There will be a need for synergy and synchronization with ADPC's other
activities. It will also be important to make full use of resources available.
The project necessarily also needs to take account of practical constraints
of staffing and time,
9.1 AIT/ADPC's Information Management Resources and Capacities
AIT as a university has a well developed engineering and scientific
library service, and a well-resourced university computing service. Both
continue to evolve to exploit a range of new technologies. ADPC itself
has a comprehensive library collection on a wide range of emergency and
mitigation topics, and excellent workgroup computing resources. ADPC is
connected to the AIT computer network, and has full external Internet access.
AUDMP's information resources, as a core element of the ADPC system, are
well-chosen, and provide an outstanding basis for a regional information
service at this level. The AUDMP also benefits considerably from the close
proximity of the UNEP Grid GIS project, which is one of the most technically
developed in Asia. AUDMP staff are technically experienced, computer-literate,
forward looking, and above all creative, which taken together gives an
excellent basis for the information component of the project.
ADPC has technical constraints in several areas. One notable constraint
is Internet bandwidth. AIT's Internet connection is very limited in bandwidth
in comparison with US and European institutions working on similar problems
- unfortunately this is a problem shared by all universities in Thailand,
and may take some time to resolve, although a new communications satellite
terminal built at AIT for UNEP-Grid may at some stage offset some of these
limitations. Second, ADPC itself has limited GIS software experience and
skills, although the skills themselves are readily available within AIT
as a whole. Third, ADPC lacks the resources for rapid computer application
development internally, including multimedia products and WWW applications.
Some of the needed skills are available from within the university.
