hi all,
I'm hoping maybe this idea exists as preconfigured components/modules somewhere?
I'm a member of a fire company (www.station31.org) and I just setup Drupal 6 for us, and converted some of our content from a Dreamweaver site.
When there is a 911 emergency in our town, our local Emergency Services Dispatch office sends out a notification/page on our audio pagers, summarizing the emergency and the location. All firefighters carry these pagers so they know when to respond.
The Dispatch office also sends out the same notifications as an SMS text message to members carrying a Cell Phone (who have registered their number with Dispatch). The text message includes fields such as:
FRM:dispatch@co.somerset.nj.us
MSG:FPF-FD:9035193:2009-05-09 08:39:50:FIRE ALARM:CRIMIANO RESD:FRANKLI-9 WOODHILL ST
Here's is a key to the above:
FRM is the email address the message was sent from (the actual "dispatch" email address depends on who at Dispatch sent the text)
MSG and everything after that, is the message. Colons (:) sometimes separate some of the fields, though they are not used consistently (see the date/time fields). Fields include:
FPF-FD - this is the abbreviation for our fire company (Franklin Park Fire-Fire Department)
9035193 - I believe this is the incident number
2009-05-09 08:39:50 - is the date and time
FIRE ALARM - is the type of issue. It may state CO ALARM or SMOKE CONDITION or something instead
CRIMIANO RESD - is the abbreviated name of who lives there and that it's a resident address (or business)
FRANKLI - is an abbreviation for the town (Franklin Park). However there are two zip codes that serve our area, so I'm not sure how that would effect something like Google Maps.
What we would like to see happen, is have the ability to receive these SMS messages via whatever method will work, onto our Drupal site. And then a Drupal module would display a map of the location on our Web site.
Does something like this exist?
Would the SMS Framework be a starting point for this?
Anyone willing to code this?
This could have wide impact for Emergency Services that also use Drupal Web sites.
Comments
Great application!
Hi darrennye. Drupal is a great place to start for something like this!
You can use a combination of SMS Framework (+receiver modules) and a Geolocation/mapping module. You will need some custom code to tie these together of course, but it's definitely possible.
The structure of the message will have to be consistent so that the parser can get the address and incident details. You would then feed the address into Google Maps or similar, providing additional information to improve the likelyhood of the address being identified first-time.
We are hoping to do something similar with an environmental agency in the Gambia.
~ap
Might be able to help
I would check out what Dev Seed is doing with slingshotsms
http://code.developmentseed.org/slingshotsms/dashboard
Which will integrate with Drupal with some work - not sure of details as we have not played with it yet.
My initial thoughts are if you can receive the SMS in Drupal then it's a matter of pulling apart that colon separated message body to get what you need to map it. We would need to see some more examples to determine if there is enough standardization between dispatchers to allow for any kind of reliability.
We also have a small nonprofit that helps to solve these kinds of problems for First Responders, so if you just want to brainstorm we would love to help out where we can. Just email me via this site.
Regards,
Coby
Metanomy.org
GeoChat + geoRSS
You might also look at InSTEDD's GeoChat (http://instedd.org), which puts out a GeoRSS feed. Their team recently worked with us on first responder field experiment, where they were able to set up a custom parser for SMS feeds. With some .NET hacking, parsing your format should be possible. GeoRSS would make it easy to display on any map.
Development Seed was at the same field experiment and their system worked quite nicely as well.