Current status of IAA (I Am Alive) system and IAA alliance

This paper describes an overview of the IAA (I Am Alive) system, which was originally developed in the WIDE project from 1995, and its current status. The IAA system is a distributed database system which contains victims' safety information. When a disaster occurs, victims can register their safety status information to the database and anyone who knows the victim's name can check his/her situation at any time. The IAA system has many user interfaces to accept any kind of user requests, e.g. Web client interface, windows client interface, fax interface using OCR/OMR, phone interface using DTMF tone and i-mode mobile phone interface. The IAA system also consists of many database nodes called "IAA clusters" to avoid paralysis of the system and network from a huge number of simultaneous requests. IAA clusters are located at deferent places and users' requests are distributed among them. All IAA clusters are loosely coupled by the IAA transport mechanism and synchronize victim information among them. In 1998, a prototype implementation was developed, so victim data format and request/response format between the client program and IAA cluster was established. Many organizations started to develop other implementations of the IAA system such as the CRL-IAA system, Monster-IAA system and NetStar-IAA system. The IAA Alliance was organized in 2002 to examine interoperability of these implementations and exchange information between developers. This organization also introduces the IAA system to many organizations including local government and gathers feedback from them to developers. We also introduce activity of this organization briefly.