2008:Archivista

The 2004 Building Act introduced a requirement for territorial authorities, such as local councils, to create guidelines on dealing with earthquake prone buildings in their region. The goal of this project is to develop an application for the Auckland City Council to support the input, storage and analysis of all information necessary to assess a building for earthquake-proneness, and which can generate PDF reports of the assessment. This will involve creating a database to hold all the related information, such as physical attributes of each building and supporting photographs, and an application to support the data entry and display. The major challenges are that the system must be usable by assessors on a laptop onsite with no Internet connection, and then the data gathered be merged into a centralised database. The progress on this project so far has been to decisions on technology to use, such as using JSP web pages to allow input and display of data, and a Firebird database to store it, and facilitate the merging. Additionally, prototype implementations of the application have been developed using Swing (superseded) and JSP. Further work will involve finishing the prototype and refining it based on input from other stakeholders in the project, such as part 4 Civil Engineering students who are analysing buildings as part of their 4th year project. It will also involve implementing the synchronisation solution.