Standards Aid Incident Command
Written by Steven Ramage
GIF 2010 Volume: 8 Issue: 6 (September)
The Department of Homeland Security’s Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS) program is advancing quickly through a series of pilot projects that are seeding widespread use of the UICDS open architecture. A key factor in that progress has been Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards specified in the architecture, which have helped overcome interoperability obstacles to implementation.
UICDS is “a blueprint for managing and sharing incident information across state and local jurisdictional lines and with DHS and other federal agencies,” Acting Under Secretary Bradley Buswell of the Science and Technology Directorate told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security last year.
“This national architecture, a response to issues identified in the 9/11 Commission Report, is aimed at establishing a set of standards to which solution developers for incident management tools will adhere in order to ensure that recipients of DHS funds at the state/local level will procure incident information management systems that comply with uniform standards in order to solve the information interoperability problems,” Buswell said.
An open and freely usable architecture sponsored by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, UICDS is being executed through a contract with prime contractor SAIC.
The UICDS project has successfully completed two major demonstrations of a prototype reference implementation of the architecture, and will soon undertake a much larger pilot. UICDS has been proven by its reference implementation to be stable and ready for pilot deployment in operational settings.
The first demonstration was hosted in 2009 by Virginia Department of Emergency Management at the Virginia Emergency Operations Center in Richmond. The UICDS prototype implementation integrated information from 23 commercial, government and academic technology provider applications, demonstrating how this information is shared among applications and the jurisdictions they serve. The demonstration included six incident vignettes occurring in a simulated East Coast storm, with each scenario showing information sharing among five to seven applications used by police, fire, emergency medical, emergency management and other response organizations.
The second major demonstration was held in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Exercise and Simulation Center in Washington, D.C., this spring. The demonstration showed information sharing across four UICDS cores representing federal, state and local governments. Live trafficaccident information was part of the demonstration, which included more than a dozen applications selected for their current use by agencies in the national capital region.
Next, the project will pilot UICDS in 120 locations in 21 states. When the UICDS team stages a pilot in an area of multiple jurisdictions, one or more UICDS cores are each attached to roughly a dozen applications. With 120 pilots, the UICDS team will have connected 300 to 400 application instances. A pilot could involve a group of states, a state with all of its counties, or a city with all its emergency response teams. By the time this multi-location pilot is finished, the project organizers believe they will have tested almost every configuration of applications in use in U.S. jurisdictions today.
Another goal of the pilot is to show that different types of partners can lead such datasharing efforts. SAIC will train a national laboratory, a university and nonprofit organization— the All Hazards Consortium—to deploy UICDS implementations similar to the reference implementation used in the Virginia demo. UICDS participants anticipate that thousands of UICDS cores will go online in the next few years.
UICDS CORE
A UICDS core is a Web server hosting a set of Web services based on open standard interfaces and payload encodings. Encodings include the OGC Geography Markup Language and OGC SensorML encoding standards, as well as the Emergency Data eXchange Language (EDXL), Common Alerting Protocol and others.
Those services connect applications to share a portion of their information with other similarly connected applications. The one-to-many relationships take place through the UICDS core. For example, perhaps a dozen applications in a city connect to a core in that city.
Separately, a number of county applications may also reside in or near the city. Most of the county’s data stays in the county’s core. But by the terms of an agreement set forth through simple configuration of an agreement service, bi-directional updates happen automatically when an incident occurs. The cores are peer to peer, and the applications connect to the cores in a star network configuration.
About a dozen standards are specified in the UICDS architecture. Several major OGC geospatial standards (the OGC Web Map Service, Web Feature Service and Web Processing Service Interface Standards), along with the OGC Sensor Observation Service Interface Standard, make up the geospatial baseline.
“The OGC standards are the integral baseline for everything done on geospatial data exchange,” explained Jim Morentz, UICDS outreach director. “As a result of their presence and pervasiveness, they have saved time and enabled that critical portion of usage to be implemented very efficiently.”
OGC standards play a vital role in winning the support of the provider community, Morentz said. “When we talk to companies, we find there is very strong interest in UICDS. We know of more than 130 companies that have applied to download the software development kit. Sixty percent of these companies use geospatial visualization, and OGC standards overcome the biggest hurdle the companies face in implementations.
“When UICDS project managers ask providers if their interfaces implement OGC standards, most respond affirmatively, and they are delighted to learn that that’s all that’s necessary to enable interoperability,” he continued. “It’s not an overstatement to say that OGC standards are the key standards that have spread acceptance of UICDS among technology providers, solutions providers and user agencies.”
For non-geospatial incident and resource information, UICDS specifies the emergency management community’s EDXL suite of message standards, which includes a resource management component and a distribution element for message routing. To meet the needs of the law enforcement community, UICDS implemented the Law Enforcement Information Technology Standards Committee suite of standards and, in some cases, made them interoperable with EDXL exchanges. This cross-standard exchange is made possible by UICDS use of the UCore Digest (https://www.ucore.gov/ucore/node/11) to summarize disparate information in a standard format.
The baseline standard encoding language used to configure the data is eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and thus the XMLbased OGC Geography Markup Language Encoding Standard provides the geospatial XML data encoding. All the UICDS outputs are XML work products.
The geospatial feature dictionary used in UICDS is the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). The actual dialect or standards to configure those words came out of a set of standards, including OGC standards and EDXL. Not every data model pertains to NIEM, and not every data model is composed of NIEM feature names and relationships. But EDXL has a migration and convergence project for NIEM, so more and more data models fit together as NIEM becomes more widely adopted. Where there isn’t a standard, the UICDS project will build it out of the NIEM dictionary.
INFORMATION SHARING
UICDS is a clear and inexpensive answer for information sharing. But many jurisdictions all around the country have ongoing information-sharing projects, driven partly by their own requirements and partly by DHS mandates. The one-to-many UICDS architecture enhances these existing projects by allowing a company or agency with a federated search, an aggregation of GeoRSS feeds, or a legacy decision support system built on a geospatial database to quickly consume new sources of information that are published on UICDS.
One attractive feature is that the UICDS connection isn’t going to overload those other sources with irrelevant updates. Rather, the updates will occur only when there is an incident to which the agency has subscribed. In this way, UICDS adds a level of intelligence that makes data sharing easier.
To provide and consume data from UICDS, an agency can quickly write agreements with all of its data-sharing partners. Often agencies and their developers are amazed to see how easily this works, after spending many months or even years building similar datasharing capabilities with just a few partners. Developers using the UICDS development kit have been very successful in implementing adapters into both new and existing datasharing programs that significantly multiply the value of those programs.
“An information-sharing architecture like UICDS depends on being able to connect to and interoperate with all kinds of information systems, sometimes quickly and in an ad hoc fashion,” Morentz noted. “Sharing geospatial information among various jurisdictions was previously one of the biggest obstacles to this kind of interoperability. But that problem is now largely solved, thanks to OGC standards built into UICDS that enable geospatial Web services to communicate.” ♦
Steven Ramage is executive director, marketing and communications, for the Open Geospatial Consortium.
