About CAMS
Building climate resilience
CAMS is a critical asset management system developed as part of a voluntary effort, led by ARISE-US, a private-sector advisory group to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), and TerminusDB.Open source for good
The project is open source and is focused on providing a data-driven system to help islands, cities, and communities become disaster resilient. It does this by storing all critical asset data and the asset dependencies so a region understands not only what its critical assets are, but how one asset could impact other assets and the cascading effect of asset failures.
A top-level view of CAMS
CAMS is a data-driven mobile and desktop application. It is used to plan and respond to disasters to show the impact of critical assets and the cascading failure chains in the event of a catastrophe. The application is designed to work on and offline to ensure usefulness in the event of an incident where power and connectivity are lost.
The application is designed to:
- Build an inventory of all the region’s critical assets and the relevant data associated with them, for example, geographical coordinates.
- Capture key contact information for assets – This could include multiple people for a power plant, through to a school caretaker who may have the keys to the school and need to be contacted to open it up as a place of shelter.
- Capture data on disaster severity and impact. These can range from cybersecurity threats to natural disasters and each has differing levels of criteria in terms of impact.
- Plot relationships, spatial and dependency, between critical assets to identify failure chains.
Provide the ability to highlight the impact on critical assets and their failure chains based on the severity and type of disaster.
Users can then:
- Input and edit data via a user interface to keep assets updated.
- Automate data input from other databases.
Import data from flat files. - Identify failure chains using a browser-based desktop application and mobile app. Users will be able to use either a map GUI to identify and plot risks and their dependencies or a form-based app.
- Provide the output of failure chains to other teams such as emergency control rooms, government officials, and risk analysis tools/teams.
Technology
CAMS is built on TerminusDB which is an open-source document graph database. The database itself enables you to build quickly with the simplicity of JSON documents and turn objects into powerful knowledge graphs – perfect for critical asset relationships.
For more information about the front and backend technology, visit the CAMS GitHub repo.
Are you interested in helping? We'd love to welcome you to contribute.
If you’re interested in helping good people, learning new technologies, and working with other like-minded folks, volunteer for the CAMS open-source project. We’re seeking backend and frontend developers, marketing professionals, and anyone else interested in spreading the word about it.
