Overview of the Key UICDS Incident Management Web Services and their Standards
UICDS information sharing is based on the best practices and standards of the emergency management community. Standards are employed to compose data so that it can be transported through UICDS by web services.
UICDS divides its web services into Infrastructure Services and Domain Services. Infrastructure Services do all the behind-the-scenes processing while Domain Services serve as the external interfaces, applying those processes to information sharing for the homeland security mission.
UICDS enables participating organizations and jurisdictions (thorough their applications) to share many types of information including incidents, alerts, organizational structures, maps and geospatial displays, procedures and tasking, sensors, resources, and ICS forms for the Incident Action Plan. A summary of these services follows:
UICDS Incident Management Service Uses the NIEM Standard Incident Schema
The UICDS Incident Management Service allows clients to:
· create an incident
· update information about an incident
· share the incident with other UICDS cores
· close and archive the incident
The UICDS incident is defined by the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) incident schema. This schema is included in the payload of the UICDS Incident Work Product. Like all work products, a UCore Digest is created to summarize the payload. Thus, the NIEM incident description is provided in its entirety and the digest is provided to briefly summarize the incident.
Once an incident is created, it is given a UICDS-unique identifier so that additional information (such as command structure, work products, and maps) may be associated with it. The incident may then be shared with other UICDS Cores according to the conditions set forth in the UICDS Agreements Service.
UICDS Incident Command Service Supports NIMS ICS & MACS Structures
The Incident Command Service allows clients to create and modify organizational structures such as Incident Command System (ICS) and Multi-Agency Coordination System (MACS) structures. Roles (and therefore positions within the organizational structure) are represented by an instance of a UICDS Resource Profile.
There are not current data standards that define the ICS organizational structure as a data model. As the UICDS data exchange formats become better incorporated into application best practices, UICDS will support the submission of the ICS Work Product as a NIEM Information Exchange Package Documentation for consideration by the community.
UICDS Alert Service Uses the OASIS CAP Standard
The UICDS Alert Service allows UICDS Clients to create, update and cancel Common Alert Protocol (CAP) alert work products and share them across the UICDS network. The UICDS Alert Service currently uses the CAP version 1.1 specification. CAP is a message format for exchanging emergency alerts and public warnings over all kinds of networks. In UICDS, alerts may or may not be associated with a particular incident. A UICDS Incident may be created from a CAP alert through the UICDS Incident Management Service.
OASIS® is a not-for-profit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society.
UICDS Map Service Uses OGC Standards
The UICDS Map Service allows GIS applications to interact with a UICDS Core to manage map-related resources.
This UICDS model is based on the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Map Context specification. This allows the service to define Layers based on the OGC Web Feature Service and Maps based on the OGC Web Mapping Service. The UICDS Map Service supports operations to create, retrieve, update and delete map work products in UICDS.
The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.® (OGC) is a non-profit, international, voluntary consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services.
UICDS Tasking Service
The UICDS Tasking Service allows a client to create, update, query and delete a list of tasks for a resource. UICDS adheres to the National Incident Management System definition of a resource as a person, equipment, or place. To be tasked, such a resource must be represented by a Resource Instance. Each Resource Instance in the UICDS system can have a list of tasks for a given incident that is represented by a UICDS Work Product associated with the incident. This structure allows applications to: 1) define a set of Standard Operating Procedures and the people or equipment that will be used in responding to the SOP tasks 2) use UICDS to make the task assignments, 3) monitor updates by retrieving the UICDS Task Work Product, and 4) visualize the status of the incident response for the application end users.
To date, standards have not emerged to define data exchange for the SOP and tasking functions in emergency management.
UICDS Resource Management Service Uses OASIS Standards
The UICDS Resource Management Service allows a client to communicate with other external clients using Emergency Data Exchange Language-Resource Messaging (EDXL-RM) standard messages. UICDS distributes EDXL-RM messages that are part of the negotiation for a resource using the EDXL-Distribution Element (EDXL-DE) standard for routing across the UICDS network.
Two specific EDXL-RM messages, Request Resource and Commit Resource, are interpreted by UICDS and formed into Resource Management Work Products. This allows all applications subscribing to the incident to obtain a list of requested and committed resource for the incident. The applications can then, for example, offer to provide a requested resource or display the location of all committed resources on a map.
UICDS Incident Action Plan Service Uses NIMS ICS Forms
An Incident Action Plan (IAP) under the Incident Command System (ICS) consists of an aggregation of ICS forms that summarize steps to be taken in the next incident period. The UICDS IAP Service allows a client application to:
· create or retrieve an IAP
· create or retrieve ICS Forms
UICDS allows applications to compose ICS forms individually or to combine them into the Incident Action Plan and, using the IAP Work Product, to publish them to UICDS for subscribing applications to consume and use. The UICDS IAP Service also identifies the active (or current) IAP, allowing for collaboration on the IAP for the next period. Once approved, the active IAP is updated and made available to subscribing applications.
Currently, there are efforts underway in both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and in standards bodies to define ICS form data formats. When these standards emerge, UICDS will adopt them. Until then, UICDS enables the sharing of data modeled on the latest paper ICS forms available from DHS.
UICDS Sensor Service Uses the OGC SOS Standards
UICDS allows external sensors that are Open Geospatial Consortium Sensor Observation Specification (OGC-SOS) compliant to be registered as UICDS resources. Observations or measurements made by these sensors are used to support incident related activities.
The discovery process to identify sensors that are relevant to a particular UICDS incident involves interactions between UICDS applications and the sensor systems at several SOS levels. To reduce the need to repeat these steps, the information required to retrieve sensor observations is stored as UICDS Work Products that are associated with the incident. UICDS clients who are interested in retrieving the sensor observations for a given incident request these work products from the Sensor Service and use the retrieved information to request observations directly from the sensor system via the SOS interface.
What this means for an application is that instead of dozens or hundreds of sensor readings that an end-user needs to sort through, the application can identify and provide exactly the right individual sensor readings critical to making decisions during the incident.
The UICDS Sensor Service provides the ability for UICDS users to:
· create a Sensor Of Interest (SOI) work product
· delete an SOI work product
· update an SOI work product
· get an SOI work product with a specified work product ID
· get a list of SOI work products associated with a specified incident
Note that each SOI work product may contain retrieval information for one or more external sensors.
UICDS Broadcast Service Uses the OASIS EDXL-DE Standard
The UICDS Broadcast Service provides a mechanism to send messages to a set of selected UICDS resource instances. The message is an EDXL-DE message and as such can contain any content allowed by the EDXL-DE specification. Resource instances are identified as individual explictAddress elements in the EDXL-DE header. UICDS delivers these messages to the specified resource instances by adding them to the resource instance's notification queue.
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