UICDS Update Archives

The Department of Homeland Security Information Sharing Technology Program

UICDS™ keeps you better informed so you can make better decisions.  UICDS is information sharing middleware for NIMS incident management that continuously receives and shares standardized data among many agencies during an incident.   Your everyday application gets from UICDS exactly the data you need to use, visualize, process, improve, decide, and then share back through UICDS to keep everyone informed.

Because UICDS is middleware, there is no new user interface to learn, no cost to obtain it, and you retain complete control over your data.  You get notified when an agency has provided new or updated incident data and you share your data with whom you want instantaneously and in the background without any disruption to your operation.

• Focus on Incident Operations
• UICDS Update Year in Review   (1/8/2013)
• A comprehensive look at progress made with UICDS across the country in 2012 leading up to the "graduation" of UICDS from R&D to full operations.
• Meet the National Institute for Hometown Security, Home for the New UICDS Consortium  (11/20/2012)
• Leading the transition to the UICDS consortium will be the National Institute For Hometown Security (NIHS). On the UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call this Thursday, we will learn more about NIHS from Ewell Balltrip, President/CEO of NIHS. NIHS was selected to form the UICDS consortium because it has a proven track record in (1) developing new technologies and devices through qualified academic research and (2) facilitating the successful deployment of the technologies to protect community-based critical infrastructure.
  
• UICDS "Graduates" from DHS S&T to Operational Status with Open Source Consortium Forming  (11/20/2012)
• Early in 2013, UICDS will transition from a Department of Homeland Security, Directorate of Science and Technology, research and development program as fully operational information sharing middleware that will be managed by an open source consortium.
• California Earthquake Clearinghouse Shakeout Technology Exercise  (11/7/2012)
• The California Earthquake Clearinghouse conducted the second of its planned six exercises employing Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS) as its information sharing middleware and SpotOnResponse as its mobile situational awareness and trusted crowd-sourcing application.
• Michigan UICDS Implementation Tracks National Guard Response to County Emergency Exercise  (10/23/2012)
• A simulated emergency occurred in St. Clair County where it was entered into the "Resilient" incident management software which was developed by IDV Solutions for the Department of Homeland Security, Directorate of Science and Technology for St. Clair County, Michigan, Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.
• Port Security and UICDS  (9/26/2012)
• The University of Southern California Center of Excellence for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) is developing the Port Security Risk Analysis and Resource Allocation System (PortSec), a decision-support system used to assess tactical and strategic risks to port operations and reduce risk from terrorist attacks. UICDS is an integral part of PortSec enabling researchers and developers to focus on data analysis not the data collection which UICDS does so well
• Naval Postgraduate School Exercise Shows GIS, Remote Sensing, and UICDS as Tools to Improve Earthquake Response   (8/22/2012)
• Chris Clasen of the Remote Sensing Center at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California discusses last week's earthquake exercise and technology demonstration that employed UICDS and a host of other innovative hardware and software for emergency response.
• Back to School Special: Learn How to Get Information Sharing Middleware Free from the Department of Homeland Security  (9/11/2012)
• September is Back to School time - no matter how old we are, the fall brings reminders of school days. So, the UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call begins this new school year with a comprehensive look at UICDS. Drawn from more than two years of tutorials, this session highlights all the major components of UICDS - operational and technical.
• Launching the Dot Mil User Group for New Military-Civilian Collaboration  (7/10/2012)
• Information sharing between military and civilian emergency response organizations and among emergency responders is critical to the successful support of the operation by military equipment and personnel. As a result, UICDS has been the middleware selected by several military organizations and has been the subject of investigation by many others.
• Business Emergency Operations Center UICDS Pilot  (2/7/2012)
• Michael Chumer, PhD, is Director of the Technical Committee of the NJ Business Force's Business Emergency Operations Center (BEOC) as well as Director of the NJIT Emergency Management and Business Continuity graduate program. Mike talks about using UICDS in his on-going programs on information sharing.
• Looking Back at 2011 and Wishing You Well for 2012  (1/12/2012)
• This is a review of 2011 highlighting all the technical and operational accomplishments achieved by the many UICDS Pilots and UICDS Technology Providers across the country.
  - UICDS Tools
  - Mobile Apps for Android and iPad
  - South Carolina Palmetto Vision Pilot
  - Richmond CAD Pilot
  - IPAWS Interoperability
  - NLE 11 UICDS Technology Showcase
  - Military-Civilian Information Sharing Through UICDS
  - Exercises, Demos, and Pilots
• Pandemic Response with UICDS: University of Louisville Pilot  (12/13/2011)
• Robert Kelly of the University of Louisville will discuss the use of UICDS in the Real-Time Decision Support System (RTDSS) for Healthcare and Public Health Sector Protection. The project is a collaboration among several universities in Kentucky and Missouri with the support of the National Institute for Hometown Security and DHS Directorate of Science and Technology. The goal of the project is to develop a decision support system to provide pandemic response staff with decision support tools to assist them with managing the response.
• Common Operational Data: A New Way of Thinking About Information Sharing Through UICDS   (10/11/2011)
• Diane Vaughan, the GIS Manager for the California Emergency Management Agency, has been engaged in balancing specific missions with geospatial visualization in her systems development. When she finished her first extended discussion on UICDS, Diane summed up the essence of UICDS when she called it "Common Operational Data."
• UICDS Pilot in Support of Palmetto Vision Project in South Carolina   (7/12/2011)
• One of the largest and most comprehensive UICDS Pilots is taking place as part of the Palmetto Vision statewide information management project in South Carolina. Sponsored by the South Carolina Emergency Management Division, Palmetto Vision will distribute to every county in the state an emergency management Common Operating Picture tool set. Information sharing among the counties is enabled by UICDS.
• UICDS CAD-to-CAD Information Sharing Pilot in Richmond   (6/22/2011)
• One of the "early adopter" UICDS Technology Providers, Intergraph®, in cooperation with Augusta Systems and the City of Richmond, has made UICDS the center of information sharing between the Intergraph computer-aided dispatch used by Richmond and other Virginia organizations.
• View From The Field - Thoughts On the UICDS NLE 11 Technology Showcase  (6/7/2011)
• Richard Wells of the Las Vegas Office of Emergency Management was one of many people who took advantage of our offer to observe the UICDS NLE 11 Technology Showcase through either Google Earth or the ESRI Flex Viewer. Below are excerpts from Richard's note on the Technology Showcase.
• UICDS NLE 11 Technology Showcase Featured   (5/24/2011)
• Employing several UICDS deployments, including a UICDS deployment to the Cloud, the UICDS NLE 11 Technology Showcase showed the scalability of the UICDS peer-to-peer architecture and the accessibility of many information technologies to the UICDS middleware. Sharing occurred among cores located from coast-to-coast and among governments, private sector organizations, and non-governmental agencies.
• UICDS NLE 11 Technology Showcase - Sharing Effects and Response  (5/20/2011)
• The NLE 11 focus turned from life-saving and discovery of losses to responding in the final two days of the exercise. The UICDS Pilots and Technology Providers continued to identify incidents and make their planned responses, sharing all of it through UICDS in the NLE UICDS 11 Technology Showcase.
• An Update on Two Days of the UICDS NLE 11 Technology Showcase Using UICDS in the Cloud  (5/18/2011)
• For the first time, UICDS "software as a service" has been deployed to the Cloud to support NLE 11 activities. This deployment leverages cloud-based technologies such as scalability and accessibility that could be employed to ensure information sharing and collaboration during a major disaster.
• UICDS Best Practices on Blue Force Tracking   (4/26/2011)
• Blue Force Tracking - police, fire, emergency medical, National Guard, private utility vehicles, and even individual responder personnel - all these resources are rapidly acquiring geo-location capabilities that enable their location to be tracked by remote operations and command centers. Whether following a police car responding to a call for service or a truck fixing downed wires, knowing the GPS location of these key resources aids emergency operations management. The UICDS approach to Blue Force Tracking is to enable the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Observation Service (SOS) to track resources managed through the Emergency Data Exchange Language-Resource Messaging (EDXL-RM) standard.
• "UICDS The Movie" Features an Operator's View of How Applications Benefit from Data Sharing Through UICDS   (3/29/2011)
• UICDS The Movie is a short summary of UICDS featuring more than a dozen different applications that serve the needs of the emergency management community sharing information. If you are an emergency management operator, this is your chance to see the UICDS Tree of Incident Knowledge grow before your eyes.
• Learn All About UICDS Interoperability Middleware in Just Two Minutes   (9/30/2010)
• You should care about UICDS if you manage emergencies or provide technologies to those who manage emergencies. UICDS is middleware to share information among applications used by all levels of government and critical infrastructure to manage incidents. UICDS has no end-user interface, so there is no training or new applications to buy.
  
• All Hazards Consortium Interoperability Workshop Features UICDS   (9/7/2010)
• UICDS was one of the featured technologies at the Regional Public Safety Communications and Interoperability Workshop held in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. The Workshop was held in conjunction with the FEMA Region III Regional Emergency Communications Coordination which has worked with AHC on prior workshops and meetings, white paper recommendations, and baseline assessments. The goal of this meeting is to move forward with actionable next steps.
• UICDS Compliance Required in State of West Virginia Contract   (8/10/2010)
• The West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety recently completed the competitive award of a contract that required UICDS compliance as a condition of award and delivery of the resulting project. The Request for Proposals stated: "The data layer for this M&S Capability shall be UICDS Compliant."
• UICDS Integrates to IPAWS, the National Warning System  (9/12/2011)
• IPAWS is the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System that was established by Executive Order 13407 for the United States to have an effective, reliable, integrated, flexible, and comprehensive system to alert and warn the American people. The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is the data format selected by IPAWS to establish the national alerting standard. In 2008 UICDS selected CAP as the basis for the UICDS Alert Work Product. As a result, now that the latest version of IPAWS is currently operational, UICDS is introducing its interoperability with IPAWS.
• UICDS Conformance Defined   (3/1/2011)
• Learn what it means to "conform" with UICDS for a manager who wants to tell his or her technical people what to do with UICDS. Here are the tools and documentation to be used by a potential purchaser of incident management technology to specify what UICDS compliance means to their specific Request for Proposal.
• UICDS Update - 2010 a Year of Achievement  (1/4/2011)
• Topics include:
  - Why UICDS? Your UICDS Value Proposition
  - UICDS Compliance Required in California Emergency Management Agency Procurement and State of West Virginia Contracts
  - UICDS Demonstration Conducted by Army Armament Research Development and Engineering Center at Picatinny Arsenal
  - UICDS Tutorials Provide Guidance and Example Code Gives a "Jump Start" for UICDS Conformance
  - UICDS Video Shows Real-Time Traffic Information Sharing in Richmond
  - You are Invited to Become a UICDS Pilot - Governments, Critical Infrastructure, Voluntary Organizations
  - More than 150 Technology Providers Approved for UICDS Development Kit - Get Yours Now
  - A Look at Three UICDS Pilot Deployment Planning Concepts
  - UICDS Featured in Geospatial Intelligence Forum Article, Standards and Incident Command
  
  
  

• Focus on Technology Innovations
• Quick Start to Incident Sharing Through UICDS   (7/25/2012)
• This UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call introduces the Quick Start Guide to UICDS Incident Management Service and Incident Work Products. The purpose of the guide is to enable providers of incident management data to efficiently map their data to the UICDS Incident Management Service in order to create, update, close, and archive incidents shared through UICDS.
• A Developer's Guide to UICDS - With Lessons for Operations, Too   (10/10/2012)
• UICDS gets better - and easier - all the time. With the release of version 1.2.x in August, the ease of installation and the improvement in core-to-core sharing yielded a major benefit to operations center information technology staff. Now, we introduce a set of major benefits for UICDS Technology Provider developers: The expanded UICDS Document Library.
• New Version of UICDS - All the Features and Benefits   (8/8/2012)
• The UICDS Team announces the release of Version 1.2.1 on this week's UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call. This release is backward compatible but updates UICDS components, improves performance in off-nominal network environments, and aligns the UICDS AdminConsole with the Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In addition to these changes to the UICDS code base, we have also significantly simplified the UICDS installation procedures.
• Getting Started Guide for Software Developers   (10/5/2010)
• The UICDS Technical Lead, Roger Wuerfel, introduces the new new UICDS Version 1 Getting Started Guide for software developers giving the tips you need to quickly move into UICDS development for your adapter.
• Understanding the UICDS Map Work Product - Using OGC® Standards   (8/23/2010)
• One of the guiding principles of UICDS is that UICDS does not compete with application developers. There is no UICDS end-user interface. Thus, UICDS is vendor and application neutral for geographic information systems. To support any choice of GIS, UICDS uses an Open Geospatial Consortium® (OGC®) standard for representing a map for an incident. The OGC Map Context provides UICDS a generic way to represent a map that is specific to an incident.
• Apple iPad and iPhone Mobile Apps for UICDS  (9/27/2011)
• Just as we have provided lots of example code for web application developers to download and make their own, we will be doing so for the latest version of mobile apps. We began with a release of example code for Android® phones in August. Now it is the turn for iPhone and iPad.
• Android Mobile App for UICDS  (8/9/2011)
• Just as we have provided lots of example code for web application developers to download and make their own, we will be doing so for the latest version of mobile apps. We begin with a release of example code for Android phones.
• In Search of a Resource Typing Schema  (10/25/2011)
• UICDS community is one place that can participate in the ongoing discussion A candidate schema follows all the available recommended structures. This is intended to be the beginning of a continuing discussion on resource typing.
• Resource Typing Schema Continued  (11/8/2011)
• We further the discussion on Resource Typing that was started on our last call. Now we will hear from two additional approaches to Resource Typing plus have an update from our last call.
• UICDS Integrates to IPAWS, the National Warning System  (9/12/2011)
• IPAWS is the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System that was established by Executive Order 13407 for the United States to have an effective, reliable, integrated, flexible, and comprehensive system to alert and warn the American people. The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is the data format selected by IPAWS to establish the national alerting standard. In 2008 UICDS selected CAP as the basis for the UICDS Alert Work Product. As a result, now that the latest version of IPAWS is currently operational, UICDS is introducing its interoperability with IPAWS.
• UICDS in the Cloud for NLE 11  (5/10/2011)
• Nothing short of UICDS in the Cloud will support comprehensive information sharing in a major disaster. So while the National Level Exercise for 2011 is occuring with thousands of players across the Midwest, UICDS will be conducting a parallel technology showcase using a cloud deployment to show how UICDS can scale to a national event. The UICDS Technology Showcase will incorporate real UICDS Pilots from across the country along with Technology Provider applications to illustrate how information flows through the UICDS peer-to-peer architecture - all the way to the cloud.
• UICDS Cores Hosted for NLE 11 Exercise  (4/12/2011)
• To support the many forms of participation with the many different agencies and UICDS Technology Providers who participated in the NLE 11 national exercise, UICDS established NLE 11 Hosted UICDS Cores to enable information sharing.
• UICDS Conformance Defined   (3/1/2011)
• Learn what it means to "conform" with UICDS for a manager who wants to tell his or her technical people what to do with UICDS. Here are the tools and documentation to be used by a potential purchaser of incident management technology to specify what UICDS compliance means to their specific Request for Proposal.
• UICDS Tools: Incidents and Mapping Example Code  (3/15/2011)
• See the UICDS Tree of Incident Knowledge grow before your eyes. You will see how an incident created without a location, say from an RSS feed or an application, can be shared with a GIS application which adds its own special information to the incident. In this case, adds a location. Then, when another application looks at the incident, it sees not just the incident but the incident and location.
• UICDS Tools: The RSS Injector Application and Example Code   (2/15/2011)
• The UICDS Tool, RSS Injector, is designed to show adapter developers how to create adapters to ingest RSS and GeoRSS feeds. The reason for doing this in UICDS is to (a) create a one-to-many relationship for important feeds so that they are shared among UICDS applications without each application having to separately consume the feed and (b) to allow applications to select feeds to associate with an incident and select items from a feed to associate with an incident.
• UICDS Tools: ESRI™ ArcGIS™ UICDS Adapter  (2/1/2011)
• You have your GIS with lots of data on it. And you have an incident. How do you share only the relevant information with all your responding forces? They do not want to know where all your resources are or every stream gauge reading. Rather, you want to give them the geospatial view that is useful to them and nothing more. The ESRI™ ArcGIS™ UICDS Adapter does exactly that.
• iAsk UICDS Request Tracking Tool   (12/14/2010)
• In order to resolve technical issues identified by UICDS Technology Providers and End Users, the UICDS Team has created iAsk UICDS. The iAsk UICDS tool allows UICDS Technology Providers and End Users directly to submit "tickets" when they encounter issues with UICDS. Tickets can be submitted for both end-user procedural questions and technical adapter development issues.
• Catching Up On Innovations: Q&A with the Experts  (8/24/2011)
• Learn all about the recent innovations in and accomplishments with UICDS, including:
  - Mobile Apps Update
  - UICDS in the Cloud During NLE 11
  - IPAWS Interoperability Update
  - South Carolina Palmetto Vision Supported by UICDS
  - UICDS Version 1.1.1
  - Richmond Computer-Aided-Dispatch
  - UICDS Pilot
  - Enhanced Administrative Console
  - Best Practice in Blue Force Tracking
  
  
• Assessment of Standards Used in UICDS  (11/29/2011)
• As part of its work on the Maritime Security Technology Pilot (MSTP) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate, SRI International (SRI) has analyzed the standards relationship between its Smart Integration Manager Ontologically Networked (SIMON) and Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS). The study focused on 14 architectural standards, two schema types, and two transport protocols and their utility for emergency management information sharing.

• In Search of a Resource Typing Schema
• We further the discussion on Resource Typing that was started on our last call. Now we will hear from two additional approaches to Resource Typing plus have an update from our last call.